Until recently, two main parties@Eur: a right-of-centre party (Christian Democrat, liberal-conservative, people’s) and a left-of-centre party (socialist, social-democratic); then smaller parties (ecologists, communists).
There is now one predominant centrist party that stands for global capitalism, usually with a liberal cultural agenda (for example, tolerance towards abortion, gay rights, religious and ethnic minorities). Opposing this party is an increasingly strong anti-immigrant populist party which, on its fringes, is accompanied by overtly racist neofascist groups.
PL (Tusk’s christdem lib conserv Civic Platform 42% vs Kaczynski’s national conserv Christian Law & Justice 32, 10/07),
NL (Rutte’s cons lib VVD 21% vs Wilders’ right populist PVV 16 vs Cohen’s socdem PvdA 20, 7/10),
NO (Stoltenberg’s socdem Labour 32% vs Jensen’s populist lib Progress 22 vs Solberg’s lib cons Conservative 14, 9/05) – ale lava vlada,
SW (Sahlin’s SocDem 31% vs Reinfeldt’s lib conserv Moderate Party 31, potom daleko nic, 9/10),
HU (Orban’s conserv christdem national Fidesz 53% vs Vona’s radical nationalist Jobbik 17 vs Mesterhazy’s socdem MSZP 17, potom len pod 10, 4/10)
we are entering a new epoch in which crisis – or, rather, a kind of economic state of emergency, with its attendant need for all sorts of austerity measures (cutting benefits, diminishing health and education services, making jobs more temporary) is permanent. Crisis is becoming a way of life.
After 1990 we entered a new era in which the predominant form of the exercise of state power became a depoliticised expert administration and the co-ordination of interests. The only way to introduce passion into this kind of politics, the only way to actively mobilise people, is through fear: the fear of immigrants, the fear of crime, the fear of godless sexual depravity, the fear of the excessive state (with its burden of high taxation and control), the fear of ecological catastrophe, as well as the fear of harassment (political correctness is the exemplary liberal form of the politics of fear).
What is increasingly emerging as the central human right in late-capitalist societies is the right not to be harassed, which is the right to be kept at a safe distance from others.
The contemporary redefinition of politics as the art of expert administration as politics without politics? This leads us to today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of the Other deprived of its Otherness – the decaffeinated Other.
After righteously rejecting direct populist racism as “unreasonable” and unacceptable for our democratic standards, they endorse “reasonably” racist protective measures: “We grant ourselves permission to applaud African and east European sportsmen, Asian doctors, Indian software programmers. We don’t want to kill anyone, we don’t want to organise any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable violent anti-immigrant defensive measures is to organise a reasonable anti-immigrant protection.” barbarism with a human face. It reveals the regression from the Christian love of one’s neighbour back to the pagan privileging of our tribe versus the barbarian Other.