openDemocracy: Poland is moving further towards autocracy

For many years after the collapse of communism Poland's political landscape was characterised by consensus. But consensual politics frayed in the mid-2000s and gave way to contention between two main political parties, PiS and Civic Platform. The rivalry of these two parties has fostered polarisation in Poland. Since 2015, when PiS won an outright majority in parliamentary elections and when Duda first became President, PiS has aggressively pursued its policy agenda (including troubling reforms to the judiciary, anti-abortion measures, and politically targeting LGBTQ individuals), pushing Poland's liberal democracy toward conservative autocracy. In turn, the government's actions have stoked the fires of polarisation. [...]

What about when polarisation gets ratcheted up? The PiS government has been marked by politicisation of gender equality and regression for LGBTQ Poles. Quite often, actions in these areas have been justified on political bases with few appeals to biblical canon or Catholic dogma. Nevertheless, Poland's Catholic establishment (chiefly, the Polish Episcopal Conference) and religious conservative voters endorse and take succour from PiS's reactionary measures. Resultantly, Poland is among the most polarised countries in the EU along religious and gender and sexual orientation dimensions. [...]

Events following President Duda's re-election, such as the arrest of an LGBT activist and resultant protests as well as the persistence of so-called 'LGBT free zones' in several Polish towns, have signaled the continuation of polarisation trends. As long as PiS retains its control of governing authority – which it will do at the national level for at least three more years, until the November 2023 parliamentary elections – polarisation is a useful strategy that allows the party to pursue its conservative autocratic agenda. The liberal opponents of PiS are left to pursue resistance through collective action and to build resilience in local communities.

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openDemocracy: In Uzbekistan, homosexuality is illegal. Here's what LGBT life is like there

This is where it got difficult. Most of the people I met refused to talk about their lives, even on condition of complete anonymity. The main reasons were distrust and fear of the consequences. Uzbekistan is one of the few remaining countries where sex between men is still criminalised, and can be punished by a three to five year prison sentence. There are no accessible statistics on how many investigations have been opened. But in the course of conversations and interviews it’s become obvious that this criminalisation is widely used to blackmail and threaten people. [...]

LGBT people living in the Uzbek capital Tashkent have it a little easier: life here is more diverse, you can get lost in the crowd. Some people don’t hide their orientation (although they don’t advertise it) – it’s just not talked about. In both the capital and outside, however, there is a total distrust of strangers and need for extreme care in the choice of partners and friends. Despite many attempts, I was only able to talk to Tashkent residents and one activist now living outside the country. [...]

I feel that there are practically no LGBT communities in either Uzbekistan or Russia. I mean the kind of community where people are friends and do things together. There is activism, of course, but that doesn’t particularly unite people – it’s each person for themselves. Gay men don’t live together as communities – no one wants to do that and basically nobody cares. There are several reasons for that, but the main thing is fear – no one wants to end up in court.

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openDemocracy: How the Greens won Budapest

On the back of an anti-Semitic re-election campaign that spring, Fidesz had secured 2/3 of the seats in Hungary’s gold-plated parliament building, giving it the right to change the country’s constitution at will – a power they’ve not been slow to use. None of the various progressive parties had managed to even reach second place: they’d also been beaten by another far right party, Jobbik. [...]

It’s not only Roma people. Orbàn has chased much of the Central European University out of Budapest, and attacked gender studies departments as part of his war on feminism. His allied oligarchs have bought out the majority of the press. Last year, openDemocracy uncovered a long list of examples of electoral malpractice in the 2018 election. And in 2018 more than one person said to me that public criticism of the ruling party – including in social media posts – can mean losing your job if you’re one of the many people on the government’s public works scheme. The country is sometimes described by those following the rise of the global far right as a model for social control with the veneer of democracy. [...]

Just as important, though, was a new innovation the party brought to Hungary: door-knocking. In a media environment where people don’t know what to believe, nothing beats meeting them face to face. While Fidesz rely on mobilising a huge database of their own supporters, the Greens knocked on thousands of doors, speaking to people about their concerns. Barabás tells me he personally knocked on 1,500 doors – 40% of the district he now represents, and that this is something other parties haven’t done in the past in Hungary.

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openDemocracy: Death of a movement

On 26 January, in both Emilia-Romagna and Calabria, M5S came third; its share of the vote was respectively 4.7% and 6.3%. This was an especially bad showing. The starred movement received considerably less support than the Democratic Party (PD), the junior member in Italy’s M5S-led government: it trailed behind the social democrats by a jaw dropping 30% in the northern region (PD won there with 34.7%) and a striking 9.4% in the deep south, where PD, despite receiving the most votes for a single party (15.2%), still lost to the centre-right alliance commandeered by Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. [...]

Jeremy Corbyn’s stance on Brexit, an age-defining issue, was negatively paradigmatic: by not sticking to the same take, whichever it might have been, throughout the entire exit process, the London socialist dug his political grave with an invisible spade. He didn’t even know he was holding one. A Eurosceptic all his life, Corbyn strangely campaigned to stay in Europe; then, at the time of triggering Article 50, MPs were bullied into voting for it. Eventually, Corbyn conceded that a second referendum was on his party’s cards, making matters shockingly worse. In other words, the Islington North MP was the only one in the country to swerve and proudly leave conspicuous red skid marks on British roads; the more these stood out, the more drivers were alerted to them and steered clear – frightened. Change red to yellow, and you’ve got a M5S recipe for failure – just as tasty as Labour’s.

Much has been said abroad about another Italian movement, an unofficial one, originating from civic society – the so-called ‘Sardines’, who packed Italy’s squares, especially in the north and centre, to oppose the right’s harsh rhetoric. Their contribution to PD’s exploits was tangible, but can be overstated. It certainly revived interest in politics among those who don’t vote or who stopped a long time ago, in a similar fashion to early-day M5S – these voters saw that the red party was the only bastion against the proposed policies of the hard-right (the self-styled liberal conservatism of Forza Italia does little to curb them). But M5S’ botched basic income policy did a lot to dent the movement’s reputation. The south of Italy can see it does not deliver; the larger a family the less the M5S-concocted basic income makes a difference. And so, in the absence of a clear vision as how to curb unemployment, why vote for them still?

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openDemocracy: George Monbiot on the unholy trinity of ideologies trashing our planet

Monbiot argues that capitalism now is neoliberal capitalism. And, unusually, that capitalism and consumerism are ideologies as much as neoliberalism is. “Part of the insidious power of these ideologies is that they are the water in which we swim - the plastic soup in which we swim. They are everywhere. They affect our decision making every day, they affect the way we see ourselves. They are difficult to see not because they are so small but because they are so big. The most powerful ideologies never announce themselves as ideologies. That is where their power lies. Our first step is to recognise them as ideologies.” [...]

“We cannot go back to [Keynes],” Monbiot responds. “It is growth based. The whole point of Keynesian economics is to maintain the rate of growth - not too fast, not too slow - and we know that even a steady rate of growth is progress towards disaster. But also, in its first iteration in the years after the Second World War it was very effectively destroyed, principally by finance capital working out ways to destroy capital controls, foreign exchange controls. The idea that we can relaunch a Keynesian capitalism and not have it destroyed by people who have already destroyed it once, who have not forgotten those lessons, and who are in a much more powerful position to destroy it today….that’s just dreaming. That is magical thinking. You cannot go back in politics, you have constantly to devise new models.” [...]

“I don’t think you can be [ideologically free]. We’re so governed by our social environment, and our social environment will always be saturated by ideology. To be ideology free would be to become an island, you would have to be completely isolated from all other human beings - and even then you would probably create your own ideology. You often hear people stand up and say, ‘I have no ideology’. And that is just self-deception.”

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openDemocracy: Iran’s protests: misrepresentation and the silence of western allies

The main misrepresented fact is that the current protests are not just about the public outrage over the downing of the Ukrainian plane, nor are they distinguishable from the protests of November 2019 or December 2017. [...]

On the contrary, the image of Iranians mourning for the death of IRGC top commander, Soleimani, was on the front page of almost every one of them. It is not a hard guess to figure out that under a totalitarian regime such a funeral is nothing but a display of power and therefore, participation is mandatory at least for civil servants, students, and soldiers. Yet it would be surprising to know that even children in primary schools and pre-schoolers had to participate in this “national mourning”. [...]

As in Europe, the left is largely losing the support of the working class and slightly gaining the support of the upper middle class, in the Middle East it has let the people down and sided with the regional dictatorship in the name of anti-imperialism or peace. The white western left tells the people of the MENA to choose the “lesser evil” in order to prevent war, yet it calls upon the people in the West to support them as the most progressive forces. [...]

This clear message of the Iranian students has been echoed in the demands of the Iraqi and Lebanese revolutionaries yet has not been heard by the western elite. The progressive forces in the MENA have proved many times that they are committed to the most essential principle of the left, i.e. internationalism. Despite the neo-orientalist view of many in the western left that, this time, exotifies suppressive regimes in the Global South as anti-imperialists, the progressive forces in the MENA still draw a clear line between themselves and the reactionary forces. But there is a limit to their influence on the society especially when they are betrayed, silenced and left alone by the western intelligentsia who could've been their natural allies.

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openDemocracy: The game's afoot: scenarios of power transition in Russia

The first piece of evidence is the timing. Why did it happen now, when 2024 is still far away? American political scientist Henry Hale writes that the political calendar is significant even under authoritarian regimes, where elections, formally competitive, are hollowed out and no longer guarantee change of power. Indeed, it is precisely around election dates that different elite groups orient their expectations and plans. This is why elections themselves often throw out unpleasant surprises for regimes, whether electorally or on the streets. Despite the apparently iron-clad consensus among Russian elites over Putin, they still have reason to be dissatisfied. [...]

The second question concerns the transition’s format. The Kremlin has several options: Belarusian (removal of limits on presidential terms and re-election of Putin as president), Kazakh (reserving Putin the post of head of a new institution with unlimited powers, which the Kazakh Security Council became after Nazarbayev joined it), and, finally, Russia-2008 (moving Putin to the post of Prime Minister and elections for his successor, perhaps with a straight repeat of 2008 - a shuffle with Medvedev). For the regime, each of these options has its advantages and shortcomings. [...]

Several analysts believe that Putin won’t take the risk and, despite initial impressions of his speech, Putin will choose the Belarusian scenario – a life presidency. As Kirill Rogov has noted, the post of president, according to Putin’s speech, will also receive additional powers – for example, the right to remove judges from the Constitutional and Supreme Courts (in agreement with the Federation Council – it will be impossible to talk about an independent judiciary even formally). We can’t rule out that these new powers will be given to Putin, rather than someone else, and that during the “popular vote” on the constitutional amendments a new paragraph will appear on removing the limit on presidential terms. Besides, as Putin has already stated, Russian citizens will vote on all the changes at once, in a “packet” of laws.

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openDemocracy: Catalonia mon amour

The answer wasn’t too difficult to find. First, there was the “great recession” of 2008-2014 which led to record high rates of unemployment, in particular among young people (Spain’s unemployment rate was twice the eurozone average in 2012, with a staggering 57.9% of youth unemployment in 2014). Then, there were the politicians eager to tap into the “pool of rage” created by the unprecedented economic crisis to further their own agendas. Chief among these was Artur Mas, former President of the Government of Catalonia (2010-2015) and the former leader of the centre-right Convergència i Unió (Convergence and Union), who succumbed to intraparty pressures in 2012 and decided to break with the traditional – middle-of-the-road – approach of his predecessor Jordi Pujol to carry the banner of independentism, till then brandished by Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (The Republican Left of Catalonia) and other groups; and Mariano Rajoy, the notorious Prime Minister of Spain between 2011-2018 whose centre-right Partido Popular (Popular Party) initiated the process which ended with the amendment of the 2006 Estatut on Catalonia’s autonomy by the Spanish Supreme Court in 2010, after it was approved by both the Catalan and Spanish parliaments, and by the Catalan people in a referendum – thereby partially crushing Catalonia’s hopes for more self-rule. [...]

Yet facts can help only so much when it comes to understanding the current crisis in Catalonia where reality is bifurcated, with few, if any, points of contact between the opposing secessionist and unionist visions. In this bifurcated world, one’s “independence referendum” is another’s “illegal consultation” just as one’s “political prisoner” is another’s “imprisoned politician”. But truth is not the only casualty of this battle of realities. Another important casualty is rule of law, the sine qua non of any democracy. After voicing his concerns on la sentencia, or the final ruling of the Spanish Supreme Court on independentist leaders, Xavier Arbós, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Barcelona told me, “The Spanish government acted as if the only thing that exists is the law whereas the Catalan government acted as if the law didn’t exist.” [...]

First, independence means different things to different people. According to the latest barometer of the Catalan Centre for Opinion Studies, only 34.5% of the population believes that Catalonia should be an independent state – as opposed to 27% who would want Catalonia to remain as an autonomous community in Spain (status quo). But there are also those who believe that Catalonia should be a state within a federal Spain (24.5%), thereby bringing the total percentage of people who would like to see a change in the existing state of affairs to 59%.

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openDemocracy: LGBTQI+ asylum claimants face extreme social isolation in Germany

The German Lesbian and Gay Association (Lesben und Schwulen Verband Deutschland) estimates that out of the nearly 1.6 million refugees that have been registered in Germany between 2015 and 2018, approximately 60,000 are LGBTQI+ individuals from countries in the Middle East, Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean. Like many other people who are currently waiting for their asylum interview or asylum decision, they are predominantly housed in rural areas in Germany in former hotels, community centres, and even barracks. “They sent me to the mountain”, one transgender claimant from Iraq said. [...]

LGBTQI+ claimants said over and over again that they feel compelled to hide their sexual orientation within the accommodation centres, which can be extremely difficult when sharing a room with several other people. They also shared many experiences of sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia and transphobia in the villages in which the accommodation centres are located. “If you are in a small village and everyone knows that you are gay or lesbian or intersex or trans, that is, that's really terrible, believe me”, one claimant said. The social isolation by LGBTQI+ claimants is exacerbated by the fact that they often avoid contact with non-LGBTQI+ claimants out of fear of their possible negative reaction. This increases the risk of mental health-related issues, which, in turn, can affect their asylum proceedings. [...]

Our research findings stress how important it is for decision makers to understand the complexities of LGBTQI+ claimants’ experiences and why it is often difficult for them to express themselves freely. We urge the German government to support the establishment of safe housing for LGBTQI+ claimants and accommodate them in urban areas where they can socialise with other LGBTQI+ people, access support, and integrate in society. As such, we also support the campaign by the organisation Rainbow Refugees Munich/SUB, which is currently lobbying the city of Munich to provide safe accommodations for LGBTQI+ people seeking asylum.

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openDemocracy: Who’s afraid of Greta Thunberg?

The climate activist does not relate well to the irony of American television programs. When asked for her impression of New York when she arrived on the Malizia yacht, she replied that it smelled bad. Her lack of understanding of irony and her seriousness are probably related to her Asperger’s syndrome (a condition she speaks openly about) and dose of Nordic frankness. All of these qualities have influenced the new environmental movement. It is a group that speaks very seriously and uses scientific research to support their arguments. It is, in fact, the antithesis of the ironic language used by generation X or millennials. [...]

The activist triggered not only a political movement, but also fury from powerful media outlets. The media and commentators have become obsessed with her. According to some observers, the adoration towards Greta Thunberg is similar to a religious awakening. But this is not her problem. It is, on the contrary, a problem of the people and the media that react to her actions and her words. Within the political spectrum, environmentalism is found mostly on the left and in the academic world. The right and many liberals deny Greta Thunberg and her colleagues the right to formulate their own political ideas and goals, instead treating them as immature and spoilt. The Argentine journalist Sandra Russo calls this the first case of “global bullying”, an idea which she discussed long before September 23rd when Donald Trump, the president of the United States, sent out a tweet which made fun of the 16 year old.[...]

Everything seems to suggest that the more popular and disruptive the climate movement become, the more virulent the rejection from those who consider climate change as a conspiracy and the protection of the climate as pure nonsense becomes. The severity of reactions to a 16 year old teenager should make us reflect. Some psychologists try to explain it by saying the ‘old’ white men won’t change their attitudes towards the environment, so instead attack Greta for her illness, for her age or because of the apparent manipulation of her activism. But behind these criticisms there is much more than the intransigence of a whole male generation. The attacks may be a sign that she, alongside the youth involved in the movement, have managed to hit a sensitive nerve. Is Greta Thunberg questioning the system?

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openDemocracy: What we talk about when we talk about trafficking

Both evangelical organisations and some self-proclaimed feminist groups regard every form of sex work as exploitation, and therefore as the main cause of human trafficking. They seek an end to the entire sex industry, and their method of choice at the moment is the so-called Nordic model, or the criminalisation of buying sex. The association Terre des Femmes has split over this dispute.

Individual situations are frequently more complicated. Many women decide to work as sex workers, but are later on deceived regarding the actual working conditions and find themselves in situations that meet the legal criteria of trafficking. Legally speaking this initial consent does not erase the responsibility of the perpetrators, but it does make the question of desired remedies less clear than abolitionist organisations would like.[...]

The problem with conflating sex work and trafficking in human beings is that women are made to be victims even when they have consciously decided to work as sex workers. The ‘rescue industry’, as the scholar Laura María Agustín calls it, attributes victim status to persons, mostly women, who have rationally and consciously decided to engage in sex work and who, at least in the moment of making their decision, do not see themselves as victims.[...]

According to Luca Stevenson, the coordinator at the International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe, this position reflects a very white middle class approach. "Very few people are free to choose their jobs and many factors contribute to someone working in informal, precarious or even dangerous industries such as sex work. The criminalisation of sex work does not create economic options, but makes sex workers more vulnerable, more precarious."

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openDemocracy: Going back somewhere: nostalgia and the radical right

The figureheads of Brexit – Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and now the newly-appointed Prime Minister Boris Johnson – are self-consciously figures of British political nostalgia. As James Meek has written, perceptively, Rees-Mogg the politician embodies a ‘steak-and-kidney pudding Edwardian Britishness’; a performance that is consciously meant to evoke a lost time on the edges of cultural memory. With his simultaneous invocation of nanny and the Morris Minor, the Victorian age and the 1920s, Rees-Mogg is a perfect embodiment of what the French critic Roland Barthes famously termed a mythology. [...]

‘This country wants nostalgia’, mused the poet and musician Gil Scott Heron in 1981, reflecting on the election of Ronald Reagan. The American electorate had voted, he thought, ‘to go back as far as they can – even if it's only as far as last week’. In this analysis, the destination of our backwards gaze is less important to this type of politics than the fact that it’s backwards we’re facing. Indeed, for Scott-Heron, this gaze peered at a fictive, mythologized vision of America, one akin to the B-movie landscape in which Reagan had made his name. Yesterday was, for Scott-Heron, ‘the day of our cinema heroes riding to the rescue at the last possible moment’, the ‘man in the white hat or the man on the white horse’. It is, tellingly, the ‘white’ cowboy that saves America at the last moment; the figure riding into our vision from out of screen shot is an idealized image of Anglo strength. ‘Come with us back to those inglorious days when heroes weren’t zeros, before fair was square, when the cavalry came straight away and all American men were like Hemingway’. Hemingway’s projected vision of white masculinity – the great white hunter – has been undermined since, of course. Actually, it was undermined by Hemingway himself, in his own writing and career. Inscribed into the Hemingway mythos are the elements of its own collapse. It is a self-consciously stagey vision of the hard-shooting, hard-drinking, hard-fighting frontiersman, a hammy performance of American maleness. [...]

In other words, the electorate are engaged at some level in a fictive transaction, where we know that what we intend to buy is indeed a counterfeit. ‘Put your orders in America,’ Scott-Heron proclaims, ‘And quick as Kodak your leaders duplicate with the accent being on the dupes’. In a song that’s about cinema and authenticity, the Kodak reference speaks of a world in which value can be quickly and cheaply reproduced. Everything about this kind of politics, then, is fake, all is surface; and at some level its supporters know they are buying the cheap copy Rolex. ‘We’re starring in a B-movie, and we would rather have had John Wayne’, sang Scott-Heron in 1981. The point about the B-movie analogy is that the form makes no real attempt to refer to a ‘real world’ beyond its borders. [...]

Taken together, these seemingly innocuous emblems and rituals – foods, images, phrases – may hide a more sinister purpose, providing feel-good cover for dangerous new forms of ethno-nationalism, protectionism and racism. Neo-fascists are nostalgic nowadays; the Italian radical right group CasaPound have reconstructed fascism as what Pietro Castelli Gattinara and Caterina Froio have characterized as a ‘hybrid communication style’. Images of Mussolini and Fascist iconography mingle with references to cultural figures sympathetic to fascist ideas, or those who might be termed proto-fascist – Ezra Pound, obviously, but also Marinetti, D’Annunzio, Sorel, Knut Hamsun, Yeats, and Nietzsche. The effect is a strange collage of nostalgic nods to the years of the Fascist ventennio and to ‘pop culture’.

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openDemocracy: Turkish centre-right: soon over-crowded?

Erdoğan’s managerial genius has allowed him to survive several political crises that would uproot most governments. In each crisis, he strengthened and personalized his grip on power. Creating political scenarios reminiscent of Agamben’s state of exception, he targeted the group at the centre of any crisis, turning them public enemies by dehumanizing them in the eyes of his electorate. For the Gezi protests, he blamed secular-leftist groups for organizing a revolt against the elected government, working with – several – foreign governments to this end. For the corruption scandal that followed the Gezi protests, he blamed the Gülenists, his former ally, whom he then subjected to radical recriminations and effectively annihilated. For the resurgence of the decades-old Kurdish issue, he threw the pro-Kurdish and liberal-leftist HDP, a legal political entity in the Turkish Parliament, into the fire. He took on several western governments and portrayed them as global powers with sinister plans on Turkey. In order to exercise political influence he has also instrumentalised some transnational state apparatuses, such as the Diyanet, in many countries.

All in all, Erdoğan survived in power but with the cost of sacrificing major elements of moderate politics and almost all of his former allies. Infusing Islamist and ethno-nationalist elements with his ever-green populism, he skilfully re-positioned himself further on the right and carried – or rather dragged – most of his electorate with him. Yet, Erdoğan has to sustain a huge effort to keep his electoral base in their new position. To consolidate this, he has used illusions of an augmented grandeur and its enemies (including domestic collaborators). [...]

Four potential rivals can be anticipated in forthcoming general elections. Two of them are the established opposition to the AKP, while the other two are from an internal opposition. Let’s start with the latter. As President Erdoğan elevated himself to the status of undisputed leader, he side-lined old comrades but kept them on a leash for quite some time. Yet, not all of them have been terminally silenced. A former president and one of the founding trio of the AKP, Abdullah Gül, together with the former minister of economy, Ali Babacan, having maintained their credibility both in the eyes of the voters and business circles at home and abroad, are on the cusp of forming a political party. Recently Babacan resigned from the party of which he was a founding member, and publicly declared that party policies in recent years were in clear contradiction with the principles to which he had subscribed. Babacan’s resignation is likely to prompt others to follow, yet it is difficult to know how many. The problem for Erdoğan is that Babacan has been at the steering wheel of the Turkish economy during the successful years of the AKP. If the economy is now Erdoğan’s Achilles’ heel, the Babacan-Gül duo will be shooting right at it.

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openDemocracy: The European demos and Ursula von der Leyen’s democratic quandary

The system of parliamentary representation in Europe was always opaque because there is no such thing that we could call a European demos; instead we have a loose collection of numerous national demoimanifesting little coherence and solidarity. Besides, the European Parliament was never allowed to control the European government. Paradoxically, this might be a blessing for an integrated Europe. The EP hosts ever more politicians determined to bring power back from Brussels to their own national capitols. They may have failed to take over the EP during the May elections, but they are now able to block important decisions within the Parliament and the Council, as Frans Timmermans has learned lately. [...]

She should start with the issue of transparency, an issue without which people can hardly control any government. The EU has cosier relations with lobbyists than with citizens, it shows more determination in curbing “excessive” social spending than tax dodging, and its communication strategy is highly selective. We recently learned that the EP snubbed a proposal to make contacts with lobbyists more transparent while the Commission for months refused to disclose the results of emissions tests it did on diesel vehicles produced by Porsche. Details of tax havens used by Europe’s firms were revealed by WikiLeaks and not by Mr Juncker or Tajani. These are probably only the symbolic tips of the icebergs, and Von der Leyen should start cleaning up this mess quickly, reassuring Europe’s public about its unbiased and transparent conduct. [...]

Creating a second chamber of the European Parliament featuring representatives of cities, regions, NGOs and business associations could also bring citizens closer to the EU. This chamber would chiefly feature local activists and sectoral representatives who are closer to ordinary citizens than professional politicians currently sitting in the EP. Of course, Von der Leyen is not in a position to create a second chamber, but she can wholeheartedly embrace the idea. She can also propose to give Europe’s citizens meaningful ways for contesting decisions directly affecting them. The prerogatives and the budget of Europe’s Ombudsman could increase and the scope of private litigation in the European Court of Justice could be broadened.

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openDemocracy: Is the UN taking a position in today’s ‘culture wars’?

Couples with children under 18 years old comprise only 33% of households worldwide. Almost as common, in developing countries, are extended families with multiple generations living together. There is also a growing number of what the report calls ‘emerging’ families, including same-sex partners, sibling-based households, and ‘blended families’ with married or cohabiting partners with children from previous unions. [...]

That event was notable not so much because ‘usual suspects’ (the Holy See, Egypt, Qatar, Belarus, Russia, Bangladesh) defended the patriarchal family, but because the US did. Even during the conservative Reagan and Bush administrations, US delegates avoided sharing a platform with states that have such overtly authoritarian and religious agendas. [...]

Speakers described this (and only this) kind of family unit as supportive of patriotism, teamwork, love, acceptance, social cohesion, and better economic outcomes – without noting that it requires women’s acquiescence to subordination and dependency to function. Any non-binary interpretation of gender, deviation from heterosexuality, or assertion of women’s autonomy, is profoundly disruptive to this project. [...]

Meanwhile, women tend to be left on their own without care as they age (twice as many women as men live alone after the age of 80, the report finds), and are more likely to lack adequate income support in old age thanks to maternity-related interruptions in capacities to earn and save.

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openDemocracy: Don't throw the word 'fascism' around with abandon

But today the word is being used expansively in ways that very inaccurately and unhelpfully conflate everything from neo-Nazis and white supremacists to people who voted leave in the 2016 referendum. When being interviewed about President Donald Trump’s recent visit to the U.K., Rupa Huq MP referenced the Leave vote in warning of us being on a slippery slope towards fascism.[...]

George Orwell in the early 1940’s said “the word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’”. How true. The discourse around Brexit has become so polarised, so toxic, that the word is being thrown around with abandon by senior politicians as a means of shutting down debate and extolling one’s own virtuosity.

This is dangerous. We know from the ensuing research that the most significant issue driving the 2016 referendum result was concern over immigration. Inevitably, this has come to frame much of why people voted to leave the EU. In the simplified world of social media Brexit = Racism. And yet, this has been a missed opportunity to have a proper discussion about immigration which has largely been ignored by political parties of all persuasions over the last three years. These are issues that we should feel a lot more comfortable talking about. If we do not retain them within mainstream discourse, then we surrender them to the extremes. [...]

To add insult to injury, to be a member of the forgotten tribe is also to be branded a “fascist” when the debate becomes uncomfortable. And there has been a definite shift on social media from the use of the phrase “I’m not racist but...” to “If that makes me racist, then I’m a racist”. Just look at the sense of threat in response to recently reported incidents of an army veteran and Brexit Party supporter having a milkshake thrown over him, a male being called “Nazi Scum” and again having a milkshake thrown over him at a Trump rally, and an elderly male Trump supporter being pushed over at a demonstration. What this tells people is that you’re either with us or against us. And if you’re against us then you’re fair game. We should all be concerned by the escalating levels of violence. Britain feels like a febrile environment at the moment, like a tinder-box of rage that will only take a nudge for us to see wide scale public disorder implications.

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openDemocracy: Over the worst in Europe: the 2010s have not ended like the 1930s

There are only two known ways to bring together diverse countries into one political unit. One is from above – empire-building. The other is from below, via the mechanisms of democracy, leading to the birth of entities such as the USA. The European Union tried to find a third way, avoiding both empire and democracy: achieving union by technocratic imperative.

With the demos thus effectively shut out and with no Emperor to exercise oversight, the experts took it upon themselves to move political integration along, bereft of effective control and accountability. With the marketplace seen as the default mode of all human activity, it was decided to start political integration with the introduction of a single currency, the euro. The rest, it was assumed, would follow in due course, given that people are only interested in market outcomes, rather than in participating in the politics of “Brussels”. [...]

We know now something that was not generally known (but should have been) even ten years ago: when governments place the common good in the care of “independent agencies”, thus divorcing decision-making from democratic oversight, the common good gets hijacked by special interests. In the end, in spite of being shut out from the decision-making, it is the demos who pay the price. This is what happened to the demos of Europe in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 and the sovereign debt crisis of the early 2010s. In both crises, the culprits bought themselves yachts; the ordinary people got saddled with record public debt.[4] [...]

Identity politics does away with this kind of individual, closing human beings into cages of group “identities”. The French thinker Raphael Glucksman has rather cleverly translated such identities as “groups of origin”: “communautes d’origine, de foi, de couleur, de peau”.[9] You cannot escape from the tribe you were born into; and everything you think, say or do is an expression of that tribe’s identity. If you try, as an autonomous individual, to escape from the tribe, by for example making the necessary efforts and sacrifices to get a good education, then you are not congratulated for achievement; you are denounced for having acquired a privilege.[10]

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openDemocracy: Polish opposition united to beat populists in Euro elections – and failed

PiS’s increased their vote by more than 13%, gaining 45% of the total vote. Meanwhile, the opposition coalition, KE, only won 38% of the vote, a decrease of more than 10 points compared to the 2014 EU elections. This victory for PiS is even more impressive due to the fact that the turnout in these elections was two times higher than in 2014 (rising from 23% to 45%). There has therefore been a huge growth in the number of citizens participating in the democratic process during PiS’s term, with the largest proportion of these new votes going to the ruling party. [...]

The incoherence of KE’s political campaign and message was particularly evident in the countryside. PiS essentially won these elections in the countryside and small towns where it won 56% and 36% of the vote (in contrast it only gained 27% in cities with a population of more than 500,000). Its main political rival in the rural regions, the PSL, was neutralised and its electorate demobilised partly due to its participation in KE. This left the field open to PiS, allowing it to advance its aim of becoming the recognised leading party in rural areas. [...]

Although, it may seem to many liberal politicians and academics that the major issue facing Poland is the threat to its liberal democratic system, this view is not necessarily shared by the majority of the population. Campaigning on issues like the independence of the judiciary or Poland’s relationship with the EU are not sufficient to defeat PiS. The European elections have shown that such a strategy has actually shrunk the vote of the opposition and strengthened the position of PiS. In order to efficiently challenge the monopoly of PiS, the opposition must actually divide into different blocs and parties. Rural and leftwing parties must fight PiS on socio-economic issues to pushback against the expansion of the conservative and nationalist right into those layers of society disillusioned by neoliberal centre-right parties. And the left urgently needs to consolidate itself into a single organisation, distant from the centre, to offer a real positive alternative to the current administration.

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openDemocracy: Why ‘Universal Basic Services’ is no alternative to Basic Income

On the premise that ‘essential services should be free at the point of need’, paralleling the National Health Service and state education, proponents have identified universal free ‘basic’ housing, free food, free local transport, free TV licence and a free ‘basic’ communications package including mobile phone and broadband internet. All of this, they claim, would cost £42 billion or about 2.3% of GDP. [...]

For a start, what is being proposed is not ‘universal’ in any accepted use of the word. For instance, the provision of ‘free food’ under the UBS banner is deceptive. According to the UBS scheme, the state would provide "one-third of the meals for the 2.2 million households deemed to experience food insecurity each year". That is not universal. It is targeted. Identifying those suffering from food insecurity would necessarily imply means-testing or some complex test of ‘food insecurity’. As with all targeted schemes, many of those eligible would not be reached, while those receiving the free food would, as a result, face an even greater poverty trap and accompanying precarity trap than exist in the British welfare state today. The Department for Work and Pensions itself estimates that going from means-tested benefits into the sort of low-paid job claimants could obtain results in only a 20% increase in net income – a poverty trap of 80%. If they also lost ‘free food’, the net gain would be even less. [...]

Providing ‘the poor’ with free food would extend the charity state and institutionalise the obnoxious system of ‘food banks’, which have mushroomed in the austerity era. The mass provision of free food would also risk more waste of food. However well-intentioned the charity state might be, people receiving free goods tend to value them less and treat them with less care than if they pay for them.[...]

Interestingly, under the German social care scheme, admired both by the House of Commons committees and by UBS supporters, three-quarters of beneficiaries opt for cash payments, even though they are lower than the value of the free in-kind services offered, because cash payments give them the flexibility to be cared for at home by family members or other informal carers.

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openDemocracy: The war on Europe’s women and LGBTIQ people has only just begun

Salvini held a rosary and kissed a small crucifix, thanking the “Immaculate Heart of Mary” (as he did during campaign rallies). Announcing it is time to “save Europe” and “its Judeo-Christian roots”, he pointed to the victories of Marine Le Pen in France and Nigel Farage in the UK, saying: “It is a sign of a Europe that has changed”.

Across the European Union, 50.5% of registered voters participated in the 26 May elections – the highest rate in 20 years, and the first significant increase since 1979. Many commentators responded to the results with a measure of optimism: the populist far-right did not conquer the European Parliament, as they had campaigned to. [...]

Take the issue of immigration, Salvini’s favourite: after almost one year of his so-called “closed ports” policy, and a decree on asylum and humanitarian protection rules that left thousands of people in precarious status, there is now a draft of a new harsh security decree against migrants and solidarity, ready to be discussed by the government. [...]

While Salvini has said that the 1978 law that legalised abortion in Italy isn’t up for discussion, his positions against sexual and reproductive rights are quite clear. On Mother’s Day, he sent wishes “to all mothers, but not to parent 1 or 2” (a jab at same-sex parents). He’s also issued a decree replacing the gender-neutral term “parents” with “father” and “mother” on the forms required to fill out for minors’ ID cards.

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