In the past year, we have seen countless memes of blundering politicians. These videos, photos, images and written parodies were often top-level entertainment and helped us through the hardship of corona, which is lasting longer in Europe than in many other places. Martin de Jong wonders if there is a darker side to this fun and whether the dismal picture they draw of key politicians in liberal-democratic Europe is not actually revealing of how much we are in need of a quantum leap in the quality of our leadership.
Who is afraid of green, orange and red?
Jaap Wagelaar was my all-time favorite secondary school teacher. He gave me a 10/10 for my oral Dutch literature exam, taught psychoanalysis during grammar class, astounded pupils with odd puppet show performances during lunch breaks and sadly ended his career with a burn-out. Few students and fellow teachers understood him. But since I trusted his judgment like nobody else’s, I once asked him why Piet Paaltjens and Gerard Reve, both canonized Dutch literary figures albeit of very divergent genres, could occasionally be kind or ironic but were more often rather cynical, cold and heartless. The response he gave has stuck with me ever since: cynical people are in fact the most emotional ones. Because of their sentimentality they are unable to handle injustice and feel forced to build up a self-protective screen against painful emotions called cynicism. Irony is mild, harmless and green. Sarcasm is biting and represents an orange traffic light. And the color of cynicism is deep red, with the shape of a grim scar that hides a hurt soul. They are all equally beautiful.
A tragicomedy of errors
These words again came to my mind when thinking back on the dozens of ironic, sarcastic and cynical memes about underperforming politicians and policy scandals disseminated over the past year. Who has not seen the image of Donald Trump walking through a desolate, scorched forest mumbling to himself: ‘My work here is almost done’? Who has not read the scathing reports of Flemish Ministers Bart Somers and Hilde Crevits escaping from a window aided by an unidentified third person after a meeting of the Council of Ministers to avoid critical journalists with the defense that they urgently needed to go on holiday and windows are faster than doors? Who has not come across the video announcement for a fictitious thriller called Angstra Zeneca with Dutch Health Minister Hugo de Jonge exclaiming ‘ik heb er zo’n kankerbende van gemaakt’ (I have made it all a cancerous mess) with a grimace stretching from ear to ear? And who has missed the most recent true story tragicomedy played by Charles Michel, male President of the European Council, and Ursula von der Leyen, female President of the European Commission, who had jointly been invited by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to discuss the position of women in Turkey? Unfortunately, they were only offered one chair for two people, which was symbolically occupied by Michel who left Von der Leyen standing awkwardly for a while. She ended up settling for a place on the comfortable sofa reserved for second rank guests. It was damned easy to get addicted to these countless videos, photos, images and written parodies. Oh, did we have fun with them! Some were ironic, some sarcastic and others cynical, but they jointly sketch a disconcerting image of the quality and reputation of key politicians in liberal Western democracies. At first sight one may be tempted to find all this a harmless or even wholesome practice. We citizens of the free Western world do not put our political figures on a pedestal. We have freedom of expression. We are not afraid of being punished for poking fun at our leaders and powerbrokers. Try this in Turkey, Russia or China!
A comitragedy of errors
Granted, but they hide a painful truth lying underneath: our European politicians are shockingly mediocre. And yet, they will often get away with their repeated failures provided their apologies are profuse enough and the smiles on their faces emphatic enough. Is it true, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, that refusing to tell the truth is not lying? Should we believe you when you claim that your consistently patchy memories about embarrassing or unlawful events occurring inside bureaucracies do not necessarily imply brain damage? How understanding should citizens in Belfast be, when they see the flames of their religious strife and violence flare up again due to Boris Johnson’s Brexit bravado mixed with complete apathy towards awkward customs barriers, or by Ursula von der Leyen’s insidious border-closing actions of which the Northern Irish were the primary but non-consulted victims? Should we be cheering for Italy’s hard-won European monies to handle post-COVID economic distress if mafia experts explain in public that Calabrese ‘Ndrangheta is already eagerly awaiting the exciting business opportunities emerging from these billions of Euros and busy currying political support to engage in lucrative public-private ventures? Was it a clever idea for Holland, Belgium and Germany to adopt evening curfews with the argument that these should be helpful to prevent further infections, when it was already known that France had even stricter measures of this type in place and the evidence indicated that the effects were, if anything, counter-productive? We still remember vividly how this unprecedented policy innovation was greeted with enthusiasm by the targeted youngsters. At the time of writing, France has the highest daily infection rate, followed by the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany in approximately that order.
And last but not least, what should we make of the incident management following reports of a tiny number of lethal thrombosis cases in Europe and North America? European politicians’ hunger for zero-risk vaccination has driven them to suspend and eventually abandon scheduled vaccination programs with AstraZeneca and Janssen’s, causing massive interruptions and thus unpredictable and uncontrollable delays. The confidence in the reliability of AZ has already plummeted and that of Janssen’s is bound to follow suit. However, as virologist and Erasmus MC comadre Marion Koopmans has verified in the medical checkbooks, the probability of this lethal vaccination mishap occurring is roughly halfway between contracting rabies after a serious dog bite and being struck by lightning. Moreover, thrombosis can also be a side-effect of contracting COVID-19 itself and that chance is far higher.
Race to the bottom
Would we not want our leadership to have oversight, practical sense, cool-headedness, scientific understanding and an open ear to experts from a variety of disciplines when making policy tradeoffs with enormous consequences? The Netherlands were absolute last in Europe in beginning their vaccination program early this year. When, in January 2021, Health Minister Hugo de Jonge had to defend himself against allegations of complacency his laconic response was: ‘This is not a race’. While Benjamin Netanyahu and Boris Johnson had struck early creative deals with pharmaceutical companies for fast and secure deliveries, hired specially qualified people to run the vaccination programs and emptied huge halls or set up enormous tents to process citizen inoculation at top speed, most European countries addressed the crisis largely by following business-as-usual procedures for administering anti-COVID-19 jabs through the regular medical channels. Few of them are likely to fully open their societies and economies before the summer. Most Asian countries had dealt with the virus pro-actively by taking it seriously up-front and managed to return to normal life (except international travel for obvious reasons) by late 2020. Vaccination powerhouses Israel, United Arab Emirates, UK and US will reach that stage by spring 2021 (barring the possibility that new Brazilian or Indian variants will soon cut through that shield of protection). And European countries? They can apparently afford the luxury of testing their citizens’ patience several months more and indulging in the idea of being the last to cross the finishing line. For the time being they can content themselves with the idea of keeping policies in place to ‘contain the spread’ as they have already unsuccessfully done since the very beginning of the epidemic in March 2020. But gentle public excuses and irresistible smiles from men wearing red shoes make extreme mediocrity in decision-making far more palatable, do they not?
No, they do not. At least not in the long run.
Democratic city walls under populist siege: the people versus the people
One may be forgiven for not having noticed this, but in the past 25 years the size of populist parties across various European parliaments has roughly doubled. I realized this while reading Pieter-Andre Taguieff’s L’illusion populiste; essai sur les démagogies de l’âge démocratique (the populist illusion; essay on the demagogueries of the democratic age), which is still a standard work on the topic although its first edition was early as 2002. He spotted a clear revival of populism in Europe’s electoral systems from the 1990s on. Populist leaders addressed contentious issues such as immigration, integration, national identity and lack of responsiveness among mainstream politicians to citizen demands. Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands, Filip Dewinter in Flanders, Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Silvio Berlusconi, Gianfranco Fini and Umberto Bossi in Italy all had their days of glory. Taguieff emphasizes that ‘populism’ and ‘demagoguery’ were originally derogatory terms used by their opponents for the purpose of vilification, but that these terms have become so ingrained that they had better be adopted as academic concepts – defined and explained. Moreover, it has always been attractive to mock conspiracy theories and distrust charisma in public speech, but he deems it far more productive to examine the reasons for the surge in their popular support. There were and are undeniable reasons for that: growing inequality in capital and income; official reports of comfortable overall economic growth that disproportionately favors top managers and shareholders; rising shares of “flexi-workers” with miserable labor conditions; urban gentrification projects driving many out of their original homes while starters at the housing market do not have access to affordable homes; the dismantling of quite a few public services due to budget cuts and the de facto erosion of rule-of-law in spite of public statements in which the opposite message is systematically rehearsed.
Is it any wonder that populists who build direct connections with ‘the people’ through charismatic speeches, who evade, erode and potentially even evict commonly accepted political institutions in liberal democracies, who appear opportunistically flexible in their adoption of ideals and ideologies as long as they appeal to ‘the people’ and who focus on spotting citizen problems rather than offering workable solutions, win the day? If people in the Netherlands want tough measures against corona and dislike Muslims, they vote Geert Wilders. If they fiercely oppose measures against corona and hold the opinion that IQ is best measured in units of race, they vote Thierry Baudet. If they believe Thierry Baudet to be a sordid populist, but otherwise dream of feeding left-wing parties as fodder to their cattle, they vote Joost Eerdmans. If they agree that farming tractors are indeed the most convenient means of transport in The Hague, they vote Caroline van der Plas. And if they affirm Muslims deserve better protection from Geert Wilders and Thierry Baudet by having Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Moroccan King Mohammed VI as Shadow Princes of the Netherlands, they vote Farid Azarkan.
Populism can be far right or far left, secular or religious, but it always catches handsome seat counts in European Parliaments these days. In 2002, Taguieff warned that soon it would require close collaboration and bland compromises between the ‘decent’ left and right, between ‘respectable’ liberals and conservatives resulting in middle-of-the-road policies to face up to the populist threat. Emmanuel Macron managed to march on Paris and defeat Marine Le Pen in battle, but God knows as well as anybody that it was not a landslide victory. Most countries in Europe now enjoy sizable populist parties and in some they have even become the ruling parties. Liberal democratic Fortress Europe is shaking to its very foundations, but it seems to have a hard time noticing.
Concrete rot in the bulwark of Trias Politica
The truth is that fragility of political bastions begins from the inside, not from the outside. Mongols, Huns and Vandals normally overrun ailing empires, not thriving ones. Once again, the Dutch situation with which I am most familiar happens to be the most colorful and illustrative case in point. It takes a sidelined Christian-democratic bellringer from Enschede with a doctorate from the European University Institute in Florence, uncommon perseverance, political acumen and a rare belief in justice and checks and balances to point the finger at advanced levels of concrete rot in the buildings from which Dutch politico-administrative elites govern their united royal provinces. In Een nieuw sociaal contract (a new social contract) Pieter Omtzigt demonstrates how employees at the tax office ruthlessly apply rules, hand out punishments to citizens who make minor or no administrative mistakes at all, brand them as fraudulent with serious repercussions to their lives, hide evidence that does not suit their interests and systematically refuse to admit they are at fault when confronted. Misconduct committed by civil servants is endorsed by their superiors and subsequently covered up or ignored by the political leadership. Ruined citizens make attempts at recourse, but see their efforts thwarted by administrative organs and legal bodies that either deny their claims or honor them, but subsequently prove simply not to have the clout to change anything substantial in their favor. In Omtzigt’s view, these forms of abuse are structural rather than incidental and reflect a context in which members of parliament, ministers and secretaries of state, courts, policy advisers, lobbyists and journalists essentially constitute a bubble of their own rather than inflict mutual checks on each other’s power. Moreover, in their decision-making they uncritically follow numerical outcomes churned out by calculations from ill-understood complex models without a commonsense grasp of the policy problems at hand. Last but not least, working in the public sector has lost its attraction in the past few decades resulting in the exodus of a great many qualified staff members who have been replaced by less ambitious and entrepreneurial types. The detrimental effects of this shift have become palpable. Anne Applebaum’s Twilight of democracy: the seductive lure of authoritarianism and Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt’s How democracies die similarly describe how in Poland and the United States political and legal institutions that can be seen as defining for liberal and rule-of-law based democracies started to be undermined long before the Kaczynski twin brothers and Donald Trump began their terms in office, but constituted a process of erosion these strong men definitely sped up and radicalized after seizing power. To defend the liberal democratic fortress against any populist invasion, the quality of European government urgently needs a quantum leap. But what does salvation amidst European twilight look like?
The truth about Pieter Omtzigt’s ‘functie elders’ (position elsewhere)
It is often said that public leaders and officials in liberal democracies should have the characteristics of those they represent. Average politicians for average citizens could then well be the slogan. But these years our mediocre European citizens appear less than satisfied with our mediocre representatives, more so than ever before. Like in most professional organizations, recruitment of leadership positions should be about quality and integrity. Political parties, bureaucracies, courts and media corporations should select candidates for top positions based on carefully defined merits and award accordingly (not outrageously). European citizens simply need the best people for the most important positions in their societies and it should be a hard-fought honor to have them; active Human Resource Management should help realize that. Not only civil servants, but also individuals finding their way up within political parties should be screened for having these characteristics. They should be probed for deep theoretical and practical understandings of society, sound track records for ethics and morality, distrust of elegant irrelevant models, creativity, respect for checks and balances and citizen rights, steadfastness to embrace and defend necessary unpopular decisions that short term-oriented citizens will later appreciate to be insightful, willingness to learn along the way through reflection-in-action and to draw lessons from other countries, and most importantly: reticence to wear red shoes. Could this be Pieter Omtzigt’s ‘functie elders’ (position elsewhere) unwittingly revealed in the failed Dutch coalition talks? Is he our man, or should we find our inspiration in Singapore where the best people still work in the public service? Being a leader or a representative implies being recruited for having the excellence to take that position. In the world today we need strength and resilience. European democracies had better take this turn later than never.
The drawbridge and the scribes
As history tells us, epidemics are decisive moments for the evolution of civilizations and their relative geopolitical positions. Even though COVID-19 is only a minor pandemic in comparison with previous ones, it has laid bare the strengths and weaknesses of different continents and political systems in dealing with crisis management. Europe has tested positive on COVID and this has not gone unnoticed elsewhere. Australia and New Zealand have learned lessons from other Asian countries and after witnessing the hopeless struggles the Americas and Europe went through, redefined themselves as integral parts of Asia. China has concluded with barely hidden satisfaction that the decline of ‘the West’ can now be called irreversible and deploys its vaccine diplomacy to hasten it. Other Asian nations who consider themselves friends shake their heads in disbelief when they observe how NATO allies which they thought were global leaders unexpectedly prove to be the world’s backwaters. The US and the UK learned their lesson the hard way through a high death toll but are on some way to recovery.
Europe is still the most livable continent on earth with cultural variation, buildings at a human scale and a good work-life balance. But it has not proven crisis-proof and has produced a display of distressing mediocrity in serving the public and applying bargaining skills. Many Asians by now assume that Europe’s color is red. Many Europeans themselves believe it is green. Perhaps it is commendable at least to envisage the possibility that it might have a strong orange hue to it.
Democracy is said to make people happy, but not rich. I concur. That sounds like something worth defending. If we end up safeguarding our city walls successfully, we will all remember today’s plight as a tragicomedy. Mark and Hugo, in the end you were both such a good laugh. Thank you for all the entertainment you gave us. But should the populists manage to cross the drawbridge over the moat and into the city, we are more likely to experience a comitragedy. It was a nice, comfortable, decadent and hilarious existence in the fort while it lasted but our lords of the castle proved too weak to cope with the challenges. Only the scribes of the future can tell.
- Professor
- CV
Martin de Jong is responsible for the academic direction and long term continuity of the initiative. His academic areas of interest are sustainable urban and infrastructure development in China, city branding, urban planning & governance, and institutional transplantation.
Martin aims to highlight two topics in the coming years, of which the first is “Inclusive cities”. This theme stresses the involvement of various social groups and stakeholders in urban socio-economic development and environmental preservation. The second topic is the transfer and translation of policy and planning institutions from China to the developing countries it collaborates with. This is a demonstration of the global geopolitical power shift to the east and the features and functionalists of this alternative model: the Beijing consensus.
The first topic connects with the agenda we are developing with the City of Rotterdam and IHS. The second corresponds with the MoU signed with the Chinese Academy of Urban Planning and Design.
- More information