openDemocracy: Global politics at a crossroads

Even in our fraught and imperfect world, the idea of the politics of compromise and accommodation – the bedrock of democratic politics  – can just about survive. Political compromises are made, negotiations continue, rhetoric rises and falls with the ebb and flow of democratic politics. Barring some extreme examples, legislators from different sides of the aisle can still talk and have tea across most, if not all, democratic countries. While all ideologies regard their views as right, in the politics of accommodation, opposing views are at least considered valid.

This is no longer is the case in several countries, with opponents and opposing views increasingly delegitimised and discarded, and their advocates mocked, dehumanised and even threatened. Recent examples range from Trump’s America to Brexit Britain, from Orbán’s Hungary to Modi’s India, and from Erdoğan’s Turkey to Duterte’s Philippines. When political systems become tolerant of falsehood and deceit on seismic levels, and when they even offer promotion to those who champion lies, democracy becomes vulnerable and highly fragile. And when those who oppose this are ridiculed and cast aside, the politics of accommodation begins to fracture. [...]

There are four reasons for this blockage, or four pathways to gridlock: rising multipolarity, harder problems, institutional inertia, and institutional fragmentation. Each pathway can be thought of as a growing trend that embodies a specific mix of causal mechanisms. [...]

We see such trends across many different kinds of countries. But the anti-global backlash is heterogeneous and rife with contradictions. It encompasses terrorism in the name of Islam, and Islamophobic discrimination against Muslims. It includes leftist rejection of trade agreements, and right-wing rejection of environmental agreements. The powerful tie that unites these disparate movements is a rejection of global interdependence and collective efforts to govern it. The resulting erosion of global cooperation is the fourth and final element of self-reinforcing gridlock, starting the whole cycle anew.  

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Jacobin Magazine: Austria’s Right Turn

Austrian voters have elected the most right-wing parliament since 1945. The FPÖ gained 5.5 points, totaling 26 percent of the vote. But the undisputed winner was the conservative People’s Party (ÖVP), which rose from 24 percent in 2013 to 31.5 percent.

With a combined share of 57.5 percent of the vote and 103 (out of 183) MPs, the right bloc has never been larger. After you add in the neoliberal, pro-business “Neos,” who entered parliament with 5.3 percent, right-wing elements enjoy a two-thirds majority, giving them the power to potentially change constitutional law. [...]

The plan worked. With Kurz, Austrian voters could vote for the FPÖ’s program without associating themselves with the far right or fascism. The extreme right’s preferred topics — Islam, migration, refugees — dominated the campaign. Both Kurz and FPÖ leader Heinz-Christian Strache presented closed borders and Islamophobic laws as the best solution to the country’s social and political problems. [...]

The new right-wing government will also target Austria’s system of collective bargaining, a key component of wage regulation in a country where 97 percent of all employment contracts are covered by a minimum union wage. Together, these reforms will create a low-wage sector with a highly flexible — read: precarious — workforce, which will drive up profits from global export markets. [...]

Authoritarian right-wing populism has now become a truly hegemonic, cross-class project. 74 percent of blue-collar workers voted for one of the two right-wing parties, as did 64 percent of entrepreneurs. Shockingly, the FPÖ won among voters 16 to 29 years old with 30 percent of the vote. Add Kurz’s 28 percent, and you have a 58 percent majority for authoritarian right-wing populism among young people. The only demographic that liked the Social Democrats were pensioners. This is what deep, right-wing hegemony looks like.

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Social Europe: Germany: What Happens Next?

The key question now is: What happens next? After the social democrats have (wisely, I think) opted for a role in the opposition, there will be an extended period of bargaining on coalition formation, with only one majority option remaining on the table: the black-yellow-green “Jamaica”. That option is likely to fail. Differences among the participants cannot possibly be bridged in stable ways. After all, the Greens would at the very least have to win the support of the majority of their membership constituency, which is hard to imagine. The next option is the formation of a black-yellow minority government. That would be without precedent in Germany at the federal level. But it will be tried, as new elections are unlikely to yield an easier-to-handle result, perhaps a worse one. Moreover, there are creeping succession leadership crises in both the CDU and CSU (if not SPD), plus looming divorce issues between the two Christian “sister” parties regarding the continuation of a joint faction in the Bundestag. [...]

Also, a historical virtue of PDS/die Linke is a thing of the past. It consisted of its capacity to mask the legacies of East German xenophobic, authoritarian nativism by reframing it in terms of social justice issues. Now die Linke has lost 420,000 of its voters to Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, which also mobilized nearly 1.5 million non-voters, making it the party with by far the greatest success in mobilizing this group relative to the number of votes it received). In spite of this massive loss to AfD, however, die Linke has been able to more than compensate for it by winning the support of 700,000 former social democratic and 330,000 former green voters.  

There is a clear East/West divide in Germany. The new Länder in the East provided almost twice the level of electoral support for AfD as that of the old Länder. In Saxony, AfD even overtook CDU by a narrow margin and came in first. The same divide worked in Berlin as well as in the EU in general: populists are in power in Hungary and Poland and (so far) nowhere in the West of Europe. [...]

One lesson we can draw from the 2017 campaign and its outcome is this: Centrism of grand coalition governments breeds anti-elite centrifugality and the further fragmentation of party system, with an unprecedented number of seven distinct parties now in the Bundestag. As one commentator observed: “Fighting extremism in Germany may demand less political centrism.” (Another one has joked: There are two right answers to the question: Are there still true social democrats in Germany? One answer is: No – all socialist projects have been abandoned by SPD. The other is: Yes – there are even two of them, namely both members of the grand coalition whose social and economic policies have become virtually indistinguishable.)

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The Atlantic: The Toxic Politics of Migration in the Czech Republic

The self-promotion of the former communist elite into a new post-communist ownership elite ranked high among populist grievances everywhere in the former Warsaw Pact countries. Babis responded to these resentments with his own distinctive approach to problem-solving: He purchased almost all the Czech Republic’s media—one of its largest radio stations, its two most influential daily newspapers, and its most popular news website, among other properties. [...]

Anti-refugee feeling turned about the fortunes of Viktor Orban, which had been sagging in Hungary after a failed attempt in 2014 to impose heavy taxes on internet use. Anti-refugee feeling delivered an unprecedented majority of the vote to the reactionary and authoritarian Law and Justice party in the Polish elections of October 2015. Anti-refugee feeling prevailed in Austria, where on October 16 an absolute majority of the population voted for immigration restrictionist parties: 31.6 percent for the People’s Party, and 27.4 percent for the Freedom Party—once such a pariah that in the year 2000 the rest of the EU sanctioned Austria for allowing Freedom Party members into a coalition government. [...]

Babis was never a true believer in the far right. He is not a true believer in anything. While he rejected EU resettlement quotas and opposed adoption of the euro currency, he did not share the more ideological anti-EU position of the rest of the European far right. “They give us money,” he said of the EU in October 2016, “so our membership is advantageous for us.” What Babis offered Czechs was all the benefits of EU membership with none of the costs. If that position was unrealistic … well, that was information that could await the post-election period.

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Politico: Million dollar Babiš

The result is something of a slap in the face for Brussels. Not only has Babiš opposed EU-mandated immigrant quotas and repeatedly accused Brussels of “meddling,” but the ODS has also been firmly anti-EU since the days of its founder, the famously Euroskeptic former Prime Minister and President Václav Klaus. [...]

The upstart Pirates, a pro-EU party, finished a surprise third with 10.79 percent of the vote. A vigorous campaign by popular YouTube vloggers urging young voters to go to the polls appears to have borne fruit for the party of digital enthusiasts, which also wants more direct democracy. The Pirates did well in every region in the country. [...]

“So, even Babiš, who appears to be very Euroskeptical, will have to modify his views because he cannot run a successful economy — as he promises to do — without being fully integrated with the rest of the European Union. Not to mention that some of the companies that are in his [Agrofert] empire are in Germany, Switzerland, France.” [...]

That is important to Babiš both politically and personally. He was charged with defrauding the EU of a €2 million subsidy after the Czech parliament stripped him of immunity in September. As a newly elected deputy, he will again be immune from prosecution — unless there is a new vote and he is stripped of his immunity again.

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Politico: Hungary’s new wave of anti-Orbán activists

The details are a closely guarded secret, but the actions are likely to be designed to attract widespread attention. They have drawn inspiration from movements in the region and beyond: In early September, Srđa Popović, the leader of the Otpor student movement that helped depose Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević, was their guest in Budapest. And the movement’s Facebook page features a photo of Martin Luther King Jr. [...]

The Hungarian government, which is in the midst of a campaign against Hungarian-American financier George Soros, has said that opposition activists are planning public order disruptions during what it predicted would be a “hot autumn,” and that outside forces are attempting to interfere in internal politics. [...]

Activists, meanwhile, like to point out that Orbán himself spoke of civil disobedience when he was in opposition. In 2007, Fidesz dismantled a police cordon near the Hungarian parliament, with Orbán’s website declaring that “Fidesz members of both the Hungarian and the European Parliament resorted to civil disobedience.” [...]

The movement’s founder and leader, 31-year old Márton Gulyás, is a household name in the capital. To his mostly young, left-wing followers he is an icon of resistance. Known to his supporters as Marci, his arrest this spring for allegedly breaching the peace and committing acts of vandalism — he threw paint at the presidential palace — sparked a protest with hundreds chanting “Marci out, Orbán in” outside a building where he was believed to be held.

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The Guardian: Russia’s free pass to undermine British democracy

Russia knows its best tactic is to use migrant crises to stoke nativist fears. “German government threw their country under feet of migrants like a rug, now try wipe their crimes under carpet,” tweeted the Russian embassy in London in 2016 as the Kremlin began a successful campaign to promote the interests of the chauvinists in Alternative for Germany. A bank close to Vladimir Putin loaned $10m to Marine le Pen’s anti-EU Front National. He encouraged the anti-immigrant Freedom party in Austria, the Lega Nord in Italy and Jobbik in Hungary. [...]

The report’s authors, Alastair Sloan and Iain Campbell, bring together what others have already discovered and add details of their own. Although it is packed with information, including responses from Banks’s lawyers, the argument boils down to this. In 2013, regulators in Gibraltar discovered that Banks’s insurance business had reserves far below what it needed. Yet a year later the apparently embattled Banks was still able to pour money into the propaganda campaigns that took us out of the EU. He gave £1m to Ukip in 2014. He followed up that small fortune with £9.6m to Leave.EU and Better for the Country Ltd, along with additional cheques for Ukip as the referendum drew near. How did he afford it? [...]

For alongside the leaders of the pan-European far right, who RT welcomes into its studios, alongside anti-European Tories, the cranks, creeps and conspiracy theorists, sit the leaders of our own Labour left – and not only Corbyn and John McDonnell. Richard Burgon is Labour’s satirically named “justice” spokesman. He has never denounced the injustice Putin brings to Russia and the wider world during the nine occasions RT has had him on air. In this, he is symptomatic of a wider left that calls itself “anti-imperialist” but has nothing to say about Eurasia’s most voracious imperial power.

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Politico: Italian regions vote for greater autonomy

The votes, which were not binding and held in line with the Italian constitution, contrast sharply with the independence campaign in Catalonia, which held a referendum on October 1 that was ruled illegal by the Madrid government and Spanish courts. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said Saturday that Madrid will dismiss the whole Catalan Cabinet, assume all the powers of the regional executive, curb the role of the Catalan parliament and call a regional election within six months.

According to partial data in Italy, turnout was around 60 percent in Veneto and just below 40 percent in Lombardy. In both regions, more than 95 percent of those who voted said Yes to more autonomy. [...]

The referendums are a boost for the Northern League as its leaders negotiate with Rome on the devolution of powers and tax revenues. The two regional governors pledged to ask for more autonomy over infrastructure, the environment, health and education.

Although the Northern League began life as a secessionist party it has been transformed by current leader Matteo Salvini into a populist, anti-immigration party with national ambitions.

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The Guardian: Rise and fall of Isis: its dream of a caliphate is over, so what now?

“Once purported as fierce, now pathetic and a lost cause,” Brett McGurk, the US special presidential envoy for coalition forces tweeted. Such triumphant claims have become familiar since the 9/11 attacks. I heard them in Afghanistan in 2002, but US troops are still engaged in the fight against the Taliban. I heard them in Iraq in 2003, 2004, and then year after year until the US pulled out in 2011.

The scepticism with which any talk of “victory” is greeted by analysts and reporters is familiar, too. Many expert observers counselled prudence rather than celebration last week: Raqqa may have fallen, but if Isis is down, it is far from out. [...]

If the defeat of Isis did not come easily, three inherent weaknesses of its project always made it likely in the long term. First, Isis needed continual conquest to succeed: victory was a clear sign that the group was doing God’s work. Expansion also meant new recruits to replace combat casualties, arms and ammunition to acquire, archaeological treasures to sell, property to loot, food to distribute and new communities and resources, such as oil wells and refineries, to exploit. [...]

Second, the violent intolerance of dissent and brutality by Isis towards the communities under its authority sapped support. One reason for the rapid expansion of Isis was that Sunni tribal leaders and other power brokers in Iraq and Syria could see significant advantages in accepting the group’s authority. Its rule brought relative security, a rude form of justice, and defence against perceived Shia and regime oppression. And assent to Isis takeover also ensured, or at least made more likely, their own survival.

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