In fhe eurozone we are facing a paradoxical reversal of the very meaning of representative democracy. National governments are judged on the basis of their submission or complicity in the implementation of policies set by the European technocracy.
Democracy is an intriguing topic of political history and philosophy since ancient Greece. With modernity it has become an ordinary heritage of the civil consciousness. Criticism invests its functioning, but not its essence. No one would give up the right to express his view on governments through the exercise of voting rights, with the possibility of changing it. Surely the vote is not the only characteristic of a democratic regime, yet is an essential feature of it.
On the merit of the judgment on a democratic regime many other elements may enter. American democracy proudly stable for over two centuries can be criticized for several aspects including the high rate of inequality or the tendency to open disastrous and seamless war fronts as it happened under George W. Bush presidency. But it remains indisputable that the United States is a democracy, while China under the leadership of a single party is not, despite its economic successes.
The two most important election results of the beginning of this year in the European Union confirm with their opposed outcomes the meaning and the value of a democratic regime. In the UK with a majority vote the Conservative government of David Cameron was confirmed. The opposite occurred in Greece. The Greek electorate resoundingly rejected the conservative government of Samaras, at the origin of a dreadful economic and social catastrophe, choosing Syriza, the radical leftwing party, that pledged to overthrow the austerity policy, that not only had not solve but had awfully aggravated the crisis.
The new-elected government of Alexis Tsipras proposed an alternative line to austerity undertaking the commitment to pay off the exorbitant debt accumulated by the past governments within a reasonable framework of its restructuration, and of a new growth policy that is the condition to repay the debt and, at the same time, to allow the vast majority of the Greek people exit the state of misery and frustration in which it was driven by past governments.
The Greek government did not merely express its intention. It has elaborated the content and the stages of a plan to be submitted to the negotiation with the European institutions. The most recent and detailed presentation dating back to May 7, presented by Janis Varoufakis, the Greek finance minister, can be read in this issue (A Blueprint for Greece’s Recovery within a Consolidating Europe [1] ). Everyone can judge its content, raise doubts and objections, if any. A false narrative is devoted to attack the Greek government for “amateurism” and consider Greece as a Pariah which does not deserve any close and serious discussion..What no one can do is to pretend it does not exist or refuse to open any effective discussion on its content.
Instead, it is just what the eurozone institutions have done. The caste of eurozone’s Brahmins, supported by Berlin, does not accept any effective negotiation with the Greek government, considered an underdog. Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister has been clear in his harshness. The Greek government is not allowed to ask for a re-negotiation of the ruinous engagements in the past signed by the democratically defeated Samaras’s government.
In other words, according to the eurozone autocracy, Alexis Tsipras is not authorized to claim a political change having gained the popular mandate of the Greek electorate. It seems paradoxical, but, according to Mr. Schäuble, national policies are determined once for all by the technocracy in Brussels under the political hegemony of Berlin.
What matters in the eyes of the ruling eurozone’s oligarchy is not the democratic representativeness of a national government, but its submission or complicity in the implementation of policies set by the technocracy that leads the eurozone, far from any political restriction stemming from the popular vote democratically expressed. The fact that a government has been disavowed and sent home by the opposition who gained the elections on the basis of an alternative program seems to be just irrelevant. It is not a stuff of the Greek people to decide on the government and its program.
We are facing a paradoxical reversal of the very meaning of democracy or rather a new model of limited and deformed democracy becoming dominant in the eurozone? The French case points toward the second answer. Francois Hollande won the election in France on the basis of a platform alternative to the politics of Nicolas Sarkozy.
Now we know what happened. Once taken the presidency, Hollande has progressively dismantled the program on which he was elected; He has changed ministers and head of government to adapt them to the demands of Brussels. No surprise if Hollande has become the most unpopular president of the Fifth Republic, allowing the National Front of Marine Le Pen to become the first party, while the rightwing alliance led by Nicolas Sarkozy at the helm of the rightwing alliance is back on the field, cultivating the not unfounded hope of regaining the presidency of the Republic.
We are used to analyze the indisputable economic failures of the eurozone’s policies. It would be wrong underestimate the wounds inflicted to the democratic regimes of a growing number of member states.
The complicity with Brussels of the center-left governments is undermining the representative democracy. We saw in France the rise of right-wing and extreme right parties. In Italy Renzi’s government has been favored by the fragmentation of the Berlusconi’s troupes, while the opposition is led on the leftwing front by Grillo's Five Stars movement, that is the second largest party behind the Democratic Party, and on the extreme right by the renewed Lega the third largest party led by Matteo Salvini politically close to the French Front National.
So, eurozone’s policy hits the representative democracy, while wrecking the traditional leftwing parties, accomplices of the European policies.
In this context, the fierce attitude toward what is deemed the indiscipline of Greek government is not surprising. The European technocratic regime that does not provide for an alternation of programs and governments can not allow for the violation of the principle of the discipline. It behaves as a post-modern neo-empire without monarchy, as written by the New York Times. In this framework Grexit is the hidden favorite solution for a wide majority of eurozone’s governments. Then everything can keep going on as before.
But is it so? Among the reasons for the victory of Cameron there is the commitment to carry out next year a referendum on the adhesion to the European Union. The outcome is uncertain. What is true is that the exit of UK would deeply diminish the role of the European Union in the global economic and political context. On the other side, we are witnessing the enhancement of right and left movements and parties openly hostile to the eurozone.
Greece and Tsipras government reminded us that representative democracy is fragile yet hard to die. The technocratic oligarchies that have seized the eurozone control without any effective democratic consent or in any case with a declining popular support think that they are bound to win their battle either forcing Greece out or obtaining its spectacular humiliation. It could be a miscalculation.
The eurozone can score a victory in the conflict with Greece. But it could be a Pyrrhic victory. Greece has clearly unveiled the attack on the representative democracy coming from the eurozone’s irresponsible technocracy that, supported by the political hegemony of Berlin, has taken over the eurozone’s destiny. After the Greek unresolved conflict nothing will be as before. Europe dangerously oscillates on an earthquake fault with a treat of fracture of the EU on the British side and .over a time more or less long, of a quandary of the eurozone’s self-defeating policy.