Recall how, in the last elections in France, every leftist scepticism about Macron was immediately denounced as a support for Marine le Pen. And look at the empty universality of successful statements like Macron's 'La Republique En Marche!' – the designation of a victorious movement forward without any obvious or specific goal
An old Chinese curse is “May you live in interesting times!” – interesting times are the times of troubles, confusion and suffering. And it seems that in some “democratic” countries, we are lately witnessing a weird phenomenon which proves that we live in interesting times: a candidate emerges and wins elections as it were from nowhere, in a moment of confusion building a movement around his name – both Berlusconi and Macron exploded like this.
What is this process a sign of? Definitely not of any kind of direct popular engagement beyond party politics – on the contrary, we should never forget that such figures explode with the full support of social and economic establishment. Their function is to obfuscate actual social antagonisms – people are magically united against some demonised “fascist” threat.
Decades ago, Vaclav Havel was the first to blurt out this dream: when, after being elected a President, he first met Helmut Kohl, he made a weird suggestion: “Why don’t we work together to dissolve all political parties? Why don’t we set up just one big party, the Party of Europe?” One can imagine Kohl’s sceptical smile.
This weird phenomenon is one of the visible effects of the long-term rearrangement of the political space in Europe. Until recently, the political space was dominated by two main parties which addressed the entire electoral body, a right-of-centre party (Christian Democrat, liberal-conservative, people’s something-or-other) and a left-of-centre party (socialist, social democratic something-or-other), with smaller parties addressing a narrow electorate (ecologists, neo-fascists, and so on).
Now, there is progressively emerging one party which stands for global capitalism as such, usually with relative tolerance towards abortion, gay rights, religious and ethnic minorities; opposing this party is a stronger and stronger anti-immigrant populist party which, on its fringes, is accompanied by directly xenophobic groups.
The exemplary case is here Poland: after the disappearance of the ex-communists, the main parties are the “anti-ideological” centrist liberal party of the ex-prime minister Donald Tusk and the conservative Christian party of Kaczynski brothers. The question now is: which of the two main parties, conservatives or liberals, will succeed in presenting itself as embodying the post-ideological non-politics against the other party dismissed as "still caught in old ideological spectres"? In the early Nineties, conservatives were better at it; later, it was liberal leftists who seemed to be gaining the upper hand.
This process brings us back to Berlusconi and Macron: new movements emerge out of nowhere when none of the old big parties, conservative or liberal, succeeds in imposing itself as the agent of the new “radical centre”, so the establishment is caught in a panic and has to invent a new movement in order, precisely, to keep things the way they are.
Already the names of their respective movements (more than just parties) sound similar in their empty universality which fits everyone and everything. Who wouldn’t agree with “Forza Italia”! or with “La Republique En Marche!” – they both designate the abstract sense of a victorious movement forward without any specification of the direction of this movement and its goal.
Read the full article here.
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