The traditionally pragmatic UK hurtles towards a Brexit deal no one likes, while a majority of voters now seem to favour Remain. Those old foes, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, find they need each other in November’s US midterm elections. In Malta, a budget is passed that takes for granted a rate of labour immigration and population growth that, increasingly, disturbs even Labour. What witchcraft is this?
It’s not old-fashioned politics. It’s new-fangled fatalism.
Despite the UK majority in favour of Remain (so say the polls), no political party is committed to stopping Brexit (apart from the politically irrelevant Liberal Democrats). The UK Labour Party is committed only to remaining in a customs union.
It’s like no one knows a way to avoid Brexit that wouldn’t plunge them into the unknown. Brexit could plunge the UK into long economic difficulty. But those kinds of troubles have been encountered before. Ignoring a referendum result has not. Better the devil you know.
The new-found friendship between Trump and Cruz might smack of opportunism as old as their profession. But it goes beyond that. Like Cruz, there are many other ideological social and fiscal conservatives who have decided to swallow their principles and ally themselves with Trump.
Yes, it’s because they need him electorally. And Trump needs them not to get impeached. But the reason they need each other is that, it turns out, neither is confident that their judgments represent those ordinary people would make.
The professional Republican politicians, in particular, seem to have lost their nerve. Like their Democrat counterparts – themselves under threat from a populist insurgency run by newcomers within their own party – they are no longer so sure about how to read the voters they claim to represent.
Why take their party down a route where it would divide against itself? When letting go of Trump might see a Democrat elected with the same economic agenda? When it might lead you to lose your seat? Better the devil you know.
Malta’s Labour is in the most self-confident position it’s been in decades. It has just passed the kind of budget that, it confidently hopes, will bury its old reputation for economic mismanagement.
But its old economic reputation was also about being anti-inflation. Now, Labour’s own policies are associated with housing prices going through the roof and increasing social insecurity and precariousness. It’s only the international criticism of Joseph Muscat’s government that has prevented internal party criticism from being less muted.
Knowingly pressing the brakes, gently but firmly, is not seen as an alternative. Its consequences could set off a negative chain reaction. They are unknown
It’s not as though Labour’s economic decision-makers are not aware of the salience of the criticisms. But they don’t know the consequences of the alternatives.
They know that continuing to press only the economic accelerator cannot end well. But they hope it will not end – that they can be agile enough to spin around the corners – or that it will not end while they’re in the driving seat.
Knowingly pressing the brakes, gently but firmly, is not seen as an alternative. Its consequences could set off a negative chain reaction. They are unknown. Even Labour, reigning over all it sees, is in this sense suffering from loss of nerve.
Better the devils we do know – unaffordable housing, growing inequality, overstretched schools, a deterioration in several markers of quality of life – even if they are legion.
Behind all this fatalism and these losses of nerve lie many factors but two deserve to be highlighted.
First, shifting voting preferences in the UK and the US are not being driven significantly by people changing their minds on how they voted.
Some people do regret voting for Brexit or for Trump. But the sands are shifting because previous abstainers are changing their minds about the wisdom of not having voted. And most are breaking out respectively in favour of Remain or against Trump.
Labour’s domination of the Maltese political scene is seeing no net negative shift, but it too knows that its current lead in the polls depends on abstainers, who are more likely to break out against it should they decide to vote.
In the UK, this fact means that the bedrock preferences that led to the Brexit referendum result remain. In 2016, the vote had split across party political lines. Age and education levels were far stronger predictors of how the vote would be cast.
Second, the fatalism also needs to be explained by the fact that the politicians know there is no turning back the clock. Stopping Brexit would not necessarily return the UK to a pre-Brexit EU membership.
The other EU states, long resentful of the UK’s opt-outs and privileges and scepticism, might well drive a hard Remain bargain. Remain represents uncertainty as well.
Likewise, the US cannot rewind to pre-Trump days – not on immigration or on economic nationalism. At least not until his policies are seen to fail.
Nor can Malta simply rewind to low skyline, pre-rental boom days. Too many ordinary people have been coopted into that economic strategy. Rewinding is as uncertain an economic strategy as pressing the accelerator is.
And so the politicians, in each country, having foisted a short menu of risky choices on their respective electorates, now find themselves havingto choose between two forms of recklessness.
They can choose economic risk, even if it seems reckless, but not wreck their political parties at the next general election. If things really do go badly economically, at least the sovereign people would have had its choice respected.
Or they can address the structural challenges and attempt to change course, but risk being politically reckless.
Guess what the politicians will choose. We like to say economics trumps politics. Not in our uncertain times, when political realism trumps economic realism in every case.
That’s the price of many decades of peace. We know fewer political demons than economic devils.
ranierfsadni@europe.com
This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece