There Is Life After Liberal Democracy
Western democracies and their institutions are not about to implode
The latest electoral victories of so-called “populist parties” - in the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, to name but a few- bring into focus the deep crisis experienced by Western liberal democracy.
If this electoral trend continues, it is likely that we will experience the actual demise of the current model of liberal democracy in the next decade, a model which has failed to maintain the allegiance of voter majorities across Europe and the US.
Since populism has started to garner electoral successes in the last few years, political leaders in the West and an obedient media have tried to portray populist parties as nothing more than Putin-inspired movements doing Moscow’s bidding, aimed at undermining the social cohesiveness of Western European nations.
This type of propaganda is misleading. It also completely misses the point as to the origins of the dissatisfaction experienced by most western world voters when it comes to the performance of their political systems. This dissatisfaction of citizen majorities has deep internal causes, like hyperglobalization, loss of economic opportunities, loss of national identity as a result of unchecked mass immigration, aggressive LGBTQ propaganda in schools, attacks on family values, and so on. The latter societal ills have nothing to do with Russia’s designs to undermine the West.
If anything, it is clear to me that even the policies of the Putin regime have, in fact, been inspired by political developments in countries from Central Europe such as Hungary and Poland, and not the other way around. This has been a time-honoured tradition dating back to Putin’s former KGB boss Yuri Andropov, who during the 1960s and 1970s had used Hungary as a political laboratory for experimenting with limited market-friendly economic reforms (known under the nickname of “goulash communism”).
Populist parties view democracy as majoritarian. They are against pluralism of the sort that allows the rise to power of national leaders hailing from sexual or ethnic minorities. In their view, top political leadership has to be drawn from the ranks of the ethnic majority of any given country, as a formal guarantee of majoritarian political rule. That had actually been the case until 2008, after which everything changed dramatically.
Since the 2008 global financial crisis, the method of selecting candidates for the jobs of presidents or prime ministers in the West has radically changed. In the US, George W Bush was the last president with a typical WASP background. For the next 8 years he was followed by a highly unusual choice, Barack Obama, who did not represent either the white majority of the citizens, nor for that matter the typical African-American minority, although he claimed he was representing both.
Obama’s election opened a political Pandora’s box in Europe. Thus, since his presidency which ended in early 2017, the top political jobs in many European countries went to representatives of minorities: gay politicians (like in France, Ireland, Luxembourg, Serbia), Indians/Pakistanis/Africans (in England, Scotland, Wales) or radical feminists like Sana Marin (Finland) or Kaja Kallas (Estonia). Such leaders were not selected because they were more experienced or in any way better on the job, but because they showed blind loyalty to their political backers. In time, it dawned on people that - regardless of the apparent “progress” in civic rights that they symbolised - once they were bought, they stayed bought and faithfully executed the agenda of the most influential minority in Western societies: the globalist 1 percent.
The shift to populist and nationalistic parties in Central and Western Europe poses the greatest danger for the survival of the current model of liberal democracy. Its possible replacement by electoral democracy in the decade ahead seems unstoppable, regardless of the frantic efforts of the ruling elite to stop the rot.
One of the biggest nightmares for the representatives of liberal democracies has been pointed out by a Deutsche Welle reporter recently: “although populists come to power more easily in bad economic situations, they tend to continue to stay in power even if the economy doesn’t improve or maybe even if it gets worse. The data clearly shows that, once in power, populists are quite likely to shape a country’s destiny for years, maybe even decades. They are political survivors.” (DW, March 20, 2024)
Given this situation, one can more easily understand why the global elite, their subservient corporate and media chiefs and the politicians defending the liberal democratic model are so alarmed about the rise to power of populist parties. This, however, does not mean that current political developments are not in line with the wishes of most voters in Western countries, or indeed that these represent a threat to Western democratic institutions, as their detractors claim. If anything, electoral democracy might just be the medicine needed to protect the Western traditional way of life and to ensure its future prosperity.