We have to move beyond 'post-democracy'

 The rise of Ukip and the parallel break-up of the Tory Party are part of a wider malaise across Europe that poses a threat to the established order. What happens next depends on whether we can get our act together in the face of growing reaction.

Ukip and the 5 Star Movement in Italy are just examples of the rise of populist, anti-politics. While these movements themselves are not fascist, their language, propaganda and nationalism has a threatening logic and opens the door to other forces. Nigel Farage rages against immigration and gay marriage, while Beppe Grillo is not hostile to Italy’s fascist past and is also anti-immigrant.

The swing to anti-politics – which can also take the form of not voting – coincides with and is driven by a rejection of austerity policies. Yet its origin actually predates the economic and financial crisis and is closely related to the globalisation process.

    

From the mid-1990s onwards, in Britain anyway, we entered a period which some refer to as “post-democracy”. Under this system, all the trappings of parliamentary democracy are retained, but the system is hollowed out. Corporate lobbyists and transnational, secretive, unaccountable agencies like the European Union and the World Trade Organisation actually determine policy. Elections become meaningless because the mainstream parties have been integrated into this process.

Ukip’s fear of the rise of the European “super-state” is not without foundation. The European Council has assumed fantastic legislative powers, while the European Parliament is the only one in the Western world that does not have the power to propose legislation and can only amend it. The Council operates in secret with its own secretariat and in reality calls all the shots. Of course, this has nothing to do with any known concept of democracy. In a challenging article for the new Statewatch journal, which monitors the EU and civil liberties Leigh Phillips notes:

The legislative decision-making apparatus is not parliamentary but intergovernmental and takes place primarily between diplomats behind closed doors. In truth, this is a form of treaty making rather than legislating, a method that historically was the realm of war, peace-making, and espionage. Great swathes of policy areas have been taken out of the domain of public, contestatory parliaments and placed in the hands of diplomats and civil servants.

Unlike most observers and to his credit, Leigh does not throw up his hands in horror at the rise of the Golden Dawn, neo-Nazi movement in Greece or Hungary’s Jobbik, with its Magyar Garda (Hungarian Guard) paramilitary association and what he describes as its “anti-Roma pogroms and unashamed Anti-Semitism”.

The question that he poses is what lies beyond “post-democracy”? We can’t return to the post-1945 social democratic consensus that lasted until the 1970s. That space is now occupied by the imperatives of corporate-driven globalisation. As Leigh says:

Depending on its particular flavour, anti-politics can exist as a cynical apathy that buttresses the neo-liberal post-democratic turn, or even wishes for an outright authoritarian turn with the arrival of a strongman saviour. But anti-politics can also be the germ of the overthrow of post-democracy if it embraces a progressive road that transforms anti-politics into the construction of (rather than just demand for) popular self-government.

Where his analysis falters, however, is in suggesting that “there is the possibility that the rejection of the political class transforms itself” into a belief in self-government” and “a desire for a transcendence of liberal political and economic structures”. Unfortunately, there is no historical evidence to indicate that democratic advances on this scale can take place without some decisive, organised intervention against prevailing state forces. That’s our responsibility to build. Nevertheless, Leigh reveals the dialectic in the break-up of the old order and his article is well worth reading in full.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Eurocrats fear 'protest against entire system'

The game is up for eurozone countries Italy and Greece and a fatal blow to the single currency may not be far behind. A deadlock of different sorts has arrived in both countries and the political systems are locked into the impasse.

At the heart of the crisis are the austerity programmes imposed on the population from the outside, by the infamous Troika – the European Central Bank (ECB), European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Ordinary people in both Italy and Greece have had enough. And their resistance has had an impact, not in the sense that austerity policies have been reversed – they haven’t – but in the inability of the political system to deliver what the Troika demands.

Troika officials are in Athens this morning, combing through the books and demanding more cuts before further tranches of the bail-out are transferred to Greece (from where they leave instantaneously for a creditor foreign bank or hedge fund).

Athens agreed to cut 150,000 public sector jobs by 2015 in return for financial support.  Under that plan, 25,000 employees were to be transferred this year to a "mobility" scheme, the first step towards redundancy.

With unemployment having reached a European record of 27%, the coalition government fears enforced redundancies will lead to total unrest. “The public sector has shrunk by 75,000 people in the last one and a half years," the finance minister, Yannis Stournaras, said. "There will be no layoffs."

With its GDP set to contract for a sixth straight year, unemployment is forecast to be more than 30% by the end of this year. Over 60% of those without work are under 25.

This cuts no ice with Troika monitors, with spokesman Thomas Wieser declaring: "All that was agreed in the bailout plan has must be implemented.”  

Across the sea to the west, near neighbour Italy is without a Pope, without a government and, from next month, will be without a president when Giorgio Napolitano stands down. Napolitano was in Berlin over the weekend, getting his marching orders from Chancellor Merkel, self-appointed guardian of the euro.

The line from Germany is that, whatever happens, the electorate must be kept away from the ballot box any time soon following last week’s general election. That resulted in the anti-establishment Five Star Movement founded by comedian Beppe Grillo picking up 26% of the vote and 163 MPs. They met for the first time yesterday and the only thing they agree on is not working with discredited political parties and leaders.

With the formation of a government ruled out, Napolitano is preparing to appoint another “technocratic” government of officials and so-called experts. Yet this is the regime led by banker Mario Monti that the Italian voters rejected overwhelmingly, with over 57% casting their ballots against anti-austerity parties.

This time Bank of Italy governor Ignazio Visco is front-runner to take over as premier.

This would be a slap in the face for ordinary Italians who have seen the economy dive into depression, with output having fallen by 10% from its peak, and where youth unemployment is at a staggering 37%.

What Napolitano is considering will effectively amount to a coup in a country where a corrupt, bureaucratic state is considered the problem by most people. “Nothing like this has ever happened before in the history of the Italian Republic. We are seeing a true crisis of the regime,” said Professor Luca Ricolfi from Turin University.

Grillo dismissed the ploy and repeated his vow to “bring down the old system” and added: “We’re not a political party, we’re a civic revolution. This country is in ruins with two trillion in debts and we have to rebuild it from scratch.”  

In Brussels, the old order is trembling at the prospect of Greece being thrown out of the euro and Italy – if Grillo had its way – deciding to quit the single currency. Giles Merritt from EU think-tank Friends of Europe said Brussels could handle old-style politicians like Silvia Berlusconi.

Grillo really worried them, he added, because it was a “protest against the entire system, and they are afraid it is spreading to other countries”. He’s not wrong there.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Pesky voters ignore markets, vote against austerity

When an anti-austerity, anti-establishment internet-based political movement with few policies and led by a comedian, gets 25% of the vote in a general election, you know for sure that the political system is travelling on a one-way ticket to disintegration.

Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement (M5S) won 54 seats and cashed in on Italians’ hatred for a corrupt, incompetent state that has cut their pensions, living standards and left record numbers of young people out of work.

Deadlock is what the markets didn’t want. That’s why Mario Monti was appointed by the European Central Bank to head a caretaker government 15 months ago as Italy’s debt mountain threatened to overwhelm the euro. But given half a chance, the electorate rejected his policies.

The ex-Goldman Sachs banker only got 10% of the vote when he put his austerity programme to the electorate. And with Silvio Berlusconi also raging against Brussels and promising everyone a tax cut, many voters backed a man who has somehow evaded prison.

As a result there is no immediate prospect of a stable government to manage Europe’s third largest economy. And the markets don’t like the stalemate at all. After initial polls showed the centre-left alliance winning, the markets rallied.

Then when the electoral deadlock was confirmed, black turned to red on trading screens around the world. Italian bonds were sold off, trading in the major banks was suspended, the stock markets plunged and the euro crisis returned with a vengeance.

“This looks like a recipe for total gridlock,” commented Nicholas Spiro, a sovereign debt analyst. “On current projections, financial markets are facing the worst of both worlds in Italy: a full-blown political crisis in the eurozone’s third largest economy and a severe setback for the liberal economic agenda championed by Mr Monti.”

Pesky voters!

Enrico Letta, deputy leader of the Democrat party, concluded that the “absolute majority of Italians have voted against austerity measures, the euro and Europe,”.  This, he claimed, sent a “a very clear signal to Brussels and Frankfurt”.

But is anyone listening at the headquarters respectively of the European Union and the European Central Bank? No they’re not. The EU and the ECB is desperately to prop up a weak currency and austerity, austerity and yet more austerity is the mantra. No matter that it doesn’t work. They have no alternative.

Spending your way out of the crisis is no good because it’s a global economic recession that is already dependent on large-scale printing of money to prevent a full-blown depression. It’s not just the political system that’s broken.

Grillo’s Five Star Movement is hostile to Brussels and the indecently corrupt Italian establishment. It wants to reform parliament by halving its size and a new electoral law based on proportional representation. Other than that, it has little to say.

Grillo – called everything from “sans-culotte satirist” to “populist, extremist and very dangerous” –  hands it back with interest. His nickname for Berlusconi is “the psycho-dwarf”, while he refers to the technocrat Monti as “rigor Montis”.

Grillo told the Financial Times last year: “We are occupying a void, which in other places like Greece has been filled by Nazis and extremists. We are a response to government ‘parasitism’, corruption, a system of political diarrhoea.” Recent scandals include arrests at the top of state-controlled Finmeccanica to corruption probes into the Eni and Italy’s third-largest bank.

Grillo does not appear on television or take part in debates. His movement – it’s definitely not a party – is driven by the use of social media. He runs Italy’s most-read blog and the M5S organises on two levels – internet and local grassroots.

He used the social network “meetup”, which was already active in Italy, to set up local support groups across the country. There are now more than 700 such meetup groups, with more than 100,000 members.

In Britain too, the establishment and the state is also mired in a variety of scandals. The old politics is dying right across Europe and further afield as the recession coincides with  a crisis at the top.

A new politics, a democratic transformation of political systems, is not only possible – it’s absolutely necessary.

Paul Feldman

Communications

A gigantic 'no' from Europe's voters

Political crisis is spreading like a forest fire through Europe following the inconvenient intervention, for the ruling classes that is, of millions and millions of voters in Britain, France, Greece and now Italy.

A rejection of austerity has produced the rare ousting of an incumbent president in France, the overwhelming rejection of austerity parties in Greece, a hammering for the ConDems in Britain and in Italy huge success in local elections for a new movement led by a comedian.

The 5 Star Movement, led by Beppe Grillo, a tussle-haired comedian who wants Italy to quit the euro, made some stunning advances. In Parma, it knocked Silvio Berlusconi's PDL which had previously ruled the city, into fifth place, winning 20% of the vote.   

"We are an epic change. And this is just the beginning. The parties are melting into a political diarrhoea. The citizens are taking back their institutions," Grillo said in a YouTube message.

This concerted rebuff for the old political order has had an immediate impact on European capitalism’s cherished project, the single currency. With bankrupt Greece unable to form a government in time to meet bail-out conditions, its ejection from the euro is a distinct possibility.

Jason Conibear, director of the global foreign exchange specialist Cambridge Mercantile, said of the election results: "There's every chance the euro will go into freefall in the weeks ahead against all the major currencies…Whether it was right or wrong, until the French and Greek elections this weekend there was at least a script. The script of austerity has now been torn up and the sovereign peoples of Europe are starting to ad lib."  

In another eurozone country, Spain, the slump in the economy has left banks on life support and needing a bail-out sooner rather than later. Whether the Spanish state can find the resources for this operation is an open question. Industrial production has fallen by 7.5% in a year and one in four workers is unemployed.

Right round Europe, the massed voices of voters through the ballot box express a clamour for change. The political class, old and new, have tried to embrace the movement. In Greece, Alexis Tsipras, leader of the second most successful party, the united left bloc Syriza, declared:

“The people of Europe can no longer be reconciled with the bailouts of barbarism.” He added: “We want to create a government of leftist forces in order to escape the bailout leading us to bankruptcy ... We're not going to let in through the window what Greek people kicked out the door.”

Such a government seems an impossibility, however. And unless Greece meets its EU/IMF loan obligations, it may not be able to pay public sector salaries next month.

In France, president-elect Francois Hollande pledged to “finish with austerity” after defeating Nicolas Sarkozy, whose political party, the UMP, is facing a break-up as a consequence of his ousting. But Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel has told Hollande there can be no going back on the fiscal pact agreed by eurozone states.

Although voters have spoken in dramatic terms, solutions to the crisis will have to be found outside of the parliamentary arena. For example, Hollande’s “growth” policy is not an option because the global capitalist economy is in a period of great contraction. This has a momentum of its own that is more powerful than any policy adjustments that might be made.

The parliamentary state, however democratic it appears, is actually part of the problem.  It has all but merged with corporate and financial power. Effectively, we live in a  corporatocracy not a democracy.

Voters around Europe have demonstrated their potential to challenge for power itself rather than being content with rearranging the deckchairs. In every country, the electorate has to become a thing for itself rather than an object for others to use and abuse. Helping to build this self-awareness with the aim of putting Europe’s bourgeois elites out of their misery, is the challenge.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor