Among the key features of contemporary party life is the treatment of the "electorate" as a market. Parties usually hire market research agencies and then they tell them what voters think about certain issues. Considering the opinions of the voters, the programs are agreed and positioned on the market. Such an approach of PR fetishism suffers from a key problem that could also be defined as abandoning politics: we give up on shaping the opinion of voters through our actions and propaganda. And he assumes that these opinions are formed on their own in some kind of social bubble that political parties must not enter because, I guess, that would make them too political. Let the people decide for themselves what is better for them: everything else reeks of totalitarianism.
However, this autonomy of the electorate is of a limited nature. I can't really have any attitude. It is known what can and cannot be done. And even in a situation where inflation significantly reduces household budgets. A few days ago, the results of a survey from the United Kingdom were published, in which citizens answered numerous questions from the political and economic domain. That's how they answered the question of whether they agree with the Government introducing price restrictions on essential goods in order to more easily overcome the crisis caused by inflation. As many as 67% of those surveyed think that the Government should introduce such restrictions, and only 10% of them are absolutely against such a move. Unfortunately, they offered the wrong answer: neither the Conservatives nor Labor are considering such an option. Their experts say that intensifying competition - along with increasing interest rates - is the only realistic response to inflation. We don't know who they blame for the drop in voters in the exam when they don't have a "socialist mentality" at their disposal, but we know that at some point such a gap between the views of the voters and the parties will pay off.
And the payment caused by a similar disparity is approaching in Germany. As you could already read in numerous articles dealing with the resurgence of the far right across Europe, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) according to the latest surveys reaches a record popularity of 19% and surpasses individually all the parties currently in power: the Greens, the SPD and the FDP . The results of the research have reactivated the populism explanation industry, which, as historian Katja Hoyer writes in an instructive newspaper article, deals primarily with the question: who is to blame? According to some, the ruling coalition and their mutual disputes are to blame, others blame the main opposition force, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), for the growth of the extreme right, and more or less everyone finds refuge in "dictatorial socialization": namely, the AfD is significantly more popular in eastern Germany . This last interpretive basis cannot withstand several banal factual challenges: 1) in the first elections after unification, voters from the east of the country mostly voted for the parties of the center 2) the AfD also recorded significant growth in the west of the country, especially in the industrial center such as the North Rhine -Westphalia 3) a considerable number of voters in the east experienced socialization in democracy.
Therefore, the obviously worrisome trend cannot be attributed to some kind of lack of democratic culture, nor to individual culprits in party life. The problem, Hoyer believes, is that the other political parties and associated free intellectuals do not question why a fifth of the electorate rejects the status quo, but assume their delusion caused by a whole series of external problems. Almost no one assumes that perhaps their policies do not address the problems of a fifth of the electorate. Or, as Hoyer suggests, it's not that voters reject democracy by choosing the AfD, but that they think they have no other way to express their democratic right. Of course, there are a number of convinced fascists among them, but this growth shows that the other options simply do not offer channels for expressing problems and frustrations.
Such an outcome is often the result at the beginning of the aforementioned policy guided by public opinion polls. If you leave your actions to market signals about voters' preferences, and not to work with them to build common attitudes, then it is quite certain that at some point the voters will "make a mistake". Delegating a considerable number of social problems to the economic market will simply lead to the collapse of the imagined political market. Or to take market jargon to the extreme: limiting the political market to the economic market will lead to an imbalance - the demand for political ideas will outstrip the supply. And then the prices go up.
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