The FT recently published an article by historian Margaret Macmillan entitled Stability and Democracy in Europe will hold fast against populism, which really sums up the problem Europe’s politics is facing today. More and more commentators are recognising that the hegemony of the neoliberal centre ground is crumbling, failing as more and more of the electorate migrate to the extremes in search of answers. Despite the misleading title, the author of the article also recognises this to some extent. However, she too gets it wrong in the final analysis.

If we take a look of some of what she said, we might see why. In the article, Ms Macmillan writes

“And the art of politics, the making of deals across party lines or building workable coalitions, is increasingly seen as suspicious and reprehensible in itself”.

So right from the off she has misjudged the landscape. People dislike it when supposedly opposing parties come to the same conclusions and in effect have the same programmes for policy. If the centre left is pushing the same legislative programme as the centre-right, and capitulating to them in votes (as a recent House of Commons vote has proved with barely half of Labour parliamentarians supporting the motion to stop British support to Saudi Arabian actions in Yemen), people start to wonder what separates the two parties. Compromise is not held in suspicion; compromising your beliefs however is the reprehensible to everyone.

Macmillan goes on,

“In West Germany, the Christian Democrats in partnership with the Bavarian-based Christian Social Union or the Social Democrats tacked carefully between moderate right and moderate left positions and presided over the country’s postwar economic miracle.”

First, we must note that there were no Grand Coalitions in the immediate post-war era. Adenauer’s Christian Democratic government ruled with the liberal FDP or with minor centre right parties up until the 60s. Only in 1966 did the CDU form a coalition with the SPD.  3 years later, they lost out from this arrangement, ushering in a 13-year era of rule by the Social Democrats under Willy Brandt and then Helmut Schmidt, until 1982. The era of Grand Coalitions in Germany has only really come since 2005. At the end of the Grand Coalition in 2005, the SPD plummeted in the polls. At the end of this Grand Coalition beginning in 2013, the SPD have, surprise surprise, plummeted in the polls (the Social Democrats are struggling to garner 20% support from the electorate going into the national elections next year). People have never liked Grand Coalitions.

Looking to history, Macmillan notes

“We have seen widespread public antipathy to constitutional and democratic politics before in history and the precedents can be worrying indeed. The Third Republic in France, set up after Napoleon III’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, limped along with a revolving cast of ministries and was known, not affectionately, as the “republic of cronies” or simply “the whore”.”

Here she largely gets it right, but the connection needs to be stressed. Complacency in office, exacerbated by a revolving cast of political actors at the top, breeds antipathy towards constitutional and representative democracy. When the representatives represent only themselves, and the constitution and its principles appear as a joke to be negotiated around rather than respected, people lose faith in their importance. When considering Italy,

“They [the politicians in power after Italian Unification] kept the system afloat by winning supporters with deals for special interests and patronage. The price of their success was the growing alienation of large sectors of the Italian public from what they saw as corrupt, self-serving and incompetent politics. Mussolini and his fascists had a ready audience for their promises of a new, clean, and effective kind of politics.”

Of course, this begs the question, why should Italy’s corrupt system of government, a mockery of constitutional, representative democracy, have been saved, when it betrayed the very principles is supposedly upheld? The First Italian Republic fell in the 90s in a corruptions scandal which extended to every corner of establishment. Italy’s two centrist parties fell in the whirlwind that was unleashed in the Tangentopoli and Mani Pulite investigations. The Second Republic doesn’t seem to have been much improvement, with its most famous politician being Silvio Berlusconi. It was hoped by many Italians that Renzi’s democratic government would be a different story, however even he is losing the people’s trust, as few can see how he has broken with the previous consensus.

Finally we turn to that perfect symbol for the establishment of why centrist politics must hold:

“Even the unloved Weimar Republic might have survived if its supporting coalition of democratic parties had held; it was the withdrawal of the Socialists in 1930 that helped to doom it. In France the pitched battles on the streets in 1934 between the right and the left produced the Popular Front, which even the Communists supported.”

This is an almost complete misrepresentation of history. The radicalism of the SPD was not the reason for the collapse of the last Weimar Grand Coalition. Firstly, the liberal centrist parties had all but vanished by 1930, the previous government being a coalition of four parties. Furthermore, the liberal parties were just as uninterested in being in coalition with the SPD as it is claimed the SPD were with the centrist parties. The source of contention between them was unemployment insurance, costs for which had increased dramatically after the 1929 Wall Street Crash. When the parties could not agree on the funding of this increase in social provision, President Paul von Hindenburg refused to provide emergency powers to the SPD Chancellor, which ended the government. However, von Hindenburg did provide emergency powers to Heinrich Brüning’s government which was even more lacking in support than the previous one. So the whole episode again makes mockery of democratic constitutionalism. But the idea of the SPD’s intransigence as radical leftists, simply obstacles to the running of representative democracy, is false. The idea that they can be blamed for the fall of constitutional democracy in Weimar Germany beggars belief. In France meanwhile, the Front Populaire, which the FT mentions, was a coalition of leftist forces – exactly the opposite of what liberal commentators such as those at the FT recommend. “Even the Communists supported it”. The idea of communist support for a coalition today would shock and chagrin politicians and centrist commentators today, as something which cannot be tolerated (unless of course, they abandoned their politics). The next time Communists would look set to enter government, in the 70s, the French establishment would make sure that would not come to pass.

Macmillan ends on a brighter note however:

“Democracy and respect for the rule of law are more firmly established and across more of Europe. We should remember that our societies have shown the capacity to reform and rebuild themselves. Think of how different the Germany of today is from the one of the 1930s.”

Indeed this is true, however the centrist ‘consensus’ seems as rigid and uncompromising (ironically) now as it was in the 1930s. Sławomir Sierakowski said in a Talk Real debate that, referencing Weimar Germany and the Visegrád democracies of today, for democracy, you need democrats. This is true, but not only of the electorate; it is true also of the people who choose to fill high office. If they are not interested in representative democracy, the people are going to notice it eventually. How far do you think you can push people?

There is a fine line between arguing passionately the need for change and progress away from a consensus which has had its day, and manipulating frustrations into an untameable populism. However, today it is as if there is no line at all; if established parties stick to the status quo, they are accused of fomenting populism, but if they adopt ‘populist’ arguments and policies, they are accused of giving in to the opponents of constitutional democracy. There is no way out for Social Democracy it seems, or the centre-right for that matter. The PSOE in Spain has been paralysed by its two wings which are fighting for the party’s soul, one accepting of another centrist government, the other willing to try something different. British Labour is also in this situation. In Greece and Italy, the old centre-left collapsed, and yet still, the message doesn’t seem to have gotten through. If both ignoring and giving into the will of the people foments populism, it seems there is no way out for democratic constitutional government.

Sources: FT