Oldal 106 [106]
104 | Anna Unger
Covid, fake news, post-truth, or Brexit could hardly be understood without
help. She also needed some time and reading to understand why populism,
identity, and migration became everyday references in our political vocabulary,
what the AfD was, and why Hungary had such a negative media coverage.
The Great Recession of 2007-2008 is usually compared to the Great
Depression of 1929-1933, both in their economic consequences and political
impacts. However, unlike the political turmoil of the 1930s, the recent changes
in politics are less sharp, brutal, and visible, but probably no less dramatic
and fundamental. The past thirteen years are usually labelled as the decade
of distrust characterised by the rise of populism, growing dissatisfaction with
representative institutions, and the weakening of liberal democracy.
Populism has become the most fashionable word in political science since
the mid-2010s. It seems to be explanatory for the political and social conflicts
in the European Union, the changing landscape of party systems in European
countries, and the rise of new social movements and political parties. Many
scholars consider populism to be a threat to democracy, while others explain
its rise as a logical and unavoidable reaction to the elitist neoliberal politics
of the 1990s and the 2000s.
Another dramatic change is the dissatisfaction with, and distrust towards
political representation. All around Europe, the classic political cleavages have
been transformed. They did not disappear, but their weight and influence
have changed. In almost all the European countries, new parties were born
since 2008; and some of them achieved parliamentary representation and
also government positions pretty quickly.
It seems that the age of big catch-all parties has come to its end, and more
ideological cleavages are returning, like the issues of social and economic
inequalities and redistribution, the environment, climate change and
sustainability, nationalism, and religion, to mention just the most relevant
ones. However, as new parties emerge, they challenge not only the old ones,
but also the procedures and institutions through which these latter have
governed their societies: namely, representative (or liberal) democracy.
The aim of this chapter is not to tell the political history of the past decade
and a half, but to give an overview of the main causes of recent political
tendencies in Europe - inside and outside the EU - with a strong focus
on the state of democracy, understood both as political participation and
representation. Nevertheless, it is important to note that many ofthe changes
that have characterised this period are not rooted in the Great Recession,
whose economic, social, and political crises have only accelerated and
magnified them. Therefore, this chapter aims to look into the deeper political
origins ofthese conflicts, which have been embedded in the practice of global
capitalism and liberal democracy since the 1990s, but received much less or
no attention as long as things seemed to be going well. In this respect, the
Great Recession is not to be seen as the hypocentre, but the epicentre of the
dramatic political changes in question.