segunda-feira, 14 de novembro de 2016

EU political parties could get Trumped


BRUSSELS SKETCH
EU political parties could get Trumped
The Union as the embodiment of top-down, insider politics is an obvious target for parties keen to burnish their anti-establishment credentials.

By TIM KING 11/15/16, 5:33 AM CET

Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president has given populist movements across Europe a massive dose of self-belief and shows that the unthinkable can become reality. But their ability to storm the citadels of power will depend on how political parties respond to voters’ discontent.

His election came about because of a systemic failure by the two parties that have dominated American politics since the Civil War, and an important lesson from the U.S. presidential contest is that political parties matter. Trump first became the Republican candidate against the will of party leaders, which set him on the path to the White House. The world may wonder how it is possible that a man who has never held public office comes to be U.S. president: A large part of the answer is that the Republican Party, which would traditionally determine that its candidate has experience as a governor or senator or general, dispensed with such filters.

Almost as importantly, the Democratic Party failed, putting up a candidate whose experience could not outweigh her known flaws. After eight years with a Democrat in the White House, the party struggled to defend itself against an anti-establishment insurgency. But that does not mean Trump’s victory was inevitable: A different Democratic candidate, or a different campaign with the same candidate, might have produced a different president.

Even before the Trump victory, the referendum vote in June 2016 for Britain to leave the EU was cited by insurgent movements elsewhere in Europe as an example of what might be possible. In reality, it’s hard to see the circumstances being reproduced elsewhere. Brexit was an extraordinary act of self-immolation by the ruling Conservatives. Their leader, David Cameron, promised a referendum to diminish the threat from the U.K. Independence Party at the 2015 general election and to resolve the warring within Tory ranks.

In the short term it worked, in that UKIP won only one seat in parliament. Yet Cameron unleashed a civil war within his own party, which ultimately brought him down. Although he campaigned for Remain, Cameron had allowed anti-EU forces to neutralize his advantages as the incumbent head of government. Tory insurgents allied themselves with UKIP and some members of the Labour Party, which was distracted by its own civil war.

In theory, the constitutional arrangements of British politics — a constituency-based, first-past-the-post electoral system that normally gives rise to single-party governments — are a high barrier to political insurgency. In practice, the obstacles were circumvented by a strange form of entryism: The anti-EU movement was helped by the government party.

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Elsewhere in Western Europe, no anti-EU movement can count on such government assistance. It is more likely that establishment parties and coalition governments might be outmaneuvered by insurgents. And, as in Britain, establishment parties will struggle to respond to issues that cut across the traditional lines of partisanship. In Western Europe, parties were shaped by divisions dating back to the 19th century: working class-bourgeoisie; religious-secular; free trade-protectionist; internationalist-nationalist. Those party identities froze in the 1920s and ’30s. New challenges arose and the parties defined themselves by their responses, but the parties themselves — mostly Christian Democrat, liberal and socialist — were pretty well fixed.

The story of recent decades, however, is of political parties struggling to adapt to changed circumstances that have erased earlier battle lines. Industrial decline and the end of Fordism, a drop-off in religious observance, a tendency to delegate economic and trade decisions to international organizations — these were all trends that eroded traditional party identity. So too, in some countries, did the end of the Cold War. Social democracy, in the wake of economic crises, took a lurch towards neoliberalism. Christian Democracy, stripped of its religious element, split left and right. Liberalism found its space contested and its policies appropriated. In turn, this has opened the way for challenges from non-traditional movements, particularly those based on environmentalism or the politics of identity — whether race, region or nation.

Opposition to the European Union is already a feature of some of those movements, and many people in Brussels fear Trump’s election is a shot in the arm to those wanting to dismantle the EU. However, while it is true that Euroskepticism can give superficial respectability to movements that might otherwise be crudely nationalist or even racist, a domino effect is not inevitable.

What matters is the configuration of the party system in individual states. The challenges faced by the likes of Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, Beppe Grillo’s 5Star Movement in Italy, Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands, or Vlaams Belang in Belgium are all very different from each other.

In France, the system of voting for the presidency is constructed in a way that favors entryism: two rounds of voting in which the second round is a run-off between two candidates. If next spring Le Pen makes it to the second round, as her father did in 2002 (with only 16.9 percent of the vote), then she will be just one victory away from the presidency.

Bordeaux mayor Alain Juppe and Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy | Martin Bureau/AFP via Getty Images
Bordeaux mayor Alain Juppe and Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy | Martin Bureau/AFP via Getty Images

As with Trump, the question is whether the establishment parties will unite behind candidates that stand a chance of defeating Le Pen. The test for the center-right Les Républicains is imminent. The first round of voting in its contest for the nomination will be held on November 20, with seven candidates on the ballot paper, including former President Nicolas Sarkozy and former Prime Minister Alain Juppé. The second round will be held a week later. As with their American counterparts, Les Républicains have been riven with factional disputes in pursuit of the presidential nomination. Le Pen will be hoping that those divisions do not heal.

Meanwhile, the Socialists are in disarray, principally because of President François Hollande’s abysmal ratings. Emmanuel Macron, the former economy minister, resigned to put distance between his aspirations for the presidency and Manuel Valls’ government. But many doubt whether the party can be put back together in time to mount a credible bid for the Elysée. Far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon ranks ahead of Hollande in opinion polls.

Spain provides a fascinating example of a country whose party configurations are in the midst of realignment. The post-Franco certainties of power alternating between conservatives and Socialists have been swept away. The rise of Podemos and the United Left now account for more than 20 percent of votes; the new Citizens party (opposed to Catalan independence) another 13 percent. On the face of it, Mariano Rajoy’s center-right Popular Party has emerged victorious from the electoral struggle of the last few months, but its hold on power is fragile.

In Germany, the populist right-wing Alternative for Germany party has this year won seats in regional elections, coming second in Saxony-Anhalt and third in Baden-Württemberg, at the expense of the Christian Democrats (CDU) and Social Democrats (SPD). Yet the constitutional arrangements in Germany, which set high barriers to entry, and the readiness of the CDU and SPD to form alliances, suggests the AfD is still a long way from power.

In Brussels the rise of insurgent parties poses some uncomfortable questions for the European Parliament.
In Central and Eastern Europe, the picture is different, chiefly because the cleavages that defined the identity of political parties were not those of the 19th and early 20th century, but of the communist era and its aftermath. Typically, the fortunes of parties tend to fluctuate more; and the support they command from voters is more fickle. Identity politics — national, regional and religious affiliations — often feature.

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In Brussels, the rise of insurgent parties poses some uncomfortable questions for the European Parliament. Typically, small parties have gained a toehold on power through elections which, precisely because they do not determine the fate of national governments, are often used by voters to express protests. The insurgent parties get an international platform to help their further growth and because the European Parliament funds political groups, they get their hands on money. The insurgents have proved adept at surmounting the obstacles that the established parties tried to put in their way: In order to qualify for funding as a group, a cross-border alliance of national delegations must comprise at least 35 MEPs from at least seven countries.

In some cases, the money is improperly used. Le Pen’s party has been accused of using EU money to pay staff working on national campaigns. This year MEP Morten Messerschmidt was ordered to repay EU money used in national campaigns for his far-right Danish People’s Party. But for the most part, the insurgents are quite legally exploiting the generous provisions that the established parties had put in place for their own benefit.

Because money and positions of power inside the Parliament are dependent on the relative size of the political groups, the established parties have an inbuilt incentive to maximize their membership without too many scruples about admission. The EU’s expansion in 2004 to 25 member states from 15 saw an unseemly scramble by center-right, Social Democrats and liberals to sign up Central and Eastern European parties, some of whom qualified only very loosely. The defenders of transnational parties argue that their alliances have spread their party values and improved democratic standards. But behind the embarrassments caused to the EPP by Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party in Hungary, or before that by Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, or to the Social Democrats by Romania’s Viktor Ponta, or to the liberals by Andrej Babis who founded the Czech party ANO 2011, there lurk questions as to whether those political families were afraid to take a principled stand that might cost them influence within the European Parliament.

If one of the lessons from Trump’s victory is that political parties matter, a second lesson is that an anti-establishment campaign can gain traction where voters are resentful and distrust the establishment. The EU is quintessentially an establishment creation and has come to embody a kind of top-down, insider politics, so it is an obvious target for parties that wish to portray themselves as anti-establishment. Trump’s victory guarantees the EU will face more criticism in the months to come. But the EU cannot do much to determine its own fate: Its duty is to maintain respect for democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights. Its future rests, more than ever, on electoral battles between individual parties within each member state.


Tim King writes POLITICO‘s Brussels Sketch.

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