Wednesday morning in Brussels and Beppe Grillo has brought his anti-establishment roadshow to the European parliament. The committee room is packed, standing room only for the former standup act.
Once he gets going, Grillo resembles a force of nature. He declines to sit on the parliamentary rostrum alongside the other participants. Instead he prowls the floor, spitting out a staccato torrent of abuse and grievance, unscripted, unstoppable, laugh-a-minute.
“I’m a bit over the top,” Grillo admits when he first pauses to draw breath after half an hour. “Maybe I should stop here.”
Grillo is the Mr Angry of Italian and, increasingly, European politics. His Five Star Movement is running a consistent second in the opinion polls at around 20% behind the modernising centre-left of the Democratic Centre of prime minister Matteo Renzi.
If Grillo is hammering on the establishment’s doors, across Europe upstarts, populists, mavericks, iconoclasts and grassroots movements are performing even more strongly, radically changing the face of politics, consigning 20th-century bipartisan systems to the history books, and making it ever trickier to construct stable governing majorities.
Fragmentation is the new norm in the parliaments and politics of Europe. Voter volatility, the death of deference, the erosion of party loyalties,, the dissolution of the ties of class make for a chaotic cocktail and highly unpredictable outcomes. Especially during and in the aftermath of economic slump.
“The crisis has shredded voters’ trust in the competence, motives and honesty of establishment politicians who failed to prevent the crisis, have so far failed to resolve it, and who bailed out rich bankers while imposing misery on ordinary voters, but not on themselves,” said Philippe Legrain, a former adviser to the head of the European commission and author of European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics are in a Mess – and How to Put Them Right.
If elections were held tomorrow in half a dozen EU countries, according to current polls, the biggest single parties would be neither the traditional Christian nor social democrats of the centre-right and centre-left, but relative newcomers on the far right or hard left who have never been in government – from Greece and Spain, where far-left anti-austerity movements top the polls, to anti-EU, nationalist, anti-immigrant parties of the extreme right in France, the Netherlands, Austria and Denmark.
Since the second world war, the continent has traditionally craved consensus and stability, the proportional representation systems geared to producing centrist coalitions and excluding extremists. That system is crumbling.
Britain has always stood apart from this European model, with its first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all system aimed at producing stable, single-party majorities and strong oppositions. But that, too, is no longer viable as the byelection in Rochester and Strood will highlight. The Conservatives and Labour are losing out to the cheeky, fresh faces of Ukip, while more broadly Scottish nationalism is making huge gains and the Greens are also gaining ground, making it more difficult for either of the two main parties to secure a majority.
“You might say that Britain is becoming a more normal European country,” said a senior EU official. “It’s becoming a little bit like Belgium. The system is failing to cope with the effects of devolution, of Scottish nationalism, of the intense impact of Europe on UK politics. Seen from Brussels, the answer is that what Britain needs is a grand coalition. And that, of course, is unthinkable.”
Legrain points out that traditional class-based politics have been in decline for decades for lots of complex social reasons, voter turnouts have fallen, party memberships have slumped. The days when the two big parties could muster 80% of the vote between them are long gone everywhere.
In Austria, the centre-left and centre-right now take 50% between them and are in effect in a permanent grand coalition to keep out the extreme right. In Germany, Angela Merkel is in her third term, in power for nine years, five of those in grand coalition with the Social Democrats because she cannot construct any other majority. Her preferred partner, the liberal Free Democrats, have virtually disappeared, supplanted by the anti-euro, more nationalistic upstarts of the Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Since the end of Franco, Spain has been a solid two-party system of the People’s party on the centre-right and the Socialists on the centre-left. In current polls they muster a mere 50% between them, outflanked by the new, leftwing Yes We Can movement of Podemos under the leadership of the ponytailed professor Pablo Iglesias. It is running neck-and-neck with the socialists at 22-27%.
Podemos is a leftwing response to the Spanish crash, to political-banking sleaze, to the savage austerity imposed by Europe as the price for being bailed out. But its appeal, says José Ignacio Torreblanca, of the European Council on Foreign Relations in Madrid, lies less in its policies or ideology than in its freshness.
“A vote for Podemos is a voodoo vote. Until now, citizens voted and nothing happened, their vote had no consequences whatsoever. It served neither to change policies nor to change politicians as no one resigned,” said Torreblanca. “But now, by simply stating their intention to vote for Podemos, many are finding themselves empowered for the first time. Now, with the same vote, they vote against political parties, against bipartisanship, against injustices, against corruption, against Angela Merkel, against the markets.”
Similar patterns might be observed in Ireland, where decades of duopoly by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are yielding to a more febrile form of politics where the paramount concern of the traditional parties seems to be a determination to keep Sinn Féin and Gerry Adams out. Sinn Féin is flourishing as the main parties founder.
In the wake of the financial crash, according to Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times, Ireland is in the grip of a “slow slide towards an ungovernable state …Something big is happening to the Irish political system. It is losing the ability to keep the only promise it ever took seriously: the promise of stability.
“The two tribes, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, were emotionally at war but, in political practice, entirely at peace … The long-established system is barely able to govern at all – it can’t get big things done because it can’t produce a democratic consensus.”
In the recent European and local elections, the two big parties between them took less than half the vote. It is a pattern that is repeating across Europe, making it ever harder to govern.
The shift from two- and three-party systems to parliaments of five, six or seven contestants has been a long time in the gestation, but it has been jolted and fast-forwarded by the financial and debt crisis of the past four years. What started as a financial and currency emergency has morphed into a broader political, social and economic crisis, with Europe mired in stagnation and deflation, no growth, no jobs and the mainstream elites struggling to come up with answers.
“Many people have opted for different forms of political expression, first NGOs and more recently ad hoc internet-based campaigns: Facebook groups, Twitter campaigns, petitions, etc,” said Legrain. “Globalisation has also eroded the powers of national governments, shifting powers to financial markets and to the EU, causing a feeling of disempowerment and sparking nationalist and localist backlashes.”
Policymakers are sweating, struggling to be in command and control. The new head of the European commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, came into office at the start of the month declaring his team to be “Europe’s last chance”.
“Everything would change if there was some economic optimism. But instead there’s an acute sense of unfairness,” said the senior EU official. “A year or two more of zero growth and the people in power will be getting very worried. Insurrection is not so far away. Governments do not seem to have a clue.”
Given the improbability of stable majorities, the elite response is to risk soldiering on with minority governments, as in Sweden and Denmark, or, increasingly, for the two big but shrinking centrist parties to form “grand coalitions” as the only option, as in Germany, Austria or the Netherlands.
But grand coalitions smother parliamentary democracy, policy is stitched up behind closed doors, parliaments become rubber stamps and populist rebels are strengthened, railing against the cosy, closed politics of the elites.
The problem was in full view last week in the European parliament, which is also now in the hands of a grand coalition of Christian and social democrats and liberals aimed at marginalising the broad ranks of anti-EU populists, Eurosceptics and Europhobes who did well everywhere in the May elections.
On the day that Grillo was denouncing the EU and consorting with Nigel Farage in the parliament, Jean-Claude Juncker, too, entered the building. If Grillo and Farage are leaders of the swelling army of Europe’s Angry party, Juncker is the embodiment of what they are angry about.
While national governments in capitals across Europe struggle to address the issues being raised by the new political movements, Brussels and the EU’s institutions are viewed by the insurgents as a central element of what’s gone wrong – austerity and its flipside, the untouched transnational European super-rich, mass migration, the remoteness of political elites. No one better personifies that elite than the president of the European commission – centrist grandee, consummate insider, political fixer. In his first days in office, Juncker confirmed their worst suspicions.
Until last year the prime minister of Luxembourg and the EU’s longest-serving head of government, Juncker became head of the EU executive a fortnight ago. Three days into his five-year term he appeared publicly in Brussels to promise a new regime of transparency, fairness and solidarity in the EU’s lacklustre quest to heal the deep wounds left by years of austerity.
Within 24 hours, Juncker had vanished. Newspaper headlines in virtually all 28 EU countries laid bare the labyrinthine tax-dodging schemes dreamed up on his watch in Luxembourg. The globe’s biggest banks and multinationals were drawn magnetically to the tiny grand duchy to minimise their tax exposure in the countries where they made their profits. For more than a decade Luxembourg had soaked the rest of the EU for tens of billions in lost tax revenue while the footloose multinationals were legally encouraged to reduce their tax bills.
Juncker’s debut was a disaster. “You have the president of the commission telling us what to do while he keeps his money in a tax haven,” grinned Grillo.
Juncker was summoned to answer before the chamber on the tax scandal after having disappeared from public view for seven of his first 10 days in office. But far from facing hostile questions, Juncker was embraced by the key parliamentary players.
“It was his first big test. The presidential majority held,” said a senior commission official.
The parliamentary hearing turned into a grand coalition exercise, not in cross-examining Juncker but in protecting him, a performance unlikely to appease the legions of malcontents changing the politics of Europe. “It used to be called the European community. But there’s no community any more,” Grillo yelled.
“People are right to be angry,” said Legrain. “Unfortunately they often direct their anger at scapegoats, notably immigrants, rather than the bankers and policymakers who have driven Europe into the ditch. The problem is that there is not a sensible alternative to the mainstream consensus, leaving a vacuum that extremists and charlatans have filled.”
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