Is Europe in for political quake?

Restructuring external debt is least priority

It took a mere six days for the election victory of the anti-austerity Syriza party in Greece to start ricocheting around Europe like a stray bullet in a concrete bunker. And already the fight between northern Europe’s austerians and their populist opponents to the south takes on a political dimension that could transform Europe. This is an economic confrontation only in part. Debt terms, budget ceilings, privatizations, and the like now emerge as theaters in a larger war. At bottom, Europeans are in a fight over the fate of their democracies and the kind of democracy they want—popular or elite, Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian.

The huge mass of Spaniards that gathered in central Madrid recently may look like a turning point in the months to come. Those interviewed may as well have spoken Greek when they explained to correspondents why they were there. Spain’s weekend demonstration was the strongest manifestation yet for Podemos, the out-of-nowhere left party that is Syriza’s Spanish equivalent. Podemos (“We Can”) put its crowd count at 300,000; the police’s number was a third of that, but either way this was a very big demo. The two parties share a common theme, and this is the key to their significance. Both dwell consistently on the question of dignity and humiliation.

Dignity is a political value. It does not much derive from horse-trading for a better deal with creditor banks, the European Union, and the International Monetary Fund. It comes of wresting power from sequestered domestic elites and distant EU technocrats and returning it to the governed, where it belongs in any variety of democracy.

The truth underlying this too-long-running crisis is this: Entrenched political cliques, often (if not usually) corrupt, and bureaucracies in Brussels and Frankfurt have drastically overplayed their hand in imposing counter-crisis strategies that effectively supersede political rights long beyond question in the industrialized nations. Nobody wins, not even creditors, unless this is corrected.

To drive the point home, consider the Podemos platform, determined last November in a bottom-up process as a social movement transformed into a party. Restructuring external debt is the last of five main planks. The others start with “defence of public education” and run to “defence of public health.” All are questions on which Spanish socialists have compromised to continue trading power with conservative coalitions, as they have since Franco’s death in 1975 returned Spain to democracy.

Podemos, you may recall, burst into the room with an utterly unexpected show of strength in elections to the European parliament last spring; it won 1.25 million votes and took five of Spain’s seats. The momentum has since been astonishing.

True enough, Podemos and its leader, Pablo Iglesias, may prove too inexperienced to govern at this point, as The Economist recently argued, but don’t take this as the end of the story.

By: Patrick Smith