Seeing no change under established parties, many people have taken to protest across Europe. Photo / AP
Seeing no change under established parties, many people have taken to protest across Europe. Photo / AP
Disillusioned European voters turn to outsiders for solutions in cocktail of new parties
Beppe Grillo is the Mr Angry of Italian and, increasingly, of European politics. His 5 Star movement is running second in opinion polls at about 20 per cent behind the modernising centre-left of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's Democratic Centre.
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 normal. Voter volatility, the death of deference, the erosion of party loyalties 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 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.
Since World War II, the continent has craved consensus and stability, 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 system aimed at producing stable, single-party majorities and strong oppositions. But 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.
"Seen from Brussels, the answer is that what Britain needs is a grand coalition. And that, of course, is unthinkable," said a senior EU official.
Legrain points out that traditional class-based politics have been in decline for decades for complex social reasons, voter turnouts have fallen, party memberships have slumped.
In Austria, the centre-left and centre-right now take 50 per cent between them and are in effect in a permanent grand coalition to keep out the extreme right. In Germany, Chancellor 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.
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. Phtoo / AP
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 per cent between them, outflanked by the new, left-wing Yes We Can movement (Podemos) . Podemos is a response to the Spanish crash, political-banking sleaze, the savage austerity imposed by Europe as the price for being bailed out. But its appeal, says Jose Ignacio Torreblanca of the European Council on Foreign Relations in Madrid, lies in its freshness. "Until now, citizens voted and nothing happened ... no one resigned. But now, by simply stating their intention to vote for Podemos many find themselves empowered for the first time."
The shift from two and three-party systems to parliaments of five, six or seven contestants has been 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 have opted for different forms of political expression, NGOs then ad hoc internet-based campaigns: Facebook and Twitter groups, petitions," said Legrain. "Globalisation has eroded the powers of national governments, shifting powers to financial markets and the EU and sparking nationalist backlashes."
"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."
Given the improbability of stable majorities, the elite response is to risk soldiering on with minority governments, as in Sweden and Denmark, or for the two big centrist parties to form "grand coalitions", 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.
EU institutions are viewed by the insurgents as a main element of what's gone wrong - austerity and its flipside, the untouched European super-rich, mass migration, and the remoteness of political elites. No one better personifies that elite than the new head of the European commission, Jean-Claude Juncker - centrist grandee, consummate insider, political fixer.
"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.
