Prime ministers, presidents and chancellors from across Europe dined in Brussels on Tuesday night and digested the verdict from their respective disenchanted voters. Many arrived as walking wounded, their credibility battered, their reputations bruised, their policies discredited.
French President Francois Hollande led his Socialist Party to a historic defeat on Sunday at the hands of the Front National, a party rooted in racism and anti-Semitism.
British Prime Minister David Cameron arrived as the only Conservative leader to take his party to third place in a national election.
Illustration: Mountain People
Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras traveled to Brussels after being beaten by the young left-wing firebrand Alexis Tsipras and his anti-austerity Syriza movement.
Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who has been tipped for a top EU job, saw her center-left government badly hit by the nationalist anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party.
Presiding over the dinner was European Council President Herman van Rompuy, anxiously wondering about his legacy and who will take over his job later this year.
It will be weeks before the dust settles on the political earthquake that has seen fundamental shifts in British, French, Greek and Danish politics, and wrought big changes in Scandinavia, Ireland, Spain and Italy.
Already attempts are under way to play down the impact of the vote and to belittle the new class of European lawmakers as noisy, rude and extremist, but also fractious and unable to hold together to get their anti-European way.
However, the incoming nationalists, neo-fascists, establishment baiters and hard leftists will make it trickier for the mainstream to push through its legislative agenda on everything from trade pacts with the US to climate change to immigration policy.
Cameron’s free-market reform agenda may also fall victim to a parliament that will be more protectionist, more anti-US and more pro-Russia.
Almost a third of the new parliament, albeit a motley crew, will be broadly or fervently anti-EU. The establishment response is likely to be a Berlin-style grand coalition of mainstream Christian and Social Democrats, ignoring the upstarts and pushing through their “more Europe” agenda.
The problem is that the two big blocs make up a mere 53 percent of the new chamber, down from 61 percent, highlighting the erosion of centrist political appeal and the domination of politics by the center-right and the center-left. At the last election in 2009, the two big Spanish parties took 80 percent between them. On Sunday that collapsed to just under 50 percent.
The other problem with grand coalitions is that when it comes to countering demagoguery and populism, they commonly become part of the problem rather than the solution.
Deals and policies are stitched up behind the scenes, rubber-stamped by safe parliamentary majorities, leaving the only opposition to the anti-elitist movements hammering on closed doors.
The elections exposed how what started as a banking disaster five years ago, then developed into a financial, debt and currency emergency, has come to roost as a political crisis, testing the competence of and confidence in European leadership.
For Germany, the EU powerhouse, the two big causes for concern are the eurozone’s second and third economies, France and Italy.
Both are under the center-left, both are struggling with parallel issues of loss of competitiveness, structural rigidity, high youth unemployment, poor public finances and a seeming inability to reform.
Yet Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi took on the Five-Star insurgents of Beppe Grillo with an avowedly and aggressive pro-European message. He routed them, while Hollande consolidated his reputation as France’s least popular president ever and, for the French elite and the center, led the country to a moment of shame.
With his talk of curbs on immigration, limits on freedom of movement in the EU and benefits tourism, Cameron sought to halt the march of the UK Independence Party. He failed.
Europe’s leaders will issue pieties about the need for growth and jobs, divided about how to get there and looking over their shoulders.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
RSS