German colours
It was the early eighties, and I was more or less recently arrived to venezuela. The time was ripe to get to know how politics worked there. I don't remember if it was in the school, or from some neighbor. but eventually somebody explained to me that here parties were identified by color codes. The social democrats were white, the christian democrats were green, the socialists were orange. Not surprisingly there were yellow liberals and red communists. And the whole thing seemed a bit of a circus. My father, I seem to remember, explained that the whole thing was a device for people with few interest in politics. It's easier to remember a color that an idea, he said.
So here we are now, some twenty-some years away, trying to figure out the future government of germany. And of course, we are faced with a whole rainbow of alternatives. A semaphore. A jamaican flag. even a red and black combination, in the best style of the cuban revolution. It seems some sort of poetic justice that the land of complicated thinkers and convolute writers ended up discussing their political future in Technicolor. Globalization, I guess.
My problem is that behind the silly carnival are scary questions to be answered. Who would like more than me seen the greens back in government? We members of the european green party should actually be proud, since both social and christian democrats consider coalitions with the joschka team, even now that joschka is in retirement. Nothing scary here, then.
But lets go back to my first experiences with electoral carnivals, even if for a second. Back in the eighties, venezuela enjoyed her own version of stable politics. For any thinking citizens it was just normal and desirable that greens and whites alternate in government. Social and christian democrats, indeed, had made a pact of governability, which produced a stable country along some forty years. And that stability make all of us go into denial when our current president, the former commander Chavez, made a cup de etat, lost, but remainded incredible famous. He won elections in 1999, and has never since loose a political battle, sending any other political party to the shelve of the irrelevance.
Of course, much is there to be said about the corruption of previous governments, and the rampant impoverishment of one of the countries with the highest oil income in the region. But politically, the debacle that gave Chavez power was simply a political debacle. Social democrats were no longer distinguishable from christian democrats. the colors became extremely irrelevant, exchangeable, and ultimately discardable.
As usual, I might be stretching my imagination comparing Germany in 2005 with Venezuela in 1999. But at some level the same problem is just there. The only real argument against a grand coalition of christian democrats and social democrats seems to be the personality of their leaders. Both Merkel and Schroeder seem to agree in the economical and social reforms that germany needs. It is very hard for the elector to distinguish the nuances in between these two parties, and the vote seems to reflect this ideological melting. Ultimately, how to claim that the cdu is really neoliberal, if the spd want to implement the same agenda of economical reforms?
It seems to me then that political parties suffer from an international disease the lack of memory. Big parties that reach some sort of stable power seems to forget that ultimately their role in the society is to provide ideas to their clients. Ideas that can be debated, that can be contrasted, that can be voted for. Ideas that obviously will have implementations that actually might end up in similar agendas of policy. But if the elector, or actually the party herself, stops to produce a well-defined identity, if a political party stops to claim the imagination of their electors, troubles are not far away in the horizon. And if the mayor parties of a country end up contrasting their figures at the top, we know that finally the hurricane is just bout to land-struck. Germany is in this state right now. In the denial that the inhabitants of New Orleans were after enduring so many smaller storms, without the defense of the wetlands needed to keep the storms away. Katrina arrived and now New Orlens would never be what it was. Germany might still cape this storm, but the denial of her political class is a storm in her own right.
So here we are now, some twenty-some years away, trying to figure out the future government of germany. And of course, we are faced with a whole rainbow of alternatives. A semaphore. A jamaican flag. even a red and black combination, in the best style of the cuban revolution. It seems some sort of poetic justice that the land of complicated thinkers and convolute writers ended up discussing their political future in Technicolor. Globalization, I guess.
My problem is that behind the silly carnival are scary questions to be answered. Who would like more than me seen the greens back in government? We members of the european green party should actually be proud, since both social and christian democrats consider coalitions with the joschka team, even now that joschka is in retirement. Nothing scary here, then.
But lets go back to my first experiences with electoral carnivals, even if for a second. Back in the eighties, venezuela enjoyed her own version of stable politics. For any thinking citizens it was just normal and desirable that greens and whites alternate in government. Social and christian democrats, indeed, had made a pact of governability, which produced a stable country along some forty years. And that stability make all of us go into denial when our current president, the former commander Chavez, made a cup de etat, lost, but remainded incredible famous. He won elections in 1999, and has never since loose a political battle, sending any other political party to the shelve of the irrelevance.
Of course, much is there to be said about the corruption of previous governments, and the rampant impoverishment of one of the countries with the highest oil income in the region. But politically, the debacle that gave Chavez power was simply a political debacle. Social democrats were no longer distinguishable from christian democrats. the colors became extremely irrelevant, exchangeable, and ultimately discardable.
As usual, I might be stretching my imagination comparing Germany in 2005 with Venezuela in 1999. But at some level the same problem is just there. The only real argument against a grand coalition of christian democrats and social democrats seems to be the personality of their leaders. Both Merkel and Schroeder seem to agree in the economical and social reforms that germany needs. It is very hard for the elector to distinguish the nuances in between these two parties, and the vote seems to reflect this ideological melting. Ultimately, how to claim that the cdu is really neoliberal, if the spd want to implement the same agenda of economical reforms?
It seems to me then that political parties suffer from an international disease the lack of memory. Big parties that reach some sort of stable power seems to forget that ultimately their role in the society is to provide ideas to their clients. Ideas that can be debated, that can be contrasted, that can be voted for. Ideas that obviously will have implementations that actually might end up in similar agendas of policy. But if the elector, or actually the party herself, stops to produce a well-defined identity, if a political party stops to claim the imagination of their electors, troubles are not far away in the horizon. And if the mayor parties of a country end up contrasting their figures at the top, we know that finally the hurricane is just bout to land-struck. Germany is in this state right now. In the denial that the inhabitants of New Orleans were after enduring so many smaller storms, without the defense of the wetlands needed to keep the storms away. Katrina arrived and now New Orlens would never be what it was. Germany might still cape this storm, but the denial of her political class is a storm in her own right.
posted by Unknown at 2:02 PM
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