I find all this talk about the establishment and the anti-establishment bewildering. Point this down to my potential naivety where politics is concerned. My world has never been black or white (except where my favourite football team is concerned). I have always been a rainbow person deep down. And this makes me easily irritated by the tendency to categorise, individuals in particular.
All this fuss about the establishment has been precipitated since a majority of the electorate in the UK voted to leave the EU. We already had the rise of populist movements in a number of European countries which now seem to have taken upon themselves the anti-establishment mantle when, as anti-establishment I would be more prone to consider iconic figures such as Che Guevara rather than Nigel Farage or Beppe Grillo.
If anything, the latter seem to want to take us back to an era which has been superseded. Farage’s notion of Great Britain as some kind of centre of gravity for the entire globe, for example, lies buried in the annals of history.
Moreover, once people like these find themselves in power, they simply become the establishment without batting an eyelid. Within a few weeks of her election as mayor of Rome, the Movimento Cinque Stelle’s Virginia Ratti was embroiled in a scandal regarding the choice of a sanitation chief to clean up the city.
Although she knew in July that prosecutors were examining the record of Paola Muraro, Raggi stood by her appointment. She had previously been forced to sack her chief of staff after it emerged that she would be earning around €200,000.
As Donald Trump, another candidate elected on an anti-establishment platform, prepares to take office on January 20, he is busy cozying up with so-called establishment figures in order to get on with the business of government. The worrying thing about the final line-up of his cabinet will, I am perfectly sure, be competence, or lack of it, as well as the dubious nature of characters such as Steve Banon who will be chief strategist and senior counsellor to the Trump Presidency.
One also needs to remember that in terms of the popular vote, Hillary Clinton leads Trump by 2.7 million votes. With the votes still being counted, her advantage over Trump in the popular vote already supersedes that of any of the past five candidates who have won the presidential election.
She also seems to be is on track to get more votes than Barack Obama did in 2012 when Obama obtained 65.9 million. As I write, Clinton is only about 400,000 votes behind him. Hence, despite being portrayed by her opponent as being the establishment candidate, she is, paradoxically, a victim of the establishment – a system that hands victory on the basis of a winner taking all the votes of the delegates of a state.
Mainstream parties of the left or the right as well as the government apparatus itself are being caricatured as the source of this sorry state of affairs
Back to Europe - how Austria’s newly elected President Alexander Van der Bellen, former leader of the Green Party, could possibly be described as the establishment candidate is mind boggling to me. Thankfully, Van der Bellen defied all odds and soundly beat far right candidate Norbert Hofer.
Why then, are so many voters turning towards parties and candidates such as Grillo or Trump? Basically, the so-called populists are successfully picking up on all kinds of grievances and using these to undermine the trust people normally have in institutions and in the method of governance. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Mainstream parties of the left or the right as well as the government apparatus itself are being caricatured as the source of this sorry state of affairs.
To be fair, a lot of this is self-inflicted. The mainstream parties sometimes give the impression that they have a divine right to govern, just like the monarchs that used to rule the European states in the Middle Ages. Many politicians find themselves caught out in some wrongdoing that casts a shadow on the entire political class. Others seem to forget that it was the people who voted them in and enjoy flaunting their power and authority and making others feel subservient.
Moreover, over the past decade or two, mainstream parties have adopted a very similar agenda and centre left and centre right are hardly distinguishable from each other, also adopting other ideas that one would not normally associate with their ideological inclination.
I refrain from commenting on local politics; however, what I have just stated is very evident in Malta. Mentioning the local scene, I was amused to see how, following Trump’s victory, our party leaders tried their best to convince us that they do not represent the establishment and that, on the contrary, it is their opponent who does.
Good thing that we have an Archbishop who is turning out to be very anti-establishment in terms of what we had become used to expect from the archbishop during the Mercieca and Cremona episcopates. In so doing, Charles Scicluna is following the lead of Pope Francis whose popularity also stems from the fact that he too has taken upon not only global issues such as poverty and the environment but also the Vatican establishment itself.
Therefore, one has to be careful when speaking about the whole establishment and anti-establishment issue. People are concerned about the state of affairs in their own country and beyond. Many of these concerns are justified, in part at least. Yet mainstream politicians only seem to bother when elections take place and, once in a position of authority, do nothing or hardly anything to address the issues that really bother people.
In so doing, they are undermining the very institutions they are elected or appointed to because people are simply fed up of being taken for a ride time after time. Hence, they are willing to choose others who, till now, have no baggage, and promise to be different.
When people vote for Marine Le Pen next year, they will be telling the mainstream centre left and centre right parties that they are fed up with them. The danger being of course, that although most electors will do so in good faith, Le Pen and people like her have an agenda that is in itself a threat to the very values that the French, for instance, deeply cherish.
Hence, all this discourse about the establishment has more to do with restoring peoples’ faith in politics and in politicians. However, for this to happen, we need a new breed of politicians who can instil such confidence because of the values they represent and because they possess the integrity to do so in a credible manner.