Anger? Fury? Disgust? Apathy?
Which word would you choose to describe what the voters in Italeigh have displayed
this week?
(Note to readers on the Planet
Zog: Italy is a country in southern Europe; Eastleigh is a constituency in
southern England. They've both just held elections.)
The wonderful thing about
elections is how powerless they make politicians feel. Suddenly, their fate is
in the hands of people they have no control over -- some of them are stupid,
malevolent, ignorant or plain cussed. It doesn't matter, because they all have
a vote, and, if the election is fairly conducted, every vote counts.
The man with the biggest smile
on his face in Italy this week has been Beppe Grillo, a comedian who heads an
anarchic movement of political novices whose most memorable campaign slogan
translates, very approximately, as: "Kindly depart and have sexual
relations with yourself."
His English counterpart (yes,
I know it's a bit of a stretch) is Nigel Farage of UKIP, not a comedian in the
conventional sense, perhaps, but certainly a man who taps into the same vein of
voter anger that signor Grillo has so successfully identified.
What significant numbers of
voters in Italeigh have in common is a profound sense that conventional
politicians have let them down. They lie, they cheat, they make promises that
they have no intention of keeping -- and, most seriously, they preside over a
collapse in living standards that throws thousands of people out of work and
creates real, palpable misery.
I suggested last September,
after elections in France, Greece and the Netherlands, that European voters had
cast their ballots in a spirit of either anger or fear. In those three
countries in 2012, it seemed as if the fear had overcome the anger -- fear of
the unknown, and therefore fear of voting for parties (the Front National in
France, Syriza in Greece) that might well take them out of the euro and perhaps
even out of the EU.
In Italeigh, on the other
hand, for significant numbers of voters (25 per cent voted for Beppe Grillo's
Five Star Movement in Italy, nearly 28 per cent voted for UKIP in Eastleigh,
the highest parliamentary share in their history), the anger has triumphed. The
message to the major, traditional parties can be simply summarised: "Get
lost." Or in the far more colourful Italian version:
"Vaffanculo."
The last time something
similar happened in Italy, in 1994, after the meltdown of the sclerotic and
deeply corrupt traditional ruling parties, the Christian Democrats and the
Socialists, the new man on the scene was the country's richest and most
colourful business tycoon, a certain Silvio Berlusconi. His campaign slogan,
indeed the name of the party he created, was "Forza Italia", the
Italian football fans' equivalent of "Eng-er-land", which at least
had the merit of being markedly more upbeat than "Go f*** yourself."
As for UKIP, they can now
claim (though they won't, of course) to be the new Lib Dems, the home for the
"dustbin votes", the pox-on-both-your-houses votes, now that the Lib
Dems are joined at the hip to the Tories. Remember those "stunning Lib Dem
by-election upsets" of the past? Stand by for equally stunning UKIP upsets
in the months to come.
I don't understand why anyone
is surprised by what's happened in Italeigh. What does surprise me is how many
voters still support the traditional parties, given the utter balls-up they've
made of dealing with the crisis of the past five years.
And herein lies the danger: if
that stubborn loyalty crumbles, if more voters turn to the populist fringes, we
need only look to Greece to see what ugly political forces start crawling out
of the woodwork when voters lose faith in conventional politics. Gangs of thugs
roaming the streets, hunting for ethnic minorities to beat up; mysterious
attacks on political targets -- Europe knows only too well where that can lead.
So the lesson for Europe's
current leaders is this: start being more honest about the choices you're
making. Tell us we're in a hole and you're doing your best to dig us out of it
-- but admit that you can't be sure it'll work, and you can't be sure how long
it'll take.
Admit there are alternatives:
austerity is a policy option, not an immutable law of physics. As the columnist
Simon Jenkins put it, in a phrase I would dearly love to have come up with
myself: "These [EU] finance ministers are like
Aztec priests at an altar. If the blood sacrifice fails to deliver rain, there
must be more blood."
And one final lesson from Italeigh -- voters don't seem to care a hoot
about politicians' sexual proclivities. Whether it's Silvio Berlusconi's bunga
bunga parties (and remember, he's still facing criminal charges over
allegations that he paid for sex with an underage prostitute), or allegations
of milord Rennard's "inappropriate behaviour", the reaction from
voters seems to be much along the lines of what I was told when I asked
African-American women at a Washington soup kitchen in 1998 what they thought
of President Clinton's behaviour towards the White House intern Monica
Lewinsky.
"He's a man, ain't he?"
