Spotlight falls on new leaders, but shadows lengthen behind
Elysee Palace, they have forgotten who helped him across the line in the crucial run-off ballot. It was the Front National, the supporters of Marine Le Pen, who, either by abstention or active rejection, sealed the fate of President Nicolas Sarkozy.
If the global financial markets make it impossible for Monsieur Hollande to keep faith with the French electorate; if the overweening style salutes and their Hellenic version of the swastika, won 21 seats in the Greek parliament last Sunday.
Their nostalgia for the days when the colonels ran Greece, and the jails were filled with leftist intellectuals and trade union activists, casts a grim shadow not only over Greek politics but over the whole of Europe.
The neoliberals’ hatred of history blinds them to the fact that the world has stood before where it stands today. In the 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression, with millions unemployed and the political leaders of the ‘‘civilised world’’ unable to conceptualise any way out of the deepening economic crisis except to cut and cut and cut, the way was cleared for the extremist demagogues of Right and Left. Men who preached the primacy of politics over economics; politicians who specialised in identifying scapegoats; butchers who slew them in their thousands.
The one great exception to the economic folly of deflation and austerity was the administration of American president Franklin Roosevelt. His ‘‘New Deal’’ offered a ‘‘third way’’ between the Scylla of Italian and German fascism and the Charybdis of Soviet communism. In faraway Sweden, and here in New Zealand, social-democratic governments followed Roosevelt’s lead, constructing societies that became the envy of the world.
Too many nations did not. Inevitably, the world was rescued from economic failure by that most terrible and irresistible of ‘‘stimulus packages’’.
Those who had declined the peaceful path to economic success were subjected to the awful audit of war. There are worse things than fiscal deficits. How does one account for millions of human losses?