I arrived to The Netherlands meanwhile the politics of the country was being teared apart. Not that I understood much of it then, busy with our newborn son, now eighteen. Yet I remember my surroundings horrified with the big electoral loses that the social democrats had suffered in Rotterdam, their historical powerhouse. And to right wingers!! We were deciding if making The Netherlands our home then, so I tried to understand the analyses being tossed around: Rotterdam is indeed home to one of the greater havens of the world, where the conquers of the traditional left had great impact in a predominantly worker population. How could people turn their backs on those that always represented them? what could that possibly mean? In the end, my beloved dutch wife and myself hoped that right wingers winning the trust of the masses would be an electoral fluke, and we stayed.
Almost two decades later, settled in my dutch life and kind of accustomed to political turmoil, I hear the same sounds coming from Andalucía. A traditional bastion of the PSOE, the last elections delivered them a bitter winning: even when being the bigger party the social democrats will not be able to form government, since the traditional right, an emergent center right party and a real far right movement have a majority that will exclude socialists from power. The turmoil in the analyses reminds me the Netherlands 18 years ago. Most of what is being said now is about immediate causes. In Spain the Catalan situation have repercussions, without doubt. Adding the secessionist revolt to times of increased migration, the right dominates the political debate, feeding the raise of the nationalism that so much has hurt Europe. Yet I wonder if we are not missing more mediate causes of this extremist-xenophobic-nationalist revolt that we are seeing in pretty much all Europe. And in the world at large, if we include the dangerous clowns of Trump and Chavez, so opposed ideologically and so much the same. Plus the many others that if I start to list there would be no space left for writing anything else.
In any case, for all what is worth, here is my hypothesis. The world wide raise of the right nowadays, or of the extreme left in South America twenty years ago has pretty much nothing to do with ideologies. It has lots to do with the own melting that the traditional parties have gone through. The right is not winning, neither the extreme left. They simply has taken over the space that both social democrats and christian democrats have vacated. And it is not an ideological space what we are talking about.
When we go back to the postwar years in western Europe, of their political equivalent in any country that we care to analyze (Right after the last dictatorship in Venezuela, or the years after the death of Franco in Spain), we will find both social democrats and christian democrats formulating new models of countries and implementing them. We will also found the young people interested in power politics joining them, joining the future, actually. At that moment both social democrats and christian democrats were inventing the future, actually. And that was the exciting place to be. Let’s push forward few decades. And to our shock and surprise, when looking at the same parties what we find are leaders screwed in place, trying to maintain the status quo, and pretty incapable to answer, let alone formulate, the more or less new questions of the time. Any emergent movement with some contact with the reality of the people can topple them. As they have, actually, done.
For any democrat against elites fixed in power forever, these developments are welcome. If we take the long perspective we can say that power is renewing itself, and that is, always, a good thing. Such democrat, anyhow, would not only be naive in extreme, but will also be wrong. The tyranny of the leftish chavismo in Venezuela has proven capable of stay in power in despite of public and evident deadly repression of opponents and wide spread scarcity. The effects of the miscalculations and mistakes of right wing politics in western Europe (consider the years of austerity and its costs in inequality, of the absurd tragedy of Brexit) will have long term consequences for our societies.
The question, perhaps for some other post in this blog, is why are not the moderates, both in the left or in the right, the ones that took over the demise of both social and christian democrats. But let’s leave that for some other day.
