The lure of anti-politics

If the Italian elections and the Eastleigh by-election have anything in common, then it is the rise of populism. In Eastleigh, UKIP managed to come an astonishing second, beating the Conservative Party into the third place and just narrowly missing to relegatge the LibDems to runner up. In Italy, Beppo Grillo's Movement 5 received about a quarter of all votes cast and became the biggest single group in the lower house of parliament.

So, what's so attractive to voters about UKIP and the Moviemento 5?

UKIP of course has been around for a long time and, after an inglorious start in the end 1990s, smoothed its message to appeal to more moderate voters. The essential argument they put forward however has always been the same: get out of the European Union in order to re-gain control over our borders.

There can be no doubt that uncontrolled immigration can be a serious problem to any country that has to cope with a large influx of immigrants in a very short period of time. Local authorities in the South East of England faced unprecedented challenges when more than 600,000 European workers arrived on these shores in 2005. Teachers in local schools went from teaching classes with English speaking kids to classes with predominately Polish speaking children, sometimes within a matter of months. This required flexibility of resources that simply was not built into the educational system and caused serious problems for those living here already and the new arrivals.

And UKIP also has a point when it argues that the EU guarantees freedom of movement (and freedom to settle) within all member states. Yet, the scary picture UKIP paints is nevertheless simplistic. Immigration is never just a matter of who controls the borders. It is always a function of the various incentives put out to potential arrivals. They include generous welfare payments (which includes accessibility), free health care and housing for new arrivals. Despite the anti-European Union rhetoric, the British government has enormous leeway to shape these incentives and thereby to influence the number of people coming to the UK.

But the real underlying message of UKIP actually centres on something else, and this is where UKIP finds an ally in Beppo Grillo's movement. It articulates an anti-political message, expressing a widely felt sentiment that all politicians and established parties are either corrupt or incapable of reflecting public opinion. UKIP's party leader Nigel Farage never tires of saying that he is not a politician. But is this true? And what does this argument mean?

As Grillo's movement in Italy is refusing to co-operate with the 'corrupt' political elite, it forgets an age old inconvenient political truth: there is no such thing as an un-political action. Whatever you decide, operating in the political arena means that you take sides and make decisions for or against some group or other in society. Refusing to co-operate with others is a political decision, like it or not.

The second delusion of Grillo and Farage is however more serious. It concerns their disparaging of the 'political class'. They argue that politicians are not representing 'the people'. Yet democracy is always the struggle between competing visions of society, and politicians are charged not with representing 'everybody' but with representing their constituents. The essence of democratic politics is strife and argument, which leads to compromise. Decisions 'untainted' by consensus and compromise can only be had in totalitarian regimes, where some are riding roughshod over the views of others.

In addition, in democratic societies, we made the decision to be represented by our peers, selecting them from our midst to find solutions to problems that concern us all. Thus politicians are also a reflection of ourselves, the good and the bad. The alternative would be to argue for a government 'above the partisan interests of society'. The last time that call was heeded, the world tumbled into mass murder under the guise of 'the common good'.

So, where does this leave UKIP and Grillo? Dismissing the political class as crooks may resonate with our fury at politician's occasional misdemeanours but it fundamentally positions them at the margins of democratic society. Our politicians are as good or bad as we are. When we look at the spectacle of political shouting matches in parliament we see a mirror image of our own souls thrown back at us. Perhaps that's why we like to vote for UKIP and people like Grillo sometimes. We hope that our vote for them demonstrates that we are nothing like conventional politicians when deep inside we know different.

Why grand coalitions rarely deliver

As Greek and Italian politicians scramble to form new governments, many people are gasping at the unedifying spectacle of prime ministers holding on to their positions. Yet before welcoming any Greek grand coalition or an administration of ‘technocrats’ in Italy we should perhaps pause and ask ourselves whether these interim governments have a track record of delivering the radical reforms both countries need.

Germany has an interesting history of grand coalitions. The first coalition between the main parties between 1966-69 is widely believed to have been a failure. While it prepared the Social Democrats (the junior partners of the CDU) to government, it did not initiate the reforms the country needed. 

In fact, most modernising reforms in the social and economic sphere were introduced by ‘small’ coalition governments under the leadership of visionary Social Democrats, such as Willi Brandt and Gerhard Schroeder. Both sought a strong democratic mandate from the German voters and introduced reforms through ‘small’ coalition governments (with the Liberals and the Greens respectively), implementing reforms often against the own parties and, more often than not, against the Christian Democrats in the Bundestag and the Bundesrat. 

So, if grand coalitions have the combined parliamentary support of the two main parties, why does their supposedly strong mandate not translate into decisive legislative action? The reason lies in the way in which representative democracy is set up. Political parties represent sectional interest of society, their clash of interests in the chamber is supposed to produce a consensus between those, often conflicting, interests. Where governments are formed by one party, or as in Germany and the UK at the moment, by one major and one smaller party, legislative programmes can by and large be implemented without significant hurdles. The struggle of ideas moderates their stance but does not prevent them from carrying out a coherent legislative agenda.  

Where two large parties come together, the interests they represent are often diametrically opposed, for example in the reform of labour law with the conflicting interests of trade unions and employers. The result is stasis, two parties blocking each other’s reform ideas. Their viewpoint of what constitutes the best way forward are bound to be farther removed from each other between two large parties than between a large and smaller party. And their habitual opposition to the other party’s proposal does not bode well for future co-operation either. 

So what about technocratic governments, so-called administrations of experts? Is their removal from the tussle of party political life not an advantage at times of crisis? Sadly not. While governments of technocrats may have a sound notion of how to break the reform deadlock, they often lack the support to get their ideas passed by parliament. The history of the Weimar Republic is a fascinating example. 

Once political parties blocked each others legislative programme in the Reichstag, the call for a technocratic Chancellor, someone above party politics, became stronger. Yet, it quickly transpired that this only quickened to move away from parliamentary politics in the first place, since the political parties in the Reichstag had little incentive to support someone without any loyalty to their ideological principles. 

In effect, technocratic Chancellors in the last years of the Weimar Republic governed without parliamentary mandate and hastened the end of representative democracy (the ironic twist of this story is of course Hitler who had achieved a strong relative parliamentary majority in the elections of July 1932 but was not appointed Chancellor until January 1933 and another round of elections where the share of the NSDAP went down). 

So what is the way forward? There may be no clean, neat option for those who find themselves in the straightjacket of overdue economic reforms and global market dynamics. To placate the markets, technocratic governments or grand coalitions may be an interim solution, yet we should not expect them to deliver the radical reforms that are necessary in either Italy or Greece. 

Ultimately, the voters will have to go to the polls again to provide the democratic mandate for such reforms. To weaken parliaments or to silence the struggle of ideas by artificially forcing technocratic solutions on political parties will only produce the impression that democracy does not work and undermine representative democracy in the long run.