Tag: Occupy

On Art and Populism: Is the populist groundswell today an effect of the internet?

Posted on by Rosemary Heather
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Syriza protest Greece

A by country list of popular political movements

27/10 2015 In previous posts I discussed why political populism tends to get dismissed as an unworkable political tendency and why it nonetheless stands as a legitimate response to current political conditions. What results is an apparent stalemate between a desire for change (reactionary and progressive) and the entrenched interests that prevent it from happening. It’s a situation that creates the expanded contemporary moment we find ourselves in, one shot through with equal parts risk and possibility. The populist tendency is regarded with misgiving by the vested interests it is marshalled against. This is of course because it’s hard to find silver bullet solutions to highly complex problems. But it also may be an indicator of “how isolated our elites and their media mouthpieces have become.”

The French political economist Guy Sorman makes a useful distinction between populist tendencies and civil society, which assumes that to be effective the former would have to be absorbed into the latter. He also says all contemporary populist movements share use of social networks on the internet as a means of mobilization and expression. Its an important point perhaps too easily overlooked. Taking into account the way populism’s ability to “galvanize new forms of political engagement”gets intensified by the internet, I put together an expanded list of today’s populist movements. The list includes recent mass movements that are popular but can’t be defined as populist because they lack a definitive leader or political party affiliation. Note that many of the populist tendencies listed below emerged within the last 5 years.

Arab Spring (Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan) Uprisings for democracy that spread across the Arab world in 2011 (in the order listed above). The role social media played in these movements is acknowledged to be significant. Four years on, lack of civil society traditions sees the Arab Spring momentum stalled or moving in reverse, in some cases to catastrophic effect.

Alternative for Germany/AfD Germany’s Tea Party. While initially formed to demand Germany abandon the Euro, the AfD has become increasingly xenophobic. It’s been an apparently successful shift helping “German voters overcome a deeply entrenched taboo against voting for a right-leaning party.”

Bernie Sanders (US – Democrat) The so-called “socialist senator” is galvanizing voters in the US simply because he addresses issues like income inequality and advocates for federal stimulus spending. Building a financial base through small donations, it remains to be seen if he poses a real threat to the“dynastic, seemingly unstoppable Democratic nominee frontrunner”, Hillary Clinton.

Dansk Folkeparti/DF (Denmark) One of the Danish People’s Party’s stated goals is to prevent Denmark from becoming a multiethnic society. Winning 21% of the popular vote in June elections, the DF “once seemed quite extreme but now they’re mainstream” — to the extent that they have pushed Denmark’s political landscape to the right.

Donald Trump (US – Republican) Is Donald Trump’s Rhetoric Distorting Reality? asks a clickbaiting recent headline. The idea has some plausibility if it’s a reality measured in wall-to-wall media coverage backed by a personal fortune counted in the billions. As a populist candidate, Trump is the genuine example of the phenomenon, using xenophobia and bribes to manipulate voter emotion.

English Defence League/EDL Cas Mudde, scholar of the radical right, calls emphasis on the most extreme and photogenic radical right groups “misguided.” While admittedly a fringe tendency, the EDL’s anti-Muslim platform backed by thuggish street protests can be filed under the category of populism that is deleterious to the public order.

Freedom Party of Austria/FPÖ (Austria) Founded in 1955, the far right FPÖ can be included in the anti-migrant wall-building strain of populist tendencies. Although they surged in popularity in October elections, it was not enough to unseat the Social Democrats, Vienna’s governing party since the end of WWII.

Five Star Movement/M5S (Italy) Led by comedian and TV personality, Beppe Grillo, the party first gained electoral success in 2013. Following the recent resignation of Rome’s Mayor, disgraced by an expense scandal, an upcoming election in Rome looks to favor M5S, “now the most popular party among Romans sickened by years of graft and poor public services.”

Finns Party (Finland) Forming part of the country’s ruling coalition after elections in April, the Finns Party is typical of populist parties in Europe, being Eurosceptic and anti-migration. Its platform includes the suggestion that “young women should be persuaded not to study and instead give birth to Finnish babies.”

Forza Italia/FI Founded in 1993 by Silvio Berlusconi, four time Prime Minister of Italy. The centre-right party is the best recent example of cult-of-personality populist politics, aided no doubt by Berlusconi’s personal television empire. Its current state is disarray, populist allegiances having shifted to either comedian Beppe Grillo’s M5S or the Northern League, which calls for independence for the north and an end to the Euro.

National Front (France) Led by Marine Le Pen, daughter of Jean-Marie, the party’s long time leader (1972-2011). Signaling Marine’s more mainstream intentions for the party, the elder Le Pen was in August expelled from the party in the wake of his statement that the Holocaust was “a detail of history” (a view he first expressed in 1987).

Party for Freedom/PVV (The Netherlands) “Mass immigration is leading to the dilution of cultural identity in the European Union member states” wrote the PVV’s Geert Wilders in an opinion editorial in the Wall Street Journal coauthored with France’s Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini of Italy’s Northern League. It’s a show of unity that may belie a more significant weakness, as 2014 European Parliament elections saw a drop in the extremist party’s support at the polls.

Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident/Pegida(Germany) Anti-Islamist protest alliance founded in Dresden in 2014. Leading weekly street protests that have been moderately successful in Germany, “the group’s demonstrations elsewhere in Europe have not witnessed significant participation.” Plans to form a political party look unlikely to go ahead.

Podemos (Spain) With origins in the anti-austerity Indignados series of demonstrations in Spain, Podemos was founded in 2014. Led by the 36 year old academic Pablo Iglesias, Podemos gained in regional elections in May of this year but more recent polls show a softening of support in advance of a general election on December 20th.

Occupy (Global) – Starting in 2011 with the occupation of New York’s Zuccotti Park, the anti-capitalist movement grew to see Occupy-related events staged in 951 cities in 82 countries. In part inspired by the Arab Spring and Indignados movements, in the US Occupy is often described as the left-wing populist counterpart to the right-wing Tea Party. Current activities include activist debt relief.

Syriza (Greece) A snap general election in September gave the left-wing Syriza a decisive victory, bringing some measure of stability to Greece and a mandate for legislation of reforms — at the same they will be doubtless confronting the reality of “what it means for the radical Left to govern in the world of global capital.”

Tea Party (US) – A symptom of ideologic dysfunction within the US Republican Party, the Tea Party movement recently expressed the full force of its nuttiness by forcing John Boehner, the already right-wing Republican Speaker of the House to resign, for not being extremist enough. A movement started in 2009, the Tea Party shares in common with the Arab Spring and Occupy decentralized leadership and lack of a uniform agenda.

UKIP/United Kingdom Independence Party (UK) Founded in 1991, this right-wing, Eurosceptic party started to get traction within the mainstream of British political life in the last two years. Showing the volatile nature of populist politics, the BBC recently reported that party insiders believe UKIP’s future is uncertain; “the party will be over in a few years’ time.”

This is one of ten posts written to accompany the Kunsthalle Wien’s Political Populism exhibition (November 11, 2015 – February 2, 2016).

Rosemary Heather is a freelance writer based in Toronto and Editor-in-Chief of Q&A, an information retail project focusing on interviews.

On Art and Populism: Political Populism – A Fresh Start for the 21st Century

Posted on by Rosemary Heather
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Slavoj Žižek

There are solid reasons why the populist tendency in politics now seems ubiquitous

20/10 2015 A quick formulation for the phenomenon of political populism could be: a tendency that gains in traction to the extent it departs from reality. To flesh this idea out it will be important to define what “reality” stands for in this equation. More of that to come.

First, some laboring of metaphor. Populism allows for a politics of aspiration, cut loose from the anchor of pragmatism. It’s an idea of a polity adrift that assumes eventually it will have to be hauled back to the dock. This means someone like Donald Trump, currently frontrunner by a wide margin in the Republican race for US Presidential nominee, cannot in the real world be the captain of the ship. Or he could be, if he became a different Donald Trump, one whose insalubrious personality and “policy views bordering on gibberish” became subordinate to the time-honored protocols and procedural methods by which the real business of government happens in the US. You see the problem here?

Like an America that cheered raucously for the Pope on his recent visit there, mostly because he represents his own special category of celebrity, the Trump phenomenon exhibits specifically American characteristics of being overblown and pretty much indifferent to the facts. By contrast, recent events in Greece provide a more European example of traits inherent to the populist tendency. In July this year, upon receiving diktats from another pulpit, that of the so-called Troika, for bailout conditions that include ongoing harsh austerity measures, the ruling Syriza party used a referendum to ask the Greek people whether to accept the terms. When the result of the vote was “no” (over 61%), the party promptly turned around and accepted an even harsher deal to secure the Troika’s bailout. “SYRIZA” may be an acronym that stands for Coalition of the Radical Left, but the political party that acts under its name can’t escape the fact of its membership in a transnational economic order, one that supersedes the interests of any one nation state that might benefit from the lifeblood of its own capital. This conflict between the will of the Greek people, succinctly expressed in the July 5th referendum, and the acceptance by its elected leaders of the bailout’s punitive economic measures points to a wider dilemma. In an article in which Slavoj Žižek calls Syriza’s response heroic (because pragmatic), he also writes: “The “contradictions” of Syriza are a mirror image of the “contradictions” of the EU establishment as it gradually undermines the very foundations of a united Europe.”

10-donald-trump-debate.w750.h560.2xDonald Trump

Shifting down to a micro-level, I draw personal anecdote to suggest a parallel between the situations in Greece and the US. A friend in New York, highly regarded by me, recently told me she would consider voting for Trump but never Hillary Clinton because she “takes money from Monsanto.” Throwing caution out the window, I’ll go ahead and say I believe Hillary Clinton, like Barack Obama, are both progressive politicians. Yet to state such a belief is to strain my own standards for credulity because of the degree to which both are in the pocket of corporate interests. Even if Clinton takes money from lobbyists who also work for Monsanto or Exxon this is simply a necessity, a reflection of the massive scale of resources required to run for President in the US (unless you are a billionaire). Taking this into account is not meant to excuse Clinton, but it certainly does provide an example of the “reality” I mentioned earlier. In both countries, legacy political institutions are more or less functioning according to the global standard, and yet remain mired in the “three C’s” of politics when conducted as usual today: complexity, compromise and outright corruption. As Žižek, well-known expert on the topic of the Real, says: “The lesson of the Greek crisis is that Capital, though ultimately a symbolic fiction, is our ultimate reality.”

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Hilary Clinton

If I used nautical metaphors earlier on in this text to evoke the idea of a political moment losing its connection to reality, I’ll revisit the concept but with on-the-ground imagery this time. In a previous post, I spoke about the risk innate to populist politics of the polity straying into “uncharted territory.” What this means is concessions made to the immediatedemands of the voting public as channeled by a populist politician are arguably incompatible with the larger legislative workings of government. Events in Greece provide a very recent example here in that no short term mechanism exists to implement the people’s desire for change expressed by the July 5th referendum. This includes the option of a so-called Grexit, which Zizek points out in a follow up article was in fact “the enemy’s plan.”

By the same token, concerns such as the everyday effects of our era’s massive income disparity lack an obvious democratic remedy within the current system. The politician or political party ready to acknowledge these facts1 will get voter traction, but at the same time be considered not serious candidates by the political establishment. The reason for this is apparently that mainstream political operatives exist simply to function as the respectable face of the economic system that backs them. Against the prevailing sense of deadlock this situation creates, our moment sees many proposed alternatives emerging. If they are in inchoate form, that’s okay. To state merely that an alternative is needed is the first step. This after all would seem to be the gambit made by the Occupy movement, which proposed itself as a model form of direct government. Working in a self-organized fashion and without mediation of a political representative, its gesture was to occupy the ground of the present. If Occupy has moved on to other initiatives, it’s important to recognize that the movement anticipated many of today’s developments, not least the addition of the term 99% to our vernacular. It’s a conceptual tool that may prove decisive in the emerging political landscape to come.

This is one of ten posts written to accompany the Kunsthalle Wien’s Political Populism exhibition (November 11, 2015 – February 2, 2016).

Rosemary Heather is a freelance writer based in Toronto and Editor-in-Chief of Q&A, an information retail project focusing on interviews.

 

1) For instance, the currently surging in the polls, independent US Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. “Sanders was interested less in academic arguments…than in hard numbers that “exemplify the disparities he sees and feels and hears about from people.”