Last week's elections in the Czech Republic once again confirmed the regularity of the balance sheet of the development of the 'victorious' neoliberal order in the former Eastern Europe. In the fourth decade after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the trend is so pronounced that at one point I dared to mark it with a paraphrase of the title of a book by the famous Russian classic of Marxism. I repeat it here in the title of this text. Is populism really the highest, i.e. the final stage of the neoliberal order? Are we inevitably and legally condemned to the rule of lying and irresponsible demagogues, aggressive xenophobia, identity and ethno-national fantasies and the trivialization of institutions and collective and individual human rights? If Andrej Babiš's Trumpist program can win in the electorate of the tame and relatively prosperous Czech Republic (36% of the vote), and the pro-Putin Party for Freedom and Direct Democracy and the anti-environmental and far-right Motorist Party together win almost 15% of the vote, then what can we on the turbulent periphery of Europe hope for?
In the context of our internal reality, which is still dominated by student rebellion, this true supremacy of populism and the extreme right raises new questions. First of all, is our anxiety about the populist, ethno-national ideas that were promoted at the Vidovdan student protest, but an anachronistic reasoning in the context of European and global trends in mass politics? Are we in Peščanik and the remaining left-liberal public in Serbia already so out of date that we do not understand the dialectics of reality that is unfolding before our eyes? In the aforementioned elections in the Czech Republic, populist and extreme right-wing parties won about half of the votes, and center-right parties about a third. The broad coalition of left-wing parties “Stačilo!” (Enough!), which also includes the once powerful and famous Czech Social Democratic Party (founded in 1878), remained outside the parliament, having received less than 5 percent of the vote (4,6%).
It doesn't take much brainpower to understand that the current rise of the right and populism in the EU is directly related to the disappearance of the principled left from the political scene in Europe and the region. The turning point is often cited as the change in the statute of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom in 1995, when Tony Blair was its newly elected leader. This was a change to the famous (and notorious to libertarians) Article 4 of the party's statute, which was introduced in the turbulent days of 1918 and which called for consistent socialism:
“To secure to workers, whether manual or mental, the full fruits of their labor and the most equitable possible distribution thereof, based on common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, as well as on the best possible system of popular management and control of every branch of industry or service.”
After Blair's intervention, the aforementioned programmatic commitment was so drastically changed that only vague hints of some principles of social justice and state intervention remained. Moreover, the new words and intonation promote the Jeffersonian pursuit of happiness/the search for individual happiness more than the collective rights of the working class:
“The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes that by working together we can achieve more than we could alone, to create for each of us the conditions to fulfil our potential, and for all of us a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few, where the rights we enjoy reflect the responsibilities we owe, and where we live together freely, in a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and respect.”
In our post-ideological era, since the second half of the 1990s, clear ideological differences between parties of liberal and social-democratic orientation have gradually disappeared. At the highest level of the EU, the 'famous' resolution of the European Parliament from April 2009 equated the so-called left and right totalitarianism (Nazism, Fascism and Communism) in ideological terms and in terms of historical responsibility and guilt, which contributed to the additional compromise of the ideological heritage of the left and the distancing from its value paradigms. The left was dying, and its most valuable ideological baggage was taken over by opponents from the camp of the liberal and conservative agenda.
Immediately after the collapse of communism, the neoliberal camp incorporated the humanistic ideals of the left (the identity program of the left, the protection of minority rights and civil universalism, the emancipation of women and the LGBT+ community). On the other hand, the social program of the left readily takes over the pseudo-conservative political camp, with some unpleasant associations at first glance. Namely, when perverted surrogates of socialism and the ideology of blood and soil are mixed in one place, we are undoubtedly in the territory of today's populism, and in fact very close to the former fascism and Nazism. In terms of political abuse, the neoliberal appropriation of the left's program was not without a clear calculation. In the liberal reception, the principles of socialist internationalism begin to correspond in a perverted way with the globalization of the economy, and the integration of minorities into society contributes to the harmonization of the global market for labor, goods and services. All this, of course, at the expense and in favor of big capital.
Populism in America does not have this kind of ideological reciprocity with socialism. On the contrary, the Trump administration is reducing what little welfare state there was in the USA. Trump's populism offers the electorate nothing but hatred, endless hatred towards migrants, foreigners, Muslims, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, leftists, LGBT+ populations, etc. In this sense, the American model of populism does not have the essential social underpinnings that it has in today's Slovakia and Hungary and with which it has long remained in power in Poland. Political commentators have long insisted that it was precisely this social moment that should have predetermined Bernie Sanders as an opponent to Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2024 elections. In the former Eastern Europe, it seems that the post-ideological model of politics and political choice is reaching its ultimate consequences. Not only has the left disappeared, but it also seems that soon we will not even have enough support for parties of liberal provenance and the center-right, as the case of the 'progressive' and prosperous Czech Republic shows.
Bonus video:
