Sign of the times

The No victory in the EU Constitution referenda in France and Holland drew a lot of commentary. Analysts tried to interpret the mass psychology that turned down the draft EU Constitution and threw the European Union into a deep crisis.

Did the people know what they were voting for or against? Did they vote on the Constitution at all? Or did they express their judgment on their government's performance?

No to the politicians

But then, in both countries, the main Opposition party supported the government and was strongly advising the electorate to vote Yes. So this time around there was no official Opposition trying to trip the government up in its constant attempts to replace it. The main political parties formed a grand national coalition to try and push the vote towards acceptance of the Constitution for which they had fought and horse-traded for years.

This is what struck me most in the result. Looking beneath the surface, one has to note that the electorate in both France and Holland decided to act against the advice of the main political parties. They pushed loyalty aside, they rejected the politicians' pleas.

I believe that this is where the analysis should be made. This is what should be ringing big bells in the heads of the political elite: their hold on the people is weakening.

Sign of the times

This is a sign of the times. Turmoil is building up in the democracies of the West. The people had been used to a rotating five-year dictatorship. They are involved once every few years to choose between one set of politicians and another.

People have been questioning the system. Massive abstentions from the ballot boxes are a sign of detachment from a system which they were considering irrelevant. This should have started to make people think. The real democrats should worry.

The people are now attacking the system. The chances they had to signify whether the decisions of their representatives reflect, as they should, their wishes and aspirations, they used to shout a resounding no.

Convenient policies

What has happened is that political parties, which originally were formed to push an ideal, a philosophy, an ideology which then attracted the fantasy and the loyalty of the masses, have now been turned into electoral machines. They use modern sophisticated tools to sound public opinion and determine which policies would attract most support. They adjust their policies away from their ideologies to tune them to the vote-catching issues.

Rival political parties that poll the same population using the same tools naturally get the same results. Rival political parties who had been 180 degrees apart on belief have now overlapped on convenient policy.

The electorate is confused.

No real choice

The people are feeling that as ideologies have been dissolved, the choice is really between an incumbent team, who can be judged by results, and a competing team who in most cases do not have any track record on deliverables and who are very generous on promises.

As these two sets of politicians alternate in power a couple of times, the people are starting to get disenchanted, feeling that they are being taken for a ride. There is really no big difference. How long are they going to listen to the same clichés, be subjected to repeated propaganda exercises? People are getting fed up.

Even if changes must be made to traditional policies because countries are facing an outrageously unviable situation, people do not understand why, after so many decades of pampering, the politicians are all of a sudden stepping hard on the brakes and asking for sacrifices and more sacrifices.

People are resenting the demands being made on them to retrench on their rights and to downgrade the expectations that they had built of a comfortable future. The credibility of the parties that have held power for so many years is dwindling. The people are finding themselves in a situation that they have no real choice when they are called to exercise their choice.

The political parties

The electorate are seeing through the existing political party structures. They are looking for some fresh thinking, for courageous visions, for defined objectives, for clear-cut plans, for unambiguous policies. They are scanning beyond party lines and traditional party allegiances.

More often than not, they are finding visionless policies, vague plans and a stale atmosphere. And they are getting disillusioned especially as they are refusing to change their allegiance from an allegiance to a vision or philosophy to an allegiance to a person.

Events that have a meaning

This week we witnessed two interesting events on the international scene. After the No vote, Laurent Fabius, the former socialist prime minister of France, was expelled from the French Socialist Party because he advocated a No vote against the party line.

And in Germany, Oskar Lafontaine, Chancellor Schröder's former finance minister, declared that he would form a new socialist formation to compete with Schröder's Social Democrats.

Even in Malta, on June 7, a new political formation calling itself the Popular Labour Movement (MLP) was launched.

This is an initiative taken by disgruntled Labour supporters who are feeling disillusioned with their party and who think that they can preserve their ideological traditions.

I have been warning the Nationalist Party not to take its support for granted. The political scenario is changing. Politicians must understand the signs of the times.

jd@dbms.com.mt