Volatility and support for parties on the extremes are now increasingly common features of elections in European countries. Jean-Louis Missika argues we are seeing the exhaustion of the two grand political narratives – conservative and social-democratic – that have formed the foundation of the political systems of liberal democracies.
Jean-Louis Missika will be speaking at an LSE event on 15 June titled What is driving the green backlash in European urban politics? as part of the LSE Festival 2024.
Despite their different political cultures, all western democracies are currently experiencing similar phenomena during elections. From one election to another, we observe voter volatility, a rise in abstention and extremism – particularly the far right – the weakening or even disappearance of major centre-right and centre-left parties, a shift of traditional right-wing parties towards the far right and the fragmentation of votes and parties.
The combined effect is that the regular alternation between two major governing parties, one on the left and one on the right, has ceased to be the norm and has become the exception. New political configurations are emerging and seem here to stay.
The people/elite antagonism
Many analyses have been conducted to explain these phenomena. In The People vs. Democracy, Yascha Mounk scrutinises the divorce between democracy and liberalism and diagnoses a political system in the process of deconsolidation. The people/elite antagonism occupies a central place in his argument.
In The Revolt of the Public, Martin Gurri also examines the relationship between people and elite and sees a shift in the balance of power in the informational sphere, linked to social networks, favouring the people, preventing elites from controlling information, managing the media agenda and channelling political passions.
In Le Grand Récit, Johann Chapoutot blames the degradation of the grand narrative on managerialism, which equates the state with a business, and refers to Jean-François Lyotard’s work on The Postmodern Condition to identify a decomposition of traditional grand narratives, replaced by fragments of discourse without consistency or mobilising power. In What Political Crisis?, Gérard Grunberg and Pasquale Pasquino offer a more political analysis of the collapse of the party system, where parties, undermined by internal divisions, are unable to maintain the bipolarisation necessary for alternation.
This raises two essential questions: Why are central parties weakening or radicalising? And why is the people/elite antagonism more structuring today than in the 20th century? I argue we are seeing the exhaustion of the two grand political narratives – conservative and social-democratic – that have formed the foundation of the political systems of liberal democracies.
The strength of these two grand narratives gave legitimacy to bipolarisation and alternation and structured the two central parties. And these two grand narratives held together communities of citizens from both the people and the elite, making the people/elite cleavage less central.
The exhaustion of grand political narratives
The social-democratic and conservative narratives share common ground: progress through the production and consumption of goods and services, growth as a condition for prosperity and emancipation. The conservative narrative took a long time to integrate the religion of progress into its narrative, as it opposed other elements of its heritage, such as tradition or authority, but in the 20th century and especially after World War II, the graft took.
On this common ground, the two narratives deployed strong and antagonistic values, freedom against the risk of tyranny for conservatives, equality against the risk of poverty for socialists. This opposition of values was understandable to all citizens and could be applied to almost every subject, from individual success to collective solidarity, from entrepreneurial freedom to the right to unionise. Each of these two narratives offered a projection into a better future, and significant progress served as evidence: the construction of the welfare state on one side, economic prosperity on the other.
The exercise of power and triangulation strategies began to erode and weaken these two discourses. In liberal democracies, the exercise of power constrains compromise, making the difference between two policies less readable. The paradox is that the more parties multiply due to vote dispersion, the more heterogeneous government coalitions become, and the less readable policies are, in a self-sustaining movement.
And when triangulation ceased to be a tactic of poaching the opponent’s ideas to become a “third way” strategy, as theorised by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in the 1990s, the two narratives began to lose their conceptual frameworks. The conflict of values gave way to an opposition between pragmatism and dogmatism, common sense and ideology. The shift towards a managerial definition of political power took place: there were no longer two narratives but one, that of efficiency, with the debate focusing on the ways and means of this efficiency.
Then globalisation led many citizens to believe that real decisions were no longer made within the halls of representative democracy but in the headquarters of large multinationals, stock exchanges and the trading rooms of international finance. The feeling that the political forces of nation states were deprived of their power to act contributed to weakening the persuasive and mobilising capacity of the two grand narratives.
The coup de grâce came from the climate crisis. By highlighting extractivism and productivism, which are the unthought-of elements of the social-democratic and conservative narratives, political ecology revealed their flaw. The world in which these two grand narratives project us is dystopian; the planet would become uninhabitable if the progress they advocate continued at the same pace. It is as if the exhaustion of the Earth’s resources signalled the exhaustion of the resources of the political narrative.
The grand political narrative of ecology does not exist
Under these conditions, we should see the emergence of the grand political narrative of ecology. And yet, nothing comes. The causes of this absence are multiple. Bruno Latour devoted his last book to them. The grand narrative of the climate crisis is that of the IPCC; it is a scientific, not a political, narrative. And when ecology ventures into political narration, most of its argumentative strength lies in describing the catastrophe, the great collapse.
We are closer to the apocalypse than to a bright future. But there is perhaps an even more fundamental cause: the political message emphasises repair and adaptation; it is not about conquering or discovering but about restoring, even preserving; climate disruption will not disappear, at best, it will be slowed, and in any case, life will be more difficult than today on the materialistic gradient that continues to serve as a measure of progress. The future changes colour. Prosperity gives way to sobriety. We are very far from the radiant future, and it is understandable that the enthusiasm of the masses is not forthcoming.
The emergence of far-right ecology, for which closing borders is a matter of preserving ecosystems and protecting both a natural and a civilisational balance, may be the signal of the appearance of a conflict of values between eco-conservatism and open ecology, and thus the genesis of antagonistic political narratives. However, we are far from a constructed narrative capable of mobilising a significant number of citizens.
For now, political ecology proves incapable of proposing a narrative that transcends the people/elite divide and of building the new ecological class that Bruno Latour called for. The people distrust how the elite plans to manage the transition and distribute its burden. In France, two recent social movements, the Red Caps (2013) and the Yellow Vests (2018), mobilised to protest against an ecological tax deemed unfair. In the Netherlands, the new Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB) was born out of a revolt by farmers against the government’s goal of reducing nitrogen fertilisers in crops to comply with European regulations. In Germany, the success of the far-right AfD party was recently amplified by its opposition to the government’s announced ban on gas boilers.
And this is just the beginning. The gap in individual carbon footprints between the rich and the poor explains this mistrust. Why tax household diesel when neither airplane kerosene nor off-road diesel for construction machinery is taxed? How to distribute the effort when the gaps in CO2 emissions are considerable and incommensurable? Can we equate a daily commute by a diesel vehicle with a leisure weekend in Venice by plane? We see how challenging the task is of transforming a scientific narrative into a political one.
Parties without a compass
The exhaustion of grand political narratives has spectacular effects on political parties. Traditional parties are losing their grounding and are tempted to abandon the culture of governance, drifting towards extremes. The shift of right-wing parties to the far-right seems to be a one-way journey. There is no turning back because this journey reveals the exhaustion of the right-wing grand narrative based on the ideas of progress, freedom and individual fulfilment. It is not a strategy but a drift.
The Republican Party’s inability to resist Donald Trump in the United States is a clear illustration of this. Similarly, the ease with which the Danish Social Democratic Party moved from universal welfare to welfare gradually reserved for natives is a significant signal of this drift. Additionally, electoral volatility encourages party splits, as new parties have a real chance of winning. In Italy, Fratelli d’Italia comes from Alleanza Nazionale; in Spain, Vox from the People’s Party; in France, La France Insoumise from the Socialist Party; in the Netherlands, the BBB from the Christian Democratic Party. The electoral success of the new party’s extremist discourse almost always pushes the old party to radicalise. Parties multiply, and polarisation increases.
The creation of personal parties is also a symptom of the exhaustion of the political narrative. The strength of the latter used to hold together personal ambitions within a common political formation. Its weakening allows a party entirely designed for the leader to find political space. Silvio Berlusconi paved the way in 2013 with Forza Italia, but France, partly due to its political system, is certainly the country where the phenomenon of the personal party is most developed (La France Insoumise, Renaissance, Horizons, Reconquête, and to a lesser extent, the Rassemblement National, which functions as a family party). These new parties do not have structured democratic operating rules, some resembling nebulous entities where the rights of members are non-existent. The personal party leads to the construction of an exclusive micro-political narrative, that of the leader’s ascent.
Narratives without a future
If the two grand narratives no longer sell, it is because the projection into the future they proposed is no longer credible, and no alternative forward-looking narrative has emerged, at least in the West. So, what do this multitude of small parties flourishing in democracies talk about? They no longer talk about the future or progress; they talk about the past and identity. When the future is dark, people turn to an idealised past, a lost golden age. Nostalgia becomes a refuge against dangers, a cocoon against the announced declines. And, in all these narratives, the link between past and identity is powerful.
The two grand narratives had finally, painfully, forged a consensus of a civic national identity. All nations have mixed civic and ethnocultural elements in their history to define their people’s identity. Hans Kundnani notes that since the Crusades and the Battle of Poitiers in 732, and “for hundreds of years thereafter, to be European meant to be Christian, as opposed to other non-Christian peoples, particularly Muslims.” With the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, a more rational and civic identity was forged, based on the citizen’s voluntary adherence to the nation. And colonisation forged a white identity for European nations.
The consensus that emerged from World War II created a balance between civic and ethnocultural identity that remained stable for several decades. Kundnani considers that this balance repressed Christianity, whiteness and colonialism in favour of a self-instituted socio-economic and civic identity, combining a social market economy, welfare state and managerial governance. For his part, Yascha Mounk believes that the end of the mono-ethnic nation-state is a major cause of the destabilisation of democracies. The multi-ethnic nation restores visibility to the ethnocultural dimension of identity.
This definition of national identity was consubstantial to the two grand narratives. Their exhaustion opens the way for the return of identity narratives based on religion, race, culture, ethnicity and history. The aspiration for a perfect coincidence between race, religion, language, territory and state is not new. It is gaining strength and challenging the balance between ethnocultural and civic identity. And the latter is also attacked from the left by critiques of patriarchy and post-colonialism, which contest its universal dimension. Identity politics, culture wars and the quest for a fantasised identity share the trait of being introspective or retrospective, but certainly not forward-looking. The future does not interest them.
It would be absurd to believe that these new cleavages are ephemeral or merely the result of social media algorithms: they are the result of the exhaustion of the two conservative and social-democratic narratives and the inability of any political narrative to project into a desirable future. Culture wars are particular in that they leave no room for compromise, whereas compromise is at the heart of the idea of democracy, as well as the idea of progress in democracy.
Identity politics do not focus on substantive issues of public policy. They concentrate on the criteria for defining the people and seek to draw a line of separation between the people and its enemies. This ethnocultural partition results in the rejection of the rule of law that protects minorities and limits the power of the majority. Political narratives centred in this way on the past and identity have the effect of disintegrating the community of citizens.
From storytelling to storyliving
Through their antagonism, the two grand political narratives held together the community of citizens and transcended the people/elite divide. The change in narrative perspective caused by their dissolution explains many phenomena characterising 21st-century politics: the collapse of trust in institutions or political discourse, the development of political narratives based on the people/elite antagonism, the fear of the future as a determinant of voting, democratic fatigue, the multiplication of micro-political narratives, and the blurring of the line between fiction and reality.
Political mobilisation also changes in nature. Many observers have noted that some social movements, like the Yellow Vests, deploy without leaders or demands. Last year’s riots in France after the death of Nahel M. resembled a political spasm, brief and violent, where, after the legitimate emotion aroused by Nahel’s death, the only messages from the rioters were videos of their “exploits” posted on TikTok or Snapchat.
We have yet to fully grasp the QAnon movement, which played a key role during the attack on the US Capitol Building on 6 January 2021. QAnon is not a political movement in the traditional sense. Despite the presence of a central account, “Q”, QAnon is fundamentally a group of internet users, mostly pseudonymous, who interact by saying “I am QAnon”. The conspiratorial dimension of the movement is assumed, but there is no proper political or ideological content.
They are not activists; they are players participating in a role-playing game, who, through their interactions, build theories, launch slogans, choose representatives and even organise various operations. It is also striking to see that their main adversaries on social media were young K-pop music fans who decided within their forums to attack QAnon. These elusive nebulas improvise their political narrative through their actions in real-time, shifting from storytelling to storyliving.
These narratives often belong to fiction, and each real-world event is reinterpreted through the lens of fiction. Donald Trump knows how to play with this kind of narrative. Starting from an initial fiction – “the 2020 presidential election was stolen” – he has woven a political autofiction entirely centred on the persecutions he suffers. This narrative occupies all public debate space, and the most probable hypothesis is that the 2024 presidential campaign will focus on this autofiction.
The digital revolution has turned each of us into storytellers. We tell our lives constantly on Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook. The porosity between private and public space on social media explains the public’s addiction to this kind of narration. What was once called a “political message” has changed in nature. It no longer necessarily relates to the truth of facts and does not fit into a grand political narrative. It is about slipping and transgressing to meet the demands of recommendation algorithms.
In this new political universe, the emergence of a grand narrative seems almost impossible. The Extinction Rebellion movement multiplies spectacular actions to adapt to these new rules of the game. But by acting this way, it shifts into the anecdotal and transgressive narration it seeks to escape. Climate and biodiversity are such complex subjects that they seem unsuitable for this new narrative model. And yet, it is by understanding and mastering this new model that political ecology can forge its grand narrative.
What is driving the green backlash in European urban politics? will take place on 15 June from 12-1pm as part of the LSE Festival 2024.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: CC-BY-4.0: © European Union 2024 – Source : EP
