In our latest podcast, our team discusses the weakness of the centre in European politics - and what it should do, but most likely won't.
The Eurointelligence Podcast
The centre is not holding
Welcome to the Euro Intelligence Podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munscher and with me, Azuzan Monjank, and Jack Smith. Today is Friday, the 28th of June, the day after the European Council meeting, which nominated Ozzellifondaline Kayakalas as President of the Commission and High Representative for Foreign Security Policy, respectively, and which voted for Antonia Costa to become the next president of the European Council. George Romelone regards this as a big stitch up and a classic reversion to the centrist coalition in European politics. We have yet to see whether this majority holds. The European Parliament has the final say on the appointments for the Commission, certainly for the Commission President. The discussion we would like to have today is about centrist policies in Europe, about whether it is right for the Centre to do what it did, whether it's a bind millonian, what alternative options would be, arithmetic. There are not many arithmetic alternatives, but there are political alternatives. We would also like to discuss the historical context of populism in Europe. We associate populism with a phenomenon of the right today, but that wasn't always the case. Jack, how do you see these events? Are there majorities available that would be an alternative to what we have right now? I've got to say, looking at both the European Council and European Parliament, it's quite difficult. I think, firstly, we have to say, most of our listeners will probably be aware of this, but for those who aren't, on the European Council, when you try to nominate a president of the European Commission or the other leadership that you have to nominate at this point as part of the Commission, it has to be done by a qualified majority. That qualified majority is based both on a qualified number of countries voting in favour, but most importantly, countries representing a certain proportion of the European Union's population voting in favour. So this is quite a different dynamic from what national governments form when you typically only need a simple majority to form a government. Of course, there are exceptions to this in Italy. It's you need both houses to agree on a government, but that's generally the way that it works. Then you have to say, okay, well, as well as a majority of countries or even more than majority of countries, you also need countries representing at least 65% of the European Union's population. At this point, this is when things start to get difficult, because once you have more than a couple of large member states not supporting the initiative, it becomes very hard to find a way around blocking minorities. The situation that we've gotten into in the Council is one where the SND, so the centre left, will absolutely not work directly with Miloni and the ECR. At that point, this is when it starts to become quite difficult, because you have the SND-led governments in both Germany and Spain. So that's already quite a large proportion of the EU's population. Then as well, Romania is technically represented by somebody from the centre-right EPP as the president, but the reality is that Romania's government is a grand coalition where an SND party holds a larger proportion of the seats in Romania's parliament. So that's another difficulty. Then you have Poland, where the EPP and ECR are actually rivals. So there are all these kind of difficulties there. You would say, okay, well, if you're the other parties, like Renew or the EPP, simply erithmetically, the path of least resistance is working with the centre-left and the SND rather than working with the ECR, because the ECR is only one major country, Italy, and a small one, the Czech Republic. You can find a way around them erithmetically, but it is extremely difficult to find a way around the SND. Similarly, in the parliament, if you were going to try and assemble a coalition of the right, erithmetically, good luck with that. The first issue is that what we kind of call the far-right, or the hard-right, the far-right, the radical-right, there are various valid reasons why political scientists use all of these terms, but so we're talking about the ECR, the ID group, which Marine Le Pen's "Wessomble Nacional" belongs to, then kind of other groups, like you have the I've Day and Victor Orban in there somewhere, but you know, all of these groups at the moment, they kind of can't agree on what time of day it is. They're not all in the same group. There was even a possibility at one point, I'm not sure if it'll come to pass or not, but there was a possibility that the ECR would split it. Yeah, that underlies major policy differences between all of these parties and major differences in their attitude to the European Union. It's also very difficult to form any kind of governing group on the right. So it's erithmetically, it's in a very difficult position. Politically speaking, I think at least if you compare it to what's going on at the national level, you would find it impossible to find a coherent majority anywhere in this type of setup. Including the center, the center has a nominal majority if you do headcounts, but we will see how strong that majority is. I hear some people saying the rise of the far-righted France in particular is focusing lines. It might lead to more voting discipline among centrist parties. There's something we will see. Sorry, I just wanted to say one of the thing here, which this is maybe something that a lot of people might not know, which is that the vote to confirm the European Commission president in the European Parliament takes place via a secret ballot, which is to say that we do not definitively know how each MEP votes. This is important for understanding why parties might want an extra big majority as opposed to just a majority, because you always have the possibility that MEPs will decide in the secrecy of the voting booth that they really do not feel like supporting their political groups chosen candidate. I think the scenario that you described, the difficulty of forming coalitions, especially if you consider the interlocking national majorities. I mean, Melania is clearly not somebody. Social Democrats want to work with including Italian socialists for whom they are. She is the main opponent. And the combination of arithmetic and the European Parliament makes it virtually impossible to form coalitions. So the EU needs to find form of governance that are very different from that of national coalition building, and the way this all-encompassing coalition procedure works in Europe. I think we're kind of stuck in right now. There are not many good and clear options going forward. I have a bit more to say about this, about what they should do. You've been writing about France and the French elections are clearly in the background of most people thinking at the moment about the rise of the far right, what the far right can do. Do you think it is effective that parties of the centre and the left form effective coalitions against the right? In the case of France, it really depends on the constituencies, whether or not you, it's all about the second round effect. So if you have any races where you have the far right opposing either the left or the centrist, the question is then the other side, whether it's kind of more evident that the centrist probably would support a socialist or a Queen Coneydads or people from the left that they find comfortable with. And the other way around, one of those things why the left is actually becoming so popular is when they argue in Manoue M.A. Cor, you came to power with the mandate that you could block the rise of the far right. Look what happened under your presidency. Never before, though it was the far right rising to such a highest extent. They won the last legislative elections at least in terms of most votes as a party, not as an alliance, but as a party. And they won the European elections with such a wide margin. And now they're here about to get an absolute majority potentially in the next legislative elections. So for the left, Manoue M.A. Cor didn't do the job. So if that's what they are about, then you could say that there is a strategic alliance in the sense that whoever is in this second round would support the other in order to block the RN. However, that's perhaps true for 100 constituencies. The rest is much more ambivalent. There will be a constituency. So where we have three candidates in the second round, and then you actually can't really move and strategically as you could, the votes will go to the ones who can get most of the votes. And possibly, therefore, reinforcing the far right end. The others, it's depending on alliances and other alliances with independence over a European become who actually split on this issue. There are some who are having an alliance with an independence party, and there are others who really don't want to actually stay independent as a potential candidate and ally also for the centrist. What is clear now, this idea that the center has this gravitational force as it used to have, and also that was the whole idea behind Emmanuel Macron's revolution that he does the revolution from the center. Man is dead. It's actually has the opposite effect. The forces go now out of the center towards the polar opposites, which is partly explained to the context of higher insecurity. However, higher uncertainty, people feel much more uncertain about their own future, about their security that sort of brings up these fierce scenarios that pushes a much more violent reaction from voters, and therefore also seeking an expression in the parties and what they have to offer. The original big sort of centrist revolutionary was Bill Clinton. I remember being in Washington at the time when Clinton became president, and it was an astonishing period of renovation. Americans had 12 years of Republican rule. It became stale the last year or so of George Bush Sr. It was not a bad president, and even Clinton didn't say he was a bad president, but there was a sort of a staleness about the Republican rule at the end of the period, and there was a lot of relief when a centrist modernizer came to power. By and large, the Clinton presidency, I would say, was a successful presidency. It was probably one of the most successful presidency in modern times in the United States. In terms of all the things that Americans frequently say that they want from their both parties, say that they want from their president, somebody who is strong overseas balances the budget, all that stuff, secures economic growth, Clinton ticked every box. But why do the centrists of modern times fail when the same parties succeeded 20, 30 years ago? Was it different circumstances? Was it the illusion of the victory of capitalism, of a communism that the, you know, the end of history, euphoria of that period? Or is there some substantive shift between then and today? First, they add to that before trying to answer the question. It's also worth saying that this wasn't unique to the United States either. In both, to a certain extent, this happened in Italy too. We can park Italy for a bit, because that's a bit more complicated. But in the United Kingdom and Germany, you also had basically populists of the center come up, and these were figures of the third way. Gerhard Schroider and Tony Blair were both very much populists in their own way, maybe not in the classic sense of creating all these us versus them dichotomies and stuff, even though they did do that, because that's just some would argue a fundamental feature of politics. But they, they, they were very much trying to govern from the center. And I think with Clinton, as well as with Blair and Schroider, part of the central message was, we care less about ideology, and we care more about you, which means that we care about things that work. For a while, as you rightly say Wolfgang, this did work. Like Schroider managed to pretty much revive Germany's industrial model after the difficulties that Germany faced following reunification. And Tony Blair presided over the strongest period of economic and productivity growth, as well as investment in the social system that the United Kingdom had seen in the postwar period. For all of these leaders, they were extraordinarily successful, I think just in those terms. Certainly, I think one thing that has happened since, of course, is that all of these people were in charge before the 2008 financial crisis. I think to a certain extent, there was a kind of fortuitousness of circumstances that they fell into in this period, which no longer lasted after 2008. There was a sense that the system was fundamentally more fragile. Plus, of course, the process of bailing out financial institutions meant that countries had hired debt burdens to take in the 2010s, then you had the Euro sovereign debt crisis and so on and so forth. I think, though, another thing is, and this, I think, is also an issue that Macron is facing, is that no matter what you do, over time, an anti-encompancy effect starts to set in. You can never make everybody happy, and eventually, people's grievances will pile up, and that's just a kind of natural cycle of the way that things are in politics, especially in democratic politics. If you kind of basically try to neutralize both the center left and the center right by saying, "You know what? We will bring everybody together, and we will create a new movement," then naturally, your opposition starts to become the extreme. People outside of that kind of centrist consensus. The other thing, too, is that, I mean, this is a point that people might disagree on. I don't think that anybody governing ever doesn't have an ideology. I think we all kind of have some sort of ideology, whether it's implicit or explicit. It's a bit difficult when you come out and say, "Okay, I don't have an ideology, and I'm going to govern without one." In fact, you kind of implicitly do. This, I think, has become clearer to voters over time as well. It used to be big ideologies. We talked about big ideologies during the Cold War, but now we have these small ideologies, like fragmented little belief systems. We can actually be adhering to socialist as well as far-right ideologies on different points, so it's this mix mix that also then results in a very broad offering from the far-right of those offer more sort of socialist versions of it and others, more liberal versions of it, but what they have in common is something. I think that happened also, and after 9/11, that people feel vulnerable or much more vulnerable in their own country. We've seen that also in France, that one of the reasons why voters, for example, female voters turn increasingly towards and the [inaudible] is this promise of more security. For them, security matters more nowadays that they see over the media reports of stabbing or reports of rape, reports of cruelty that happens in their own societies where they feel much more vulnerable, and also knowing that Marine Le Pen herself was a strong woman who even ousted her own father from the party. That is a very strong narrative of a powerful woman who can show a man the door out. So it's a very strong narrative here. In terms of 9/11, what it brought out, it definitely was one of the beginnings in then terms of the recurring themes of our own vulnerabilities, and now we have these wars on Ukraine. We have a war in Gaza. We have the potential of more refugees coming to our countries to come into the European borders. The promise of artificial intelligence that it could replace certain jobs has not been even digested by the next generation. So the cost of housing and inflation also pressures on the economic situation for many of the young people. So there is a lot of uncertainty economically, and also in terms of personal security. It sort of is on the people's minds and that may actually express itself much more violently or seeks a much stronger and robust response rather than what used to be the pragmatic approach from the center. You mentioned 9/11. On the economy side, the equivalent seminal event was the financial crisis, and I think one factor that has played a role in the weakness of the center is that it didn't find a coherent response to the number of economic shifts that have taken place since then. The weakness of sovereign debt is obviously one factor, but it's not the big underlying one. The bigger ones are de-globalization, de-industrialization, the challenge of new technologies. There are so many changes that are affecting our economy, so much so that even central bankers no longer understand how the economy works, how inflation is generated. There are so many uncertainties in the structure of the changes to the structure of the way the economy works, that politicians feel it's a very tough job to say what do we need to do for the economy, even if you didn't have the obstacle of democratic majorities, you would still struggle to actually come up with a solution to what it takes to reverse the declining productivity trend, which is something that we all accept America, United States, have in common. We all suffer from declining productivity. Italy was first, UK came second. Germany has had declining productivity since 2017. It looks like France has now caught the buck. We all have that in common, but there isn't even a debate about this. You know what voters will not in an election ever talk about productivity decline. This is very much a technical abstract technical discussion, but ultimately this is what it is about because it means less profits for companies. It means fewer jobs created. It means an economy that generates less income for our social models. While today the effect is no longer unemployment. It used to be the bane of the working classes. Today, the problem comes in terms of loss purchasing power, loss of benefits, loss of opportunities. In that scenario, the way I look at this political opposition is not that they are shifting to the right, because in the UK they're shifting to the left. They're shifting to whoever is in opposition. We've seen this in Italy where it started, where the electors shifted between all the parties at some point. It was just the terms and office became shorter and shorter. It was an average two years. We may find this in the UK, which had very long runs of government, that you may find after 14 years of tourism, 13 years before with labor, that we might just have four-year parliaments as we had in Italy, like even shorter terms when people don't get the majority that we're getting these flip-flops. I expect that to happen in Germany. I think the SPD will lose its leadership. It is the result of a failure to address these issues. This search process can go on for a fairly long time. It will eventually, I suspect, will eventually emerge. That could be someone on the right, but it could be someone from the left to the center. But what we're seeing now, and I think that is my concern, that the center doesn't have it, that the centrist revolution, the one we had, that you mentioned is on Macron, that was a centrist revolution that failed. It had failed politically. I think that Macron has made many mistakes. I think he appears increasingly delusional about himself, about his powers, about his popularity. He makes big misjudgments. I agree with you, Jack. After seven years, people become more skeptical of any incumbent. But I have to say that player after seven years was still relatively popular. Clinton after eight years was still very popular. After winning the 2005 German election, he did. That was after seven years. They all hit their point of unpopularity before. I'm sure it became unpopular briefly in the middle, after five years. But in 2007, he was popular again. I don't see any more. Just a couple of things here. One of them, firstly, on Macron is interesting, because he's kind of, I think, as well. Just aside from his distance, he's sort of another—I'm not sure if I call him a populist or not, but he's another breed of this kind of centrist figure. But almost, I think he's quite a different one. My interpretation of Macron has always been that he's almost a bit of a kind of true adherent of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The idea, I think, implicitly, that Macron very strongly has is that there is some sort of rational general will. And the best thing that Macron can do is appeal to it. He loves making all of these big, long speeches to the French people. This is, I think, part of the rationale behind going to the electorate and things like this. I remember in the Gilegé zone, his response to it was to basically go around and debate with as many people as he could humanly find. I think Macron very strongly, inherently believes in this idea that the Polish, the people, they're reasonable. And if only he could just convince them, sit them down and persuade them, that's how things could happen. Of course, this isn't really how things can happen, but I think that's the idea kind of animating Macron and part of the reason why he decided to go back to the French people for this legislative election. Coming back to the financial crisis, firstly, I do think that there are definite parallels between the financial crisis in 9/11. And I think one of them, which is, I think, led to the souring of this mood towards these centrist leaders, is the idea that they revealed, I guess you could say, potential problems or insecurities that were inherent within the system. It was almost like almost not really external threats, but threats that came from within our way of life, our society, our economies themselves, which is to say, 9/11, of course, we're not police states, right? We're open societies. But then it became the issue of, okay, but do we allow people to take advantage of that and stay terror attacks that could compromise people's security? And then, of course, afterwards, the question after the passage of the Patriot Act, after all of these different, say, later on, the NSA scandals and Edward Snowden and stuff, the question became, okay, well, what's the balance of liberty and security? Is there a point where we become so obsessed with dealing with this threat that we actually start to lose our identity as liberal democratic societies? And that was the kind of tension, like, within liberal democracy, does it sow the seeds of its own destruction in that way? And then with the financial crisis, the insecurity was basically inherently within the financial system itself, that we had kind of created this entire complex web of financial architecture that almost nobody could understand anymore. There was always the potential for some risk within the system. And because you just had this potential for some risk within the system, it became very easy for it to become paralyzed. And also that the only way we fixed it was ultimately to reward those who benefited the most in the free crisis era. Oh, I think that was what upset people about disasters, right, with bailing up at banks. And it was, yeah, absolutely. And the QE by the central banks, the distortion the effect it had on incomes, the income distribution is so extreme now, to an extent that even measures that we use in economics, like GDP per head, that these become much more questionable today with, you know, 1% of the population, you know, Elon Musk gets an annual pay award of like 50 billion. If that happens, then these measures become absurd. But people will find it profound in justice because, you know, 50 billion would actually, this is rare that an individual's income could actually solve a lot of social problems. We normally always took the view that doesn't matter, the rich don't matter, because even if you text them to death, the text revenues would really not make much difference. But that's different today. And you have people who are so wealthy that their wealth corresponds to the GDP of states. Then we're talking about very different scenarios and it's perfectly understandable that people conclude, especially people who are worse often, we are conclude that the system is working for us anymore. And while I don't think they believe necessarily that the far right has an answer, and I don't believe the far right has any answers at all, and to receive the spectacle of them splitting at the moment of a relatively petty, your petty nationalist issues. There isn't an agenda. And I doubt very much that any of the far right party will succeed. But eventually, probably someone will come who has an idea. I'm not convinced that this person will come from the center. That's why this sort of is all my nervousness about the situation. My question is, I agree with you reading that the fact that we haven't actually sorted out the financial crisis or interested in any serious ways is coming to haunt us now in these elections. And that's why also explaining why the left and France is actually also a popular and with its request of addressing these inequalities and the injustices as well in the society. I mean, these are undeniable. And as long as these injustices are actually increasing, we will have always a party. So we will be able to campaign and vote for it. But the other question is, I have with this flip-flopping this system that we have now, with on the national level, where we have ground coalitions, smaller coalitions, three, four, five parties coalitions, or governing with confidence and supply agreement in parliament. So no more clear cuts are out right majorities, as the Ras'on de Ummal National Steel dreams of getting in the next financial elections. But if that's no longer reality in most, or EU countries, is it not then that the EU electoral system, it's no longer fit for purpose? I mean, it's not meant to have this, there is an inherent stability then, if the member states and their parties who are in government who will select the members who select the top jobs, who then actually are threatened to be voted out a year later or two years later, then you could always say, why should he get the top job if he's out of office anyway or expected to be out of office anyway? I mean, which is the case in German, given the numbers, it's very unlikely that all of Scholz will survive or be part of the next government. That's a question I want to ask, this instability on the national level, how does this feed through into the European system? Yeah, I agree. The national instability is clearly the source of the problems. I mean, Jack in his initial comment, he explained to a great deal that the Germans and the Spanish socialists, they don't want to compete with the far right. So once you have all these national firewalls included, you haven't got a coalition left. And that's the problem for the EU. That used to be different. The system was based on the bipartisan agenda. I see the source very much in national politics, which is why I think European politics will need to reinvent itself in different ways. My personal view is that European politics would need to reinvent itself by being focused on few issues that are not as politically divisive. I would not do things for which the EU has no budget, so I would not touch defense. I would also de-emphasize foreign policy because I don't think the EU is very effective. As a foreign policy player and much more likely to disappoint people, I would focus on two or three issues, especially on innovation and on productivity growth and trying to address some of the root causes that lead to dissatisfaction in political and in political life. But that's not what's happening. The Ursula Fonda lines very much a person who is very active, who wants to expand the EU into many areas. But she doesn't have to budget for any of these things. So it will be a very superficial agenda. And the EU has long lost the focus on the things that need to be done. It's trade policies, it's commercial policies. It's also a neighborhood policy. You have to think about instability on the neighborhood. I was just going to say a couple of things here. Firstly, coming back on to the point you were making about a perception of inequality in France. I think what's going on in France at the moment is actually a really interesting example of how your perceptions of inequality can be quite different depending on where in a country you are and how that can influence your voting behavior. If you're out in the suburbs or the countryside, I think the idea of inequality that you might have, at least from my impression living here in France, is that it's like geographic. You see yourself as kind of look down on or left behind relative to the city. You go to the city, you see things that work well, you see all these riches around you. And then you wonder, well, why am I living in this area that's neglected in comparison to this, right? Or you see it on TV, conversely, you see inner city suburbs as super dangerous places with all of these difficult areas and stuff. So that's one thing. And then if you kind of look at a voting map of France, a lot of the far rights support comes from these kind of again suburban and rural areas. I think if you actually live in one of these urban areas, you actually start to perceive this not so much as geographic, but almost more, I guess kind of fundamentally class center, which is to say that you can be relatively well off and living in a big city, but you will come across people who are much wealthier than you on a regular basis. You could be the merely well off, you would be very well off if you lived in a kind of more suburban or rural area, but you are living pretty much cheek and jowl with people who are absurdly wealthy. It reminds me of back in the 19th century what Victor Hugo was writing of the Lille in northern France, that it was a city where the wealthy merchant classes led live next to the kind of downtrodden industrial poor. Similarly then, in big cities, you also see people who are so destitute, they have almost nothing. People who were kind of homeless or they're kind of asylum seekers who were stuck in limbo and stuff like that. So I think it gives you a very different perception of inequality, and this changes your voting behavior too. Coming back onto the EU, I think as well, there are some kind of institutional issues. One of them, of course, is that the EU is both, I guess you could say, an intergovernmental and supernational structure that are grafted together. The intergovernmental part of that makes this up government opposition dynamic quite difficult. The fact that you do need these super majorities in the council. When has one side of the political spectrum, how often do they ever get super majorities in a national and a national level, let alone the EU level? And the second thing which comes back to the parliament is that the parliamentary groups that we all talk about, they're composed of a bunch of different national political parties. And in those national political parties, what you tend to find is that the national party's leadership has a lot of control and preeminence over the people who sit in the European parliament. The European elections work on party list systems, and ultimately it's the party's leadership who might sit back in their national capitals who kind of at the end decide on the party lists. So these guys are really the ones kind of almost like fundamentally in control of who goes where, and therefore fundamentally more in control of the agenda. I mean, this isn't to say that you don't have independent-minded MEPs, you certainly do. But it is to say that the national parties very much hold the whip hand in this entire system. And I think that's part of the difficulty there. Well, in that sense, I recall the German constitutional court, I think it was the Lisbon ruling, I have to check this in detail, but I think it was the Lisbon ruling where it's declared the European parliament not to be a proper parliament for exactly those reasons. That it doesn't behave like parliament does, it doesn't behave. The allegiances of the individual members are to their parties back at home not to their groups in the European parliament. And there are fundamental differences that would also then suggest that the political system of the EU has to work differently from that of member states. It means that we cannot form coalitions, you cannot run with narrow majorities against others, because these are illusionary majorities and practical life. And when it comes to legislation, those majorities will not hold together. There may well be other majorities or no majorities. So I believe that the consequence that you should draw from this is to seek a wider majority for a narrow agenda. While there's no way to co-op the far left and the far right into anything uncommon, there are agendas that may, that you may co-op maloney into and that you may co-op some others into that do not constitute a formal coalition. I think the problem, the impasse, we have, the one that you described Jack, is very much of the kind that everybody thinks in terms of coalitions. It would have been much more useful to think in terms of, given the vote, what can we do in the next five years? What are the three or four things we can agree to do? And then we should have had a discussion about that and then see whether we could have achieved a consensus in the European Council. That would have been a much more constructive way and would have not have left to a situation where Maloney is really, I think she's really no longer part of the running of the EU and she's, I think, rightly so concluded that she's probably better off at the moment resisting it and paying off and playing sort of a more sort of victory or one type role with the EU with holding support rather than retoing anything but withholding support and seeing what deals she can get. She will obviously become much more transactional than this in her relationship with the EU as all one has. There's a purely transactional relationship. There's nothing else left and that's not good for the EU. So that would have been my suggestion is, you know, focus not on the jobs first, focus on the three or four agenda points that you can do. And I think that there are things that probably could have agreed on. We may disagree on immigration, we may disagree on equality and all these big issues that we cannot address in any case at the EU level. So let's focus on the few things that we can address at the EU level, whether you actually has a role to play and that's so surely trade policy is one of them. Competition policy, industrial policies, these things matter to the future of the EU and I would have preferred a narrow agenda. Yeah, I mean, certainly I would have positioned a big gun with what we wanted to do rather than who we wanted to be with. Classic, classic European response. On that note, we'll call it a day. Next week, we will be back with our views on the first round on the French elections and on that note, thank you for listening until next week.