Populist
anger is ‘a gift wrapped in barbed wire’
Belgian
author attempts to make sense of voters’ mounting sense of
frustration.
By ESTHER
KING 11/2/16, 5:30 AM CET
The Flemish author
and poet David Van Reybrouck has spent his career writing about those
whose voices are only rarely heard. His books include a travelogue
set in post-apartheid South Africa and an award-winning “Epic
History of a People” about the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In his latest work,
however, he has turned his attention to a group of “voiceless”
people much closer to home: voters in Europe and the United States.
A feeling of
disenfranchisement, Van Reybrouck argues, lies behind the anger on
display among electorates across the West. The rise of populists like
Donald Trump in the United States, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands,
Marine Le Pen in France and Frauke Petry in Germany, and the fury on
display during the Brexit debate all share a common cause: an attempt
by establishment politicians to shut down the debate. It’s because
citizens are feeling excluded that the shouting is getting louder.
“The anger of
citizens we see today is not a danger for democracy,” says Van
Reybrouck. “It’s a gift. It shows that people are committed and
are willing to engage with their society. It’s a gift, but it’s
wrapped in barbed wire.” The trick, with this gift, he says, is to
figure out how to unwrap it.
* * *
Van Reybrouck’s
insights came out of the 2010-2011 Belgian political crisis, in which
the country’s elected officials failed to form a government for 541
days. What most political commentators wrote off as a quirk of an
unwieldy political process became, for Van Reybrouck, the symptom of
a larger problem.
The idea that
citizens were given the right to speak only every four or five years,
and only by ticking a box on a piece of a paper, struck him as absurd
— and counterproductive. “Democracy is quintessentially people
talking to each other,” he says. “But our democracies have become
very, very silent. We vote in silence, and then we shout … on
Facebook and Twitter. But a sort of meaningful discussion with people
who might have different ideas is not taking place anymore.”
“The easiest job
for a politician today is to be a populist leader.”
It is not just that
people feel voiceless, it’s that they are voiceless. Governments
across Europe have met anger with anger. Attacks on populism have
been just as vitriolic as their targets. As those expressions of
anger are dismissed as ignorant, uninformed or retrograde, the gulf
between the elite and the broader public has grown. “Many of the
politicians today remind me of the aristocracy in 1788,” says Van
Reybrouck. “The masses are shouting and yeah that’s annoying, but
the crisis won’t come. One year later, the Bastille was stormed.”
The mounting sense
of frustration, he says, feeds into the populist narrative. “The
easiest job for a politician today is to be a populist leader,” he
says. If someone with “a little more self-control than Donald
Trump” had taken up the banner of populism in the United States, he
or she would easily have swept up the votes of an increasingly
frustrated electorate.
Referendums may have
become the tool of choice for politicians trying to reassure voters
that they are being heard. But these offer only the illusion of
control, says Van Reybrouck. In the Brexit debate, for instance,
voters were made to believe their vote mattered, but once the polls
had closed and the votes to leave had been counted, they quickly lost
any say in how their decision would be implemented. “The referendum
has become the toy of populist leaders,” says Van Reybrouck. “I
am deeply convinced that if we refuse to update democracy, we’ll
see the end of democracy, and quite soon.”
People hold signs
with lights that spell out 'DUMP TRUMP' while demonstrating against
Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump
* * *
In the midst of the
Belgian crisis of 2011, Van Reybrouck launched G1000, an experiment
in participatory democracy that brought together 704 people chosen at
random to discuss ideas for solving Belgium’s political gridlock.
Participants were
asked to express their feelings on various aspects of the political
situation by rating the government’s response to an issue on a
scale of one to 10. They proposed steps that would incrementally
improve that rating by a notch or two, and then discussed the ideas
with their neighbors over several rounds of debate led by academics
and political experts.
When the answers
were gathered by the organizers, the result was a collection of
tangible policy proposals that were handed over to the country’s
seven presidents of parliament. The format has since been adopted by
political parties across Belgium, and the Netherlands has hosted more
than 10 of its own G1000 events. The Dutch government has created a
parliamentary commission to look at democratic renewal. And in the
city of Utrecht, the mayor’s cabinet regularly confers with
citizens for solutions to pressing policy issues, such as migration,
that weren’t on the table during electoral campaigns.
“Not doing
anything about our democracy is opening the gates to anarchy.”
Small European
countries, especially those that have gone through a crisis such as
Belgium and Iceland are more willing to innovate and should become
laboratories for mechanisms of participatory democracy, he says. At
the moment, Ireland leads the pack. In 2012, 66 citizens were chosen
by lot to join 34 government officials in a debate on constitutional
reforms. In October, the country repeated the process, randomly
selecting 99 citizens to tackle some of the country’s most
politically sensitive questions, including legalizing abortion and
climate change.
Van Reybrouck, who
has laid out his ideas in his book, “Against Elections: A Case for
Democracy,” has been invited by the leader of the Belgian senate to
hold an experiment in which a chamber of citizens chosen by lot would
join senators in discussing issues that fall under the senate’s
purview, such as constitutional reform and laws governing the
organization of the federal system.
The idea, he is
careful to say, is not to replace elections with a lottery. It’s to
experiment with methods to bring the voices of citizens into the
democratic process.
At the risk of
sounding like a Cassandra prophesying the end of days, Van Reybrouck
cautions that our democracies have become ticking time bombs. “I
see why people fear anarchy when they hear me talk,” he says. “But
not doing anything about our democracy is opening the gates to
anarchy.”
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