The end of democracy

It is, I suppose, fitting that the same country that introduced us all to the concept of democracy, should also be the one to show us exactly where it all ends.

The latest to come out of Greece – for yes, it was the Greeks wot did it! - is that the previously defiant Tsipras administration has now come back to the table with new ‘compromise’ proposals to avert an imminent default. These include an €8 billion tax hike, and the introduction of fees for services previously provided for free by the State.

In other words, exactly all the things Tsipras had promised the electorate he wouldn’t do, when rocket-propelled into government last January. And inevitably, the Greek electorate is up in arms: pensioners were protesting in Athens yesterday evening, and by all accounts the entire country is rife with unrest.

Close an eye at the economic implosion that has engulfed Greece since 2012, and already the pattern looks vaguely familiar. Both Maltese and Greek governments can be seen to have reneged on critical electoral promises, within barely two years of getting elected… albeit in very different circumstances, and to very different effect. 

In our case, the net result was some 3,000 environmentalists marching on Valletta last Saturday, in what has since been described as ‘the single largest non-partisan protest ever held in Malta’ (somewhat strangely, as I seem to recall the hunters mustering around four times that number for another ‘non-partisan’ protest back in 2008). 

But no matter: in both cases you will observe that political parties say one thing before an election… but the reality they will later unleash will invariably be quite different. And of course, it’s not just Malta and Greece. Much the same pattern can be seen at work behind every successful democratic campaign: starting with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, on the promise to ‘change the world’.

Clearly, there is a level at which newly-elected governments throughout the democratic world do not actually believe their own electoral manifestos. It’s a classic case of: ‘That? Oh, that’s just something we said to get the environmentalists [here and there varying to ‘liberals, conservatives, hunters, gun control lobbyists, feminists, LGBT groups etc.’], on our side. We didn’t really mean any of it, you know…’

And strangely, in all but a few instances, electorates all over the world just accept this. It’s as though the promises are meaningless even from the average voter’s point of view…

But the situation in Greece is admittedly more or less unique. Truth is, you can’t really just ‘close an eye’ at the economic black hole into which that country has been sucked (and its citizens suckered). The consequences of a Greek default are too severe for Greece, and indeed for everyone else. Heck, even tiny Malta stands to lose 177 million euros in the transaction… 

It is in fact this element of ‘force-majeur’ – the outrageous pressure piled on Greece by all major international power-houses: the EU, the IMF, the ECB, the WB, all the creditor countries, etc. – that underpins Tsipras’s dramatic (but very obviously reluctant) U-turns. Arguably, the Greek PM started out with every intention to resist austerity until the bitter end. It’s just that he underestimated exactly how ‘bitter’ that ‘end’ would be. 

In a sense, this only makes all the other examples less excusable. One can understand a government forced at gunpoint to depart from its electoral manifesto, as Tsipras was by the conjoined efforts of practically all the rest of Europe. What’s Malta’s pretext? 

As far as I can see there are no international power-brokers currently piling pressure on Joseph Muscat to release more ODZ land for development. There would be no dire financial consequences affecting other countries, if the Maltese government actually abided by its own electoral manifesto, and ‘prioritised the environment’ like it said it would. 

All the same, however: in terms of the effect of such U-turns, it makes no real difference if the government broke its own word deliberately, or under duress. It’s like that vintage slogan from another environmental protest, long long ago: ‘Vote George, get Lorry’. It literally makes no difference whom or what you vote for in a democracy, because what was promised is almost  certain not to materialise… with a strong likelihood that the opposite will materialise instead.

But back to Greece for the moment. It’s one of those thorny, complicated little issues where no direct culpability can be agreed upon. That Greece owes more money than it can pay is now a self-evident fact. That this was due to fiddling with the national accounts is also largely accepted. Greece as a country is therefore clearly at fault… but whose decision was it to cook those books in the first place? Certainly not the pensioners who were protesting last night. Nor the beneficiaries, who will now lose their social services. Nor all the people who will be run out of business through higher taxes at a time of total economic collapse.

Even if we concede that the buck should stop with all the former Greek governments which were responsible for engineering all this debt… it doesn’t actually change anything in practice. The democratic model we are used to implies that any past political misdemeanour is automatically atoned for, the moment the guilty party loses an election. We see this here in Malta all the time: whenever, for instance, the present government hides behind decisions taken previously by the Gonzi administration… only for the PN to remind it that Gonzi is no longer prime minister for that very reason.

Blaming Greece, then, is clearly not going to work. And besides, not everyone would even agree that Greece alone is at fault. The international institutions that lent its government money, the European Union that accepted its budgetary submissions without question, merely because they were motivated by the political (as opposed to financial) project of ‘eurozone integration’… surely these must assume some kind of responsibility for the current situation, too? 

But then, as we all saw when banks engineered similar situations, such as the US sub-prime mortgage crisis in 2007, and the subsequent European credit crisis… the international financial institutions are not allowed to pay any price for their own mistakes. They’re all ‘too big to fail’, remember?

Leaving aside the question of who is technically to blame for the situation… there remains the issue of who gets to actually pay the price. Things are a lot simpler here. It can’t be former governments as these have already ‘paid’ by losing an election. It can’t be banks and financial institutions, as these have a 007-style ‘licence to defraud’. We’re running low on options here, folks. And there’s a whole mountain of money, that someone, somewhere will have to start paying.

So I guess it will have to be the pensioners, the single mothers, the infirm, the disabled… even the plain old average Greek citizen who doesn’t fit into any ‘underprivileged’ category at all. I.e., the one party we all agree cannot possibly be blamed for the crisis.

And here is where you begin to see the precise demarcation point at which democracy breaks down, and something else – something much uglier – takes over instead. Not only is a blameless Greek population now being forced to pay the price for crimes committed by others – forced, one might add, precisely by the people who committed some of those crimes – but the same Greek people actually voted for an ‘end to austerity’ just five months ago.

Even now, I’m not sure which kick in the nuts would have hurt more. Being told you have to pay for a crime you didn’t commit… or being told that your vote in an election doesn’t actually mean anything. Either way, you are left with no option but to conclude that the democracy invented by Greece just doesn’t work beyond a certain point…

Naturally, you can also blame the Tsipras government for making promises it knew it couldn’t keep… and you’ll have many allies in Europe on this point. But this only underscores the impression that what we are looking at is a systemic flaw within the machinery of democracy itself.

Malta’s experience also illustrates this point. Political parties are free to make whatever promises they like before an election… and as we can all see in the Zonqor Point issue alone, there is no mechanism that kicks into action when they default on their electoral pledges. You can’t sue a political party for fraud, even when it blatantly deceives you with a barefaced lie. You just have to lump the consequences, like the people of Greece.

One of these consequences is that the overarching theme of the so-called ‘majesty of democracy’ seems to deflate and fizzle out in the cold light of day. There is nothing ‘supreme’ about the decisions taken by the electorate in a democratic country. A country can vote against higher taxes all it likes. But if it serves certain other interests, higher taxes is what that country will get.

Just like that ‘Vote George, Get Lorry’ slogan, all over again. The Greek electorate voted to ‘end austerity’. What they actually got was the end of democracy instead.