Crisis of Conformism
Boris Kagarlitsky
The Moscow Times, 21 May 2002
When one cow flies overhead, the old joke goes, that's an hallucination. When three cows fly overhead, that's a trend.
The success of the far right in European elections has started to look like a trend. First came Jörg Haider in Austria, then Silvio Berlusconi and his more-than-suspect allies in Italy. Jean-Marie Le Pen made it into a run-off in the French presidential election. And last but not least, the party of murdered anti-immigration politician Pim Fortuyn took second place in Holland's parliamentary election.
The Pim Fortuyn List, or LPF, is a peculiarly Dutch version of right populism. Fortuyn himself, for example, never attempted to conceal his homosexuality as he lambasted immigrants, moral dissolution, etc. And no one called him on it. In Holland even a champion of traditional values has the right to a non-traditional sexual orientation. The leader of the new right willingly benefitted from the fruits of his country's tolerance as he denounced it.
Upon closer inspection another trend becomes clear. The far right's successes always coincide with the decline of the moderate left. It's not so much that the far right advances, but rather that the Social Democrats retreat. Jacques Chirac, not Le Pen, became the French president. And in Holland the big winner was not the LPF, whose leader was killed during the campaign, but the Christian Democrats, who won 43 of the 150 seats in parliament, a huge success by local standards. The big loser was the Dutch Labor Party. In France it was the Socialists who took a pounding.
And in Germany the general view is that only a miracle will save the Social Democrats from defeat in the upcoming elections.
Several years ago, in my book "New Realism, New Barbarism", I predicted that the most likely result of the Social Democrats' success in elections across Europe would not be a continental shift to the left, but rather a sharp upturn in the fortunes of the far right. To my great regret, that forecast proved accurate.
When Europeans voted the Social Democrats into power after a long period of conservative rule, they hoped for change, but got none. Now they are punishing the moderate left for its broken promises. If the moderate left is indistinguishable from the right, there is no point in prolonging its existence.
The traditional rightist parties seem more appealing as a result. At least the voters know where these parties stand. No one expects them to change anything, and their policies are in line with their ideology. So voters looking for a change have begun to look for new leaders.
A vote for the far right, just like a vote for Vladimir Zhirinovsky here, is sometimes just a way to express disgust with the main political parties. And the success of right populists brings with it an unprecedented advance of the radical left. The strong showing of the Trotskyites has already become a hot button issue in France. The Dutch gave nine seats in parliament to the Socialist Party - the former Maoists. The Party of Democratic Socialism, positioned to the left of the German Social Democrats, is gaining strength. Its main problem now is not criticism from the right, but charges of insufficient radicalism.
A push for change is under way in Western Europe, but the "respectable" political parties oppose it regardless of the slogans once inscribed on their party banners. The crisis of the Social Democrats will continue until their leaders realize that they have only one option left: to offer the electorate some new ideas.
It would seem that far right parties are approaching the limit of their influence in Europe: 15-17 percent of the vote. The prospects of the radical left, on the other hand, are unclear. Until quite recently their performance at the polls was so negligible that it scarcely registered in the total tally. But as the Social Democrats shift to the right, they steadily lose their own identity and authority, lending the radical fringe greater appeal. Sooner or later this will have an impact on the entire political party system. Politics, which had turned into a routine competition among careerists, has once more acquired significance as a contest of ideas.
However alarming the rise of the right may be, it is merely a symptom of a much more serious illness: the crisis of democracy, a crisis born of conformism and the homogeneity of ideas.
If it can overcome this crisis, democratic society will also find a way to handle the rest of its problems.
Copyright 2002 The Moscow Times
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