While caution is in order - since elections always present a barometer sensitive to that part of the electorate that is most volatile - and despite the influence of different and well rooted state and social institutions, there are clearly some broad supranational trends at work.
Four aspects of these recent ballots can be highlighted:
the growing fragility of parliamentary democracy; the electoral advance of reactionary, populist and fascist movements; the deep crisis of Social Democracy and, finally, the first stirrings of a left alternative.
FRANÇOIS VERCAMMEN
LL these aspects stem from the
A same source; while it is true that capitalism, with the aid of the reformist bureaucracies of the workers movement, has succeeded in managing its crisis, it is also true that it has had to pay a high price. The past fifteen years have worn down and undermined all the classic instruments of domination, marshalling and legitimation of the bourgeois order. By clever manoeuvring, whose "cleverness" is directly the result of the retreat of the workers' movement and the absence of an overall response on the latter's part, a brutal, head on confrontation has been continually postponed. Until when?
The governmental parties have slipped back, but the main opposition parties have drawn little profit from this. Despite appearances created by the electoral system, even the British case does not escape this framework. The theory that the opposition must get in when everyone is fed up with the government no longer holds.
The traditional parties are generally discredited, the strongest in particular. This is above all true for the Christian Democracy in Italy and Belgium and the Social Democracy in France, government parties for the past decade, if not since 1945. But the official opposition has also suffered. The Belgian Social Democracy has wasted its reentry into government in 1987 after seven
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International Viewpoint # 228 • May 11, 1992 of power ended in humiliation. The German Social Democracy, meanwhile, no longer knows how to cope, while the bourgeois parties in France have failed to profit from the spectacular collapse of support for the ruling Socialist Party. Italy, meanwhile, sees unprecedented fragmentation among the traditional parties.
The rise of spoiled ballots and abstentions, as well as the breakthrough of the ecologists and populist right show the lights on orange and moving towards red for the parliamentary regime. The debates on the electoral system reveal the concern which haunts the bourgeoisie in the face of the general disillusionment and the turbulence in the East: to achieve an authoritarian reform of the state which will guarantee stability while avoiding any provocative ideas of a fascist solution.
But this solution is not easy to attain. It is just as dangerous to deprive an important part of the electorate of their deputies by disallowing a proper proportionality between voters and their representatives — as in France and Britain — as to allow the real expression of public opinion at a time of chronic and worsening social crisis, as in Italy, where one can cast a "useful" vote and see and hear in the media parliamentarians who are not, at least yet, ready to play the sterile parliamentary game.
The debate on the principle of proportional representation (Britain), on how much cutive. The personal campaign of Italy's President Cossiga for a more authoritarian "New Republic" is a particularly explicit example of this.
The key is the strengthening of the executive's power over society. While the material and legal powers of the state have hugely increased over the past twenty years, there remains a lack of coordination. In all these countries, the debate on electoral systems is part of a broader problematic: what political instruments and what price must be paid to maintain or even recreate a threatened social and political cohesion?
Far right becomes major force in big cities
Is the vote for the far right simply a protest vote or a lasting sign of political and social discontent? The advance of populist and fascist movements everywhere except in Britain is a significant change in the political map. With national support that today hovers around 10%, these forces embody a struggle for political power in the big cities, such as Marseilles, Antwerp or Milan, where scores of 25%+ were achieved by the far right, a sign of the social and moral crisis. Now installed in the heart of the "democratic" institutions, they are a permanent factor in the balance of forces, both on the institutional level and in society.
Whatever their differences, these movements grow from the same soil: social distress, insecurity, existential anxiety and, in the absence of any more collective way out, a search for individual salvation by the most deprived. The expression of the social frustration of the marginalized and their desire to punish "those up there" combines with a yearning for order and elitism on the part of better off sections of the middle class.
While the first group adopts the immigrant as the scapegoat for all its troubles, the latter are governed by the egotistical reflexes of prosperity which they feel to be threatened. While the first quote immigration statistics, the second refer to taxes and social transfers by the state. Nationalism, sub-nationalism and localism provide some sort of ideological basis for this jumble.
Calling for "priority for our people", Le Pen in France, the Leagues in Italy and the German Republicans give effective expression to diffuse but widespread sentiments found throughout all sections of society.
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EUROPE elections
Furthermore, one should not underestimate the lifeline that this sudden breakthrough may give to these Fascist-Nazi grouplets who have for a long time remained isolated in their nostalgia.
Even if they remain still at the beginning of their organization into a real party (except in France) they have now gained three advantages. Firstly, these organizations will now dispose of the material means attendant on their presence in the state institutions, going far beyond those at the disposal of the militant anti-fascist forces.
Secondly, they have won through these elections an aura of democratic legitimacy at a moment when all the established parties are severely discredited. The long-time fascist grouseems impossible.
One could say that the two experiences are chemically pure and thus exceptional, in countries where the electoral system favours homogeneous and long-lasting governments. But even where coalitions succeed one another in rapid succession, confusing the political picture, there is no mistaking the decline of Social Democracy. In Germany the SPD has seen a spectacular retreat. In Baden-Württemburg, the country's richest Land with 10 million inhabitants, it got its worst score since 1968 (29.4%), while the Christian Demo-
EUROPE fic!
However in the event Social Democracy was overwhelmed by the impossible reform of the (post-) Stalinist bureaucracy and the discrediting of "really-existing socialism". After that, the political balance sheet of the Socialist parties' response to the capitalist crisis returned to haunt them with a vengeance. Rather than attempting to fight against it, the Social Democracy had been fully implicated, in the name of the lesser evil or of the European way, whether in or out of government.
Called upon to break workers' resistan-
Ice, it sowed the demoralization to which it is now itself falling victim. Over the past ten to fifteen years this balance sheet, which is
CRISE plets have been joined by a new generation of fascist leaders, often young and "up-to-date".
Civil war in the social
Umore or less clearly grasped by workers, has undermined the place of the Social Democracy inside the traditional workers' movement.
Furthermore, it has cut off its access to the youth. While one segment of its popular base, disgusted catacombs
They intend to carry out a civil war in the catacombs of society NHAC under a respectable cover and employing a united front line on their "transitional demands"; on immigration, security, housing, education, social security, the struggle against corruption, the defeat of the "secret" and illegitimate political and financial power of unions and cooperatives, European unity, the rejection of American imperialism and so on.
Thus, and finally, they can act in concert with a new right wing produced by the overall toughening of bourgeois policy which is developing inside the traditional bourgeois parties in crisis.
The worrying advances of the far right should not lead us to overlook another burning issue: the electoral decline and crisis of the big Social Democratic parties. Eleven years of exclusively "Socialist" government in France have brought the Socialist Party (PS) to the edge of the abyss. Thirteen years of "Socialist" opposition in Britain, during which time the Conservative government has implemented an austerity policy of a brutality unparalleled in Europe, have led the Labour Party to a crushing electoral defeat. In both cases the Social Democratic leadership has violently confronted and discomforted its own rank-and-file in order to win the confidence of big capital: the PS to stay in government, Labour to get into it.
In both cases this has led into a strategic dead-end. The "culture of government" in France - or the break with the trade unions — in Britain — seem as suicidal as returning to "anti-capitalist" and "class struggle" sources, however reformist cratic Union (CDU) got 36.9%, a decline of 9.4%.
In Schleswig-Holstein the SPD slumped from 54.8% to 46.2%. In Italy the small drop of 0.6% in the score of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) does not accurately reflect the party's political defeat. In fact in the north the party lost 25% of its electorate, accentuating its character as a southern clientelist party and putting an end to the dreams of its leader Craxi of reorganizing the political landscape around his own person. Enormous and disagreeable shock
This is an enormous and disagreeable shock for the European Social Democracy. Towards the end of the 1980s, its leaders hoped and dreamed that history was about to call on them. The exhaustion of the disastrous neo-liberal policies of the Reagan/Thatcher era would see them summoned into the arena of partnership. Meanwhile in the East, perestroika was to bring about the "socially amended market economy" , propelling Gorbachev into the arms of the Second International. The future was rosy, from the Atlantic to the Paciand bewildered, is tending to drift to the populist or extremist right, the young and the new sectors of wage workers are not, for all that, spontaneously attracted by a "modernist" Social Democracy which offers no future or hope, no global alternative or even concrete
CE and relevant proposals.
It should also not be forgotten that, in the deep discredit that has struck it, and more than ever implicated in the cogs of capitalism, the leading circles of the European Socialist parties have developed a taste for "easy money". Besides spectacular scandals and illegal excesses (robbery, fraud and so on) day-to-day corruption has created a layer of "Socialist arrivistes" whose lifestyle in times of austerity for the people is found unbearable by the rank-and-file to whom it has been wont to expand on the dangers of corporatism and egotistical demands.
While there are certainly debates, contradictions, conflicts and occasionally even a "left/right" polarization inside the Social Democracy, it is also the case that a really thoroughgoing recomposition in its ranks has yet to appear. The main apparent contradiction appears to be that between the Socialist Party, increasingly in the embrace of the bourgeois state, and the trade union movement which is under more direct pressure from the working class and social movements.
The weakness of the revolutionary left in these elections is striking. It reflects, of course, the relation of class forces at the international level and between reformists and revolutionaries inside the workers' movement. But it leaves questions to be answered, at a time when the Communist 1 7 parties have abdicated their responsibility