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There is no doubt that French politics have been ever strongly tilting to the right for months now. It’s not even exaggerated to claim that the political discourse is dominated, if not polluted, by far-right vocabulary and semantics. Want to study first-hand the mechanisms of the Overton window? This is the place.

Paradoxically, at the same time, all three right-wing pretenders that are currently jockeying for position in the race to win the second spot for the second round of the presidential election are battling with serious credibility issues.

The primary curse

In November 2016, the great comeback of ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-12) was ended before it had even started. With no more than 20% of the votes he was eliminated in the first round of the primaries organised by the party he had himself rebranded as Les Républicains.

Nicolas Sarkozy at the Sens Commun rally in 2014.

His credibility had already been severely tarnished two years before, when he set out to reconquer the party’s presidency in order to have the necessary resources at hand for a successful presidential bid in 2017. Shortly before the party’s conference in November 2014, he was filmed addressing a rally of the reactionary movement of the traditional catholic movement Sens Commun. He promised them to reformulate, once elected again in 2017, some aspects of same-sex marriage law (officially named “marriage for all”) of 2013. But when the audience started to chant “Repeal! Repeal!”, he caved in immediately: “If you prefer (…), if that makes you happy, frankly, it doesn’t cost me much!”

Just an anecdote. But one that illustrates two of the major weaknesses of the Républicains, who claim to be the heirs of true Gaullist faith and want to position themselves as the grand old party of the moderate right.

On the one hand it highlights that the system of party primaries has revealed itself to be an unintentionally radicalising force, both for the party chair in in 2014 and for the presidential nomination in 2016 and 2021. Each time, the intended moderate, conservative no-nonsense discourse has massively hardened under the pressure of a radical, vocal and highly mobilised minority among party members, pushing candidates to adopt extreme right-wing issues and vocabulary.

On the other hand, the anecdote points to the Gaullist’s fundamental dilemma: even in an increasingly polarised France, the presidential race is still won in the centre. Right there, where local and regional conservatives were perfectly able to impose themselves, as could be observed both during the municipal elections of 2020 and the regional elections of 2021. But that’s local politics. On the national level, the rightward tilt intentionally launched by Sarkozy has left the liberal-humanist centre up for grabs. It was immediately seized by Emmanuel Macron’s La République en Marche. With the consequence that the formerly Republican right now shamelessly adopts far-right discourses while wanting to sell themselves as moderate.

It’s a paradoxical situation: half of the French electorate will give their vote in April to a candidate explicitly labelled as right-wing. And that’s without even counting Macron’s voter base (stable at 25%), despite the obvious overlaps with moderate Républicains in terms of policy preferences and human resources.

Even more disturbing is that more than a third of the vote will in all likelihood go to candidates who unambiguously belong to the far right. That’s three times more than what the infamous Alternative für Deutschland obtained at the German parliamentary elections last autumn.

And despite this discursive hegemony, the right will have serious difficulties in its conquest of the Elysée palace. All three candidates who may reasonably hope to enter the second round are caught in the credibility trap.

Valérie Pécresse between a rock and hard place

Before she entered the primaries of Les Républicains, Valérie Pécresse had gained a strong profile since 2015 as the respected leader of the Ile-de-France, one of Europe’s most economically powerful, most densely populated regions, which hosts both France’s richest municipalities and poorest suburban ghettos. Her main accomplishment was a successful budget consolidation, for which she even received praise from the court of auditors (very rare in France, for good reasons!). Her self-description as “a mix of two thirds Angela Merkel and one third Margaret Thatcher” was deemed pretty accurate and she was comfortably re-elected in 2021.

Campaign poster of Valérie Pécresse, inspired by the traditional postal stamps with the effigy of the Republican allegory “Marianne”.

Considering her bourgeois-catholic origins and her political career following graduation as top student in two elite schools (HEC and ENA), you would expect her to be firmly rooted in the liberal wing of Gaullism, as embodied for instance by Jacques Chirac. To no surprise, Sarkozy picked her for a ministerial post in 2007.

Yet, all of a sudden, in order to have the slightest chance in the 2021 primaries, she felt obliged to change in tone and style. All of a sudden, it was all about seemingly exploding crime, presumably uncontrolled immigration, and apparently threatened national identity. Issues that were imposed on her by the nationalist and xenophobic hardliner Eric Ciotti, who had come first in the first round of the primaries.

That sounded all strangely inauthentic, and even now, in the hottest phase of the election campaign, it simply does not sound convincing. Since her nomination in December, she has been stagnating in the breathlessly published, but generally rather reliable polls, at around 15% of voting intentions. And her big rally on 13 February, in front of 7,500 supporters in the Parisian Zénith concert hall, hyped as the kick-off for the decisive campaign weeks, was an oddly embarrassing, pathetic performance.

What are you supposed to think of a speaker who very obviously does not believe herself in half of what she thinks she needs to say? How trustworthy is a conservative party that on the one hand hardens its discourse by the minute and on the other hand has been aggressively bashing a president who launched so many of the reforms that Chirac and Sarkozy always kept announcing but never had the courage to tackle in all their years in power?

Valérie Pécresse has fallen into the credibility trap. The politics she could have represented with competence and authenticity, are entirely covered by Emmanuel Macron. The politics he has been forced to embody by the party and the circumstances are very obviously not hers. In the tectonic upheaval of the national French political landscape, there’s not enough room left any more for herself and the Républicains. 

Marine Le Pen’s risky business of normalisation

At her third run for the presidency, Marine Le Pen faces a positioning conundrum of a different type. It’s been more than ten years since she took over the nationalist-populist party called the Front National from her dad. Since then she has been unwavering in her attempt to clean the party from its disreputable, unsavoury, shady aspects and turn it into an eligible alternative for all parts of French society.

The key word in this process is “de-demonizing” (French: “dédiabolisation”). In order to bestow on her party a new gentrified respectability, she purged the leadership committees of the numerous “crazy catholics” and “extreme idiots” (according to a leaked confession) and broke with all those who were unwilling to follow her path. These included her long-standing lieutenant Florian Philippot, who had been highly successful in giving the Front National a solid social appeal, and her niece Marion Maréchal, who was already considered as a future star (and competitor of her aunt) by the old hardliners.

Her disastrous, almost surrealistic performance in the television debate with Emmanuel Macron in early May 2017 certainly made many of her supporters doubt she had the necessary clout and gravitas to climb that last step in the ladder. Rather surprisingly, though, it did hardly impact her authority within the party. In 2018, she successfully imposed its re-branding to Rassemblement National (RN), a symbolic act that took the de-demonization process one step further, towards full-fledged mainstreaming.

Campaign poster of Marine Le Pen. The “M” is pronouced “aime”, as in “The France one loves”.

This consistent normalisation strategy, reflected in a still aggressive but much less verbally abusive opposition to the Macron government as well as a calm and controlled pre-campaign, seemed to work out just fine. A no-go like “Frexit” or, at the least, withdrawal from the Eurozone – both impossible to sell to the average voter and perceived by many as evidence of amateurism – was discreetly deleted from the official party programme. Until November 2021, there was no doubt that Marine Le Pen would qualify for the second round of the election like she had done in 2017, and why not with a stronger share of the vote than the incumbent President.

That was when Eric Zemmour officially announced his presidential bid. The outspokenly Islamophobic pandit/polemicist/populist suddenly offered a self-confident far-right alternative to all those who disapproved of Marine Le Pen’s rebranding. All those Vichy patriots and nostalgic colonialists, racists and homophobes, Europe-haters and authoritarians who did no longer feel at home in the mollified, assuaged Rassemblement National.

It turns out there are more of them around than previously suspected. Immediately, Marine Le Pen’s voting intentions collapsed from 25 to 17 percent. Clearly, her gentrification strategy was much less accepted among her long-standing followers than was thought. While her base seems to have consolidated since – she’s still the favourite for the second place – there is no week without a prominent party member leaving her for Zemmour. Heavyweights like Stéphane Ravier (the RN’s only Senator) or MEPs Gilbert Collard and Jérôme Rivière simply slammed the door in anger. More embarrassingly, campaign spokesman Nicolas Bay (another MEP) had to be fired for having leaked relevant internal information to the Zemmour team.

If one is to believe the latest polls, Marine Le Pen does not seem to suffer from the “rotten fruit falling from the tree”, as she poetically called the renegades. But that does not change the one big question at the heart of her rebranding as the new mainstream: how trustworthy is a candidate, who owes her political standing and popularity to anti-establishment positions and who decides, at the most important moment of her career, to adopt the behaviour codes and verbal norms of the despised “system”, the very system she vociferously (and successfully) decried all those years?

Even if she is still well placed to qualify for the second round, it remains unclear how she could possibly manage, within only two weeks, to reconquer all those disenchanted voters who left for Zemmour and simultaneously gain several million new votes in the mainstream.

Eric Zemmour and the limits of the reactionary protest potential

In the genuinely brilliant television series Baron Noir (three seasons between 2016 and 2020) the French party spectrum is all shaken up by a totally unknown populist newcomer boosted by the social networks. It’s a scenario whose plausibility was vindicated by the yellow jackets movement and feared by the governmental majority.

In real life, the meteoric maverick finally does not stem from the hardcore anticapitalistic left, but from a right wing that unmistakably deserves the adjective “extreme”. And he was not put on orbit by a diffuse protest movement on the internet, but from old-fashioned traditional media. For thirteen years Eric Zemmour wrote for Le Figaro, the formerly venerable conservative daily that has been trying hard for years now to reach the level of British tabloids. But his current name recognition is due to television exposure. More precise: to the very specifically French constellation of four competing 24/7 news channels, all available to French citizens within the basic TV offer. All four of them are under existential pressure to reach a market share beyond 1.5 or 2 percent.

In this crammed ecosystem, the only way to differentiate yourself from the competition is to engage in an uninterrupted hysterization of political life, spiced up with regular purposeful verbal transgressions that will be picked to pieces (and tweeted!) by the entire Parisian media landscape for days. On one of these four channels, CNews – an originally harmless branch of Canal+, now systematically foxified by the reactionary industrial industrialist and multi-millionaire media czar Vincent Bolloré – Eric Zemmour managed to reach, by deliberately breaking taboos, ratings of 5 percent (roughly one million viewers) in his access prime time talk show.

Campaign poster of Eric Zemmour. The slogan is a quote attributed to Napoléon Bonaparte.

In doing so, he shifted the limits of what could be said in public to a spectacular degree. Inspired by the success of the transgressive, inflammatory rhetoric of Donald Trump, with whom he has frequently been compared and who recently apparently even supported him in a phone call. The fact that he has repeatedly stood trial for inciting racial hatred only seemed to play in his favour with his supporters, who claim he merely says out loud what the “silent majority” (populism’s favourite fantasy) thinks.

Attempts to denounce the rhetorical mechanisms of his hatemongering – as exemplified in a strong little pamphlet by the renowned linguist Cécile Alduy – or debunk his grotesque falsifications of history – picked apart by an army of indignant French historians – also don’t have much of an impact.

What Zemmour feeds on is the deep distrust of citizens towards parties and politicians, media and experts, democratic institutions and procedures. As the yearly “Trust Barometer” of the CEVIPOF institute at Sciences Po regularly confirms, distrust and wariness are much deeper engrained in French society than in other comparable European countries (check out slides 31 and 44 here).

Eric Zemmour’s qualification for the second round of the presidential election would be a political earthquake. It would raise very fundamental questions about the causes of so much resentment, sullen offendedness, and outright hatred. It would, however, have next to no impact on the result of the election. True, Zemmour was able to conquer 15% of the electorate in one strike, just by announcing his bid. But since then, he has stagnated at exactly the same level, despite the recruitment of numerous well-known renegades both from the Républicains and the Rassemblement National, and despite a permanent media buzz.

And he remains by far the most despised political actor in France: 67% of the French declare having a bad opinion of him (Le Pen 59%); 61% refuse him explicitly (Le Pen 49%, source: recent Odoxa polls, here und here). He has a massive credibility deficit: only 23% of the French grant him the necessary competence for the job (Le Pen 35%, Pécresse 38%, source: current IPSOS survey).

Zemmour has exhausted his reactionary potential. He may serve as useful and worrying indicator for the irritability of a distraught nation whose nerves are on edge. But even in an insecure, destabilised France that is not sufficient for capturing the mainstream of society.

Parallel worlds

France’s tilt to the right is real. The “self-dwarfed left” – kudos to Nadia Pantel from the Süddeutsche Zeitung for this pertinent adjective – is close to inaudible. The presidential election campaign clearly suggests that the radical, reactionary discourse has become hegemonic. But this impression is misleading. The centre of society, the oft-invoked middle classes (which always come in the plural in colloquial French), certainly want to be taken seriously in their existential unease and anxiety, but have no wish to be governed by marginal ideologists.

As the pandemic has kindly recalled, France does not have the monopoly on disenchanted citizens and enraged conspiracy theorists caught in their filter bubbles. The same goes for the slow and painful decline of previously hegemonic popular parties in an increasingly fragmented political landscape. But what distinguishes France from other comparable democracies is the astonishing, striking discrepancy between the political spectrum on the national and the local level.

While Socialists of all shades of pink, moderate down-to-earth Conservatives and more and more pragmatic Greens are entrusted with the government of all regions and the overwhelming majority of cities and small towns, the national level is almost entirely dominated by a kind of cultural struggle between political movements that play next to no role in local affairs.

This spectacular gap between political realities may perhaps serve as an approach to explaining why a rather well-functioning daily life in a profoundly liveable country is permanently overshadowed by a shrill siren of decline and civilizational despair.

Fortunately, with regard to the forthcoming elections, it is possible to predict with a good deal of probability that while the hardened discourse of the right may reflect certain non-negligible tendencies, the political actors that are pushing it are not perceived as credible leaders by society at large. Emmanuel Macron is likely to benefit from the credibility deficit of his opponents. He is certainly not everybody’s darling, yet when it comes to competence and what the French call “embodiment of the presidential function”, he is clearly identified as number one.

Macron’s probable re-election will first and foremost be based on his credibility edge. It will, however, not change anything to the toxic discursive and mediatic environment that continues to poison French political life and public debate.

This is post no. 4 of the ‘France 2022’ series.
The previous ones can be found here.
All ‘France 2017’ posts can be accessed here.

The post France 2022: The credibility gap appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The very porousness of the border poses questions about EU states' contingency plans, which for the most part have remained confidential.

Unsurprisingly, given the sensitivities surrounding energy issues in Africa and Europe, leaders did not appear to be in a hurry to announce big, new financing deals for fossil fuels at the summit.

The EU has been busy drawing up a list of sanctions against Moscow in retaliation for any aggression. But the threshold for their imposition still needs to be determined.

Just 24-hours after the EU referendum on 23 June 2016, I posted this on my blog:

‘Just over half of those who voted bought manky lies dressed up as a better life after Brexit. They were told they’d get their country back. Their lives would be transformed. 

‘More jobs, homes, schools and hospitals. Less migrants. No more rule from Brussels. We’d be British, and Great Britain again.

‘They were duped. They were deceived. They were sold a dodgy time share by cowboy politicians, who made claims and promises they can never deliver because it was all a delusion.

‘Those conned voters, when they realise they’ve paid dearly for faulty merchandise, will need support and direction. The rogue politicians will need to be kicked out.

‘We can do without those politicians. We cannot do without voters.’

James O’Brien on LBC has consistently agreed with this line; blame politicians, not voters, he implores.

In a broadcast two years ago he said:

“Blame the people who sold it, please, not the people who bought it. That’s going to be my most important message for the next couple of years.”

It’s the same message I posted just a few hours after the referendum result, but now of course, it’s almost six years later.

Today, we are all rapidly realising that politicians must own and take full responsibility for the horrific, catastrophic mess that Britain has got into as a direct result of Brexit.

DAVID CAMERON – the Prime Minister who called for an unnecessary referendum not for his country, but as he confided in Donald Tusk, “only for his party”.

He then led an inept, lacklustre referendum campaign that was so appalling that anyone would think he wanted to lose.

BORIS JOHNSON – the Prime-Minister-wannabe who used to be a Remainer, but then at the last minute, switched sides to be the Brexit poster-boy, as he thought that would be his best route into 10 Downing Street (he was right).

To win, he lied on a colossal scale – the biggest deceit being his claim that Britain sends £350m a week to the EU, that could instead be spent on the NHS.

MICHAEL GOVE – another PM-wannabe, who also lied to win, telling the nation that EU migration in the decade following the referendum could be as high as 5 million.

But it was based on another lie – that Turkey would be joining the EU soon, which Gove must have known was impossible.

NIGEL FARAGE – the on-off-on-off UKIP leader who introduced the nation to raw racism, turning Britons against EU citizens living here who were actually helping our country to thrive.

He called for racial discrimination laws to be scrapped, and said he wanted not just Brexit, but the end of the entire EU.

He also conveniently forgot his pre-referendum announcement that if the result was 52%-48% he’d want another vote (but only if the result was 52% for Remain).

THERESA MAY – another former Remainer who changed sides so she could put her career before country. In other words, she wanted to be PM more than she didn’t want Brexit.

She over-interpreted the referendum result, ignoring that almost half of those who voted didn’t want Brexit.

Instead, she acted as if Brexit had won 100%; did her best to demean and bypass Parliament to get her way, and used vile, Nazi-type terminology such as, “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.”

JACOB REES-MOGG – the upper-class MP with the honed posh-voice who promoted Brexit pretending it would benefit the poor, whereas in reality, it’s only some of the rich who are prospering from it.

On the one hand he claimed Britain had no real power in the EU, then called for Britain to be “as difficult as possible” if there was a long extension to our membership.

“We could veto any increase in the EU budget,” he claimed and “obstruct” an EU army and “block” Mr Macron’s “integrationist schemes”.

‘Shurely shome mishtake’ as Private Eye would say. How is it possible for a country that has no power in the EU to wield such power in the EU?

Rees-Mogg did, however, say that it could take “50 years” to reap the benefits of Brexit. What a useful get-out clause…

DOMINIC CUMMINGS – the unelected Svengali-style string-puller who masterminded the Leave victory all based on lies, mistruths and false promises.

He is the man who gave Britain Brexit.

His primary insight was to weaponise unregulated social media. 

Of course, in their day, the Nazis were ahead of the curve in their use of broadcast media, but Cummings didn’t add anything that Goebbels didn’t know.

………………

There are many other politicians who must take full responsibility for Brexit.

Remember this: most voters in Britain didn’t vote for Brexit – Leave was only supported by 37% of the electorate. 

That would not be enough for Leave to have won in most democracies across the world that hold referendums, where at least 50%, and often at least 60%, of all registered voters would be required before such a big change could happen.

It wouldn’t even be enough, under Tory legislation, for a trade union to call a strike, which requires the support of at least 50% of all its members before a walk-out can go ahead.

What’s more, in the general election of 2019, most voters did not vote for the Tories; most voters voted for parties that wanted another referendum on Brexit. 

The Tories only won their landslide 80-seat majority with just 1% more votes than they got in the 2017 general election, in which the Tories lost their majority entirely.

Johnson got his 80-seat majority with the votes of less than 30% of those eligible to vote.

Our system of politics and voting is broken and unfit. It’s allowed a result that the country at large didn’t, and doesn’t, want.

What a cunning, clever, coup this has been.

The bottom line: Blame politicians, not voters, for Brexit. We can do without lying politicians. We can’t win without voters.

• Watch this 2-minute video of James O’Brien on LBC explaining why we must not blame voters.

• Follow my journalism page on Facebook: Jon Danzig writes
• My campaign page on Facebook: Reasons2Rejoin
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I need some work done at home and invited firms to quote.

“That’s a smart van,” I said in passing to the managing director of a limited company that visited last week.

“Oh, we’ve got six of those,” he replied.

We went through the project.

In the past, companies had sent me quotes with the words “plus VAT”. That’s annoying as well as unlawful. I’m not a business and need to know the final price I’m to pay.

So, I said, “When you do your quote, please clearly show the full price, including VAT.”

“Oh,” the young man looked surprised. “So, you WANT to pay the VAT?”

“If you’re VAT registered, it’s a legal requirement,” I replied.

“Oh, not really,” came the response. “If you pay me cash, you won’t have to pay any VAT, at least not on the labour!”

“That would be unlawful,” I said.

“Up to you,” he said, without batting an eyelid; without even knowing who I was. 

After all, I could have been a tax inspector for all he knew.

It got me thinking. 

Loss of VAT to the government.

Loss of income tax too, as the cash paid obviously wouldn’t go on the books.

If anything went wrong with the work, no come back. This was quite a large project, and if the firm messed up, there’d be no receipt, no proof, no going to court, no redress.

But actually, worse than that: loss of revenue for the NHS, for schools, for roads, for sewers, etc.

This was cheating and fraudulent.

CHEATING AND FRAUD

But then I got thinking some more.

The government does cheating and fraud.

Its ministers hand out multi-million contracts to mates without going through the proper procedures. The courts have ruled that’s unlawful.

What’s more, the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has announced that the government will be ‘writing off’ over £4 billion in fraudulent claims for programmes such as the furlough scheme, pandemic support for freelance workers and ‘Eat Out to Help Out’.

Most of those who made unlawful claims will just get away with it. They won’t be pursued.

Last year, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee reported that taxpayers will lose tens of billions of pounds to Covid-19 support schemes because the government dropped basic fraud checks and rolled out the programmes in haste.

Last month, Theodore Agnew, UK minister for efficiency and transformation, resigned his post.

Why? Because of the government’s ‘failure to tackle fraud’.

In an article for the Financial Times he wrote:

‘Fraud in government is rampant. Public estimates sit at just under £30bn a year. There is a complete lack of focus on the cost to society, or indeed the taxpayer.’

Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, said Agnew’s resignation was “a damning indictment of the chancellor and the government’s failures on fraud”.

• Billions of pounds lost because of the government handing out unlawful contracts to their mates.
• Billions of pounds lost because of the government turning a blind eye to those taking government money fraudulently and who won’t have to pay it back.

Billions. Billions. Our money. Public money.

Billions. Heaven knows how many hospitals, doctors, nurses, medicines that would pay for. Or schools. Or roads. 

GETTING AWAY WITH IT

So, is it any wonder that if the government can get away with it, many businesses and individuals think they can too?

Not charging VAT and not paying tax is a fraud. But as the government also does fraud or doesn’t care if others do fraud, what does it matter?

Of course, we’ve always had a ‘black market’. But my subjective view is that it’s now much more prevalent.

In the old days, the government had schemes such as Business Links, that helped businesses to do things professionally, honestly, with a view to growing reliable and successful enterprises.

But the Business Links were all closed under David Cameron’s savage austerity cuts.

It was of course a false economy.

Because today, a culture of dishonest business, and dishonest government, will bring down Britain and result in an unreliable, unsuccessful country with unreliable and unsuccessful enterprises. 

It’s leading to a ‘Broken Britain’. A country that will rapidly go downhill, with the basic services that so many of us rely upon becoming increasingly decreased.

Does the government care? Of course not.

This week Steve Barclay, Number 10’s new Chief of Staff, pledged that Boris Johnson’s government would “step back” and favour a “smaller state.”

I’ve lived long enough to know what that means.

It means cuts to the services that are the glue that keep the country and its communities functioning and intact.

It means less money for hospitals, schools, roads and sewers, to name but a few.

RICH BASTARDS

Does the government care? Of course not.

They are mostly rich bastards. They don’t need the state. They don’t need government, even though they are the government.

• Hospitals? They don’t need NHS hospitals. They have their own private hospitals they can access.
• Schools? They don’t need state schools. Most of them went to private schools, as do most of their children.
• Roads? Well, of course they need roads. But they’ll be pot-ridden roads, so government ministers can no doubt take private jets instead (at least Boris Johnson can – he’s got two of them in Union Jack colours).

Why else would the current government be so uncommitted to trying to get back billions lost to fraud?

Why else would the current government be so cavalier with public money, giving out unlawful contracts to their mates, who were often not at all qualified or even able to deliver for the public?

As I write this, the pavement immediately outside my house is gushing out thousands of gallons of water.

It’s a serious leak of a water pipe, splurging out drinking water from the pavement at a rate of knots, which is not sating anyone’s thirst, but instead overwhelming the nearby sewage system.

Of course, I reported this major leak to Affinity Water. But that was over three weeks ago.

They texted me to say that “emergency” works to repair the leak would take place outside my property on 9 February. They would be sure to let me know if they couldn’t attend.

But they didn’t attend and didn’t let me know.

I rang them and asked, “What’s going on?”

They replied they had to get the local council to put up traffic lights, and all that would take time.

But today, the water is still going to waste.

According to UNICEF, across the world, 2.2 billion people don’t have access to safe drinking water.

And right now, outside my house, thousands of gallons of safe drinking water are literally going down the drain.

Affinity Water had the temerity yesterday to ask for my feedback. Could I please score my “recent experience” from 0 (very dissatisfied) to 10 (very satisfied).

Of course, I gave them ‘0’ and explained:

‘I reported an emergency leak of water coming out of the pavement outside my house. I have not been kept informed and the leak has still not been repaired.

‘This is a disaster for the environment and a waste of thousands of gallons of good water.’

‘Thank you. Your feedback is important to us…’ was the texted reply.

GOVERNMENT DOESN’T CARE

Does the government care? Of course not.

They’ll allow good water to go to waste, or for raw waste to go into good water. After all, we’re no longer beholden to EU directives that aim to prevent this happening. 

The government will ‘urge’ private water companies to tackle the problem, without ensuring they do.

Then, when they’ve left government, ministers will no doubt have the chance to work for such companies on lucrative contracts.

It’s all part of ‘Broken Britain’.

Last month I drove a friend to Stansted Airport. On the way back, driving on the inside lane of the M11, my car went over a significant pothole, which I suspect damaged one of my wheels.

A sizeable pothole, in a motorway. All part of Broken Britain?

Of course.

And expect more of Britain to be broken in the years ahead.

We’ll have less government, that has less money, because so much will have been lost or wasted, and the government won’t care.

It might take a generation to undo the damage that is taking place to our country.

It starts and ends with the government.

If the government acts dishonestly, they cannot expect the country’s people, and the country’s businesses, to act honestly.

We so much need a different government, but if that’s to be Labour, then they have to be much clearer and much bolder in explaining their plans to fix Broken Britain.

• Follow my journalism page on Facebook: Jon Danzig writes
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In Munich, Volodymyr Zelensky voiced his concerns that the chances of Nato membership for his country may already have been diminished, because of the pressure from Russia.

We are sounding the alarm to prevent an irreversible destructive scenario from unfolding. We must take lessons from the bitter experiences of the 20th century and dedicate all our efforts to reversing a march towards conflict.

African leaders, after their two-day summit in Brussels, called an offer by the EU to help Africa build vaccine-manufacturing plants was incomplete without backing a vaccine patent-waiver proposal.

Commission will need up to three weeks to update guidelines for suspending EU funds to rule-breaking member states.

Final communiqué at EU-African Union summit stripped of reference to women's health and sexual freedoms.

Source : © European Union, 2022 - EP

For our weekly “Ideas on Europe” editorial by UACES, the University Association for European Studies, we welcome Dr Theofanis Exadaktylos from the University of Surrey, in England. Bonjour, Theofanis!

 

 

 

 

euradio · Covid-19 policies : how does political trust make a difference in responding to a common crisis ?

 

 

Theofanis, you are associate professor of European politics, and together with three colleagues you are about to publish a book on “Policy Styles and Trust in the Age of Pandemics”. Can you let us know more about it?

As we all know, since 2020, there has been a wide variety of policy responses by national governments. Some governments immediately and proactively took measures to stop the virus spread, some waited for clarity to decide their course of action and others downplayed the severity of the threat, continuing life as if nothing had happened.

 

So what how does your research explain these differences?

It’s explained by national ‘policy styles’. And in responding to crises, this policy styles are correlated with the political trust expressed by citizens.

Crises are moments of flux and extreme uncertainty. They expose vulnerabilities and frequently prompt political leaders to think outside the box to reassure citizens they are still in control. But the degree of freedom also depends on the administrative capacity their countries have, and the way problems and solutions are conceived in the national context. Effectively, policy makers inherit commitments, institutional arrangements, ways of doing things and norms that form a country’s policy style.

 

How does “trust” play into this?

Compliance to any public policy is linked to the levels of political trust within a country and, policy makers need to have a good estimation of how high or low that trust is. When governments are faced with new challenges they turn to “institutional memory”. Some governments are better in anticipating problems while others only react; in some countries consensus is required in decision-making whereas in others a top-down approach is the norm.

Citizens’ expectations are important. Pandemics require a public that makes conscious choices to comply to measures issued by a government. Lack of voluntary compliance will lead to more stringent measures, including fines and strict lockdowns. Compliance to measures also depends on whether they are perceived as ‘imposed’ or ‘organically developed’, especially in the context of democratic societies.

Countries like Denmark or Sweden have a more legitimate and efficient public administration system, and citizens tend to trust the bureaucracy of their country, compared to Greece or Italy for example. If trustworthiness and legitimacy are low, the capacity of a government to do its job is decreased, and implementing any measure is quite hard.

Legitimacy and political trust are even more important in the context of a pandemic when non-elected officials expand their decision-making roles. In Britain, Hungary and Poland, for example, experts have been at the receiving end of targeted blame.

 

How does it work in countries that have a high level of trust in their government?

In systems with more inclusive processes, like in Sweden, high trust magnifies the capacity of a government to act, leading to decentralised responses.

Conversely, in systems with lower policy capacity and lower inclusiveness, citizens lack faith in the system and expect central authority to take over. Greece is a good example for that. Lack of trust weakens the capacity of a government to act and the capacity of citizens to behave in a way they see fit.

 

These are the extremes. What happens in countries that are ‘in between’?

When high capacity coincides with low trust, the tendency is not to trust policymakers but put faith in the capacity of the state, for example, in the health system, to handle the crises. Hence policymakers will pursue more centrifugal responses to avoid taking the blame. This was the case in Britain, where policy makers tried to diffuse responsibility away from the central government in London.

When on the other hand, there is high trust but lower policy capacity (for geographic or demographic reasons), policymakers and citizens know that the health system may not cope if left without strong political direction. In this case, policymakers may choose a centripetal response because it allows more control over outcomes. This is the example of Norway where the government managed to acquire emergency powers to react, contrary to its inclusive policy style.

 

So what’s your conclusion after two years?

There is a vast variety of policy response across Europe , not only for the effectiveness of measures in containing spread, casualties and economic impact, but also in the timings and ways that measures were eased, dropped or re-introduced.

And we are not out of the woods yet. The pandemic is still evolving today with unknown outcomes. Therefore, whatever the national policy styles and levels of political trust, we should hope that national governments and citizens not only learn from past experiences but also from each other.

 

Thank you very much, Theofanis, for sharing your research with us. We’ll put a link to your book on the website. “Ideas on Europe” will be back next week. We will welcome Joanna Ciesielska-Klikowska, from the University of Lodz, in Poland.

 

First published on eu!radio.

 

 

The post Covid-19 policies: how does political trust make a difference in responding to a common crisis ? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

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