Electoral season 2016

What an electoral season! With Trump and Brexit all over the news, who would have noticed that the Spanish parliamentary elections of last December utterly failed to produce a government? Only the Spaniards. As I predicted in my previous blog, an inbred cultural blinder to the role of mutual concessions would hamper coalition formation. And it certainly did. New elections had to be called. Now one can already see the signs of another failure in the campaign for the repeat elections on June 26, as party leaders hammer each other with insults that will be hard to retract, once the voters have had their say. As in last December, no party is likely to be even near a majority in Spain.

Of course, while the Spanish will be forced to compromise, in the US there is no need to. At least this is Donald Trump’s obvious bet. As outside observers, we Europeans have been watching with fascination how nearly half of the US electorate appear to have gone collectively mad in the Republican primaries. Trumpomania rules. What we have seen in the US this spring demonstrates why the ancient Greeks were so sceptical of democracy. It even gives the resistance to democracy of today’s Chinese government a sheen of respectability. Mr Putin and Mr. Erdogan could equally claim to be in good company, as is Mr. Urban and his Polish colleagues. Trumpism is populism at its most incoherent, demagogic and dangerous.

At this point the obligatory re-run of the Spanish elections on June 26 is pushed aside even in the Spanish news by the Brexit thriller, to take place three days before. In the British case, as in the US and Spanish ones, the preferred strategy seems to be to go all out with over-the-top argumentation.

Going for the extreme has been this spring’s theme whether in the US primaries, the Spanish parliamentaries or the British referendum. Exaggeration works! We have now seen how this entices a mentally deranged person to stab and shoot to death a parliamentarian he disagrees with. Another crucial limit has been breached.

We can see the politics of a hundred years ago in the mirror.