The writer is an FT contributing editor, the chair of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, Sofia, and fellow at IWM Vienna
It is “la lutte finale” in many democracies around the world today.
The memorable line about the “final struggle” from the old socialist hymn “The Internationale” is a fitting refrain for much contemporary democratic politics.
Launching his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump told his supporters that they faced a stark choice — either they secure victory or “our country will be lost forever”. This, he said, was the “final battle”.
A similar cry could be heard in Paris where, for weeks, hundreds of thousands have been demonstrating against President Emmanuel Macron’s determination to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. The protesters also nurture a broader antipathy against his imperial, “Jupiterian” style of governing.
It is the “final struggle” in Israel as well, where large numbers of Israelis are determined to stop Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightwing government from reforming — or, as they see it, subjugating — the judiciary. And it is now or never in Turkey, too, where forthcoming elections pit the autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdoğan against the democratic opposition.
But is it really the case that the participants in these rallies and demonstrations, for all their genuine conviction, have nothing left to lose?
After voting in Bulgaria’s fifth parliamentary elections in the past two years last Sunday (with still no guarantees that a government will be formed), I have come to wonder whether this zeal to save democracy is actually compatible with the business of governing in democratic states. Can democracy work if a majority of citizens believes that to lose an election amounts to losing your country?
The 19th-century French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville was one of the first to suggest that democratic politics needs drama. But democracy also needs to be de-dramatised.
The day after an election, all the doom and gloom, Sturm und Drang, of the campaign suddenly disappear, problems start to look solvable and the world magically returns to normal. Working democracy requires political actors trained in the manner of Bertolt Brecht not Konstantin Stanislavsky. Which is to say that they should be capable of taking a distance from their campaign selves.
Unfortunately, the magic of the post-election return to normality seems to have been lost. Democratic politics today is consumed by a sense of extreme urgency, in which there is no place for compromises. This is politics as the clash of two apocalyptic imaginations.
On the left, climate activists believe that if we do not act now then, if not tomorrow the day after tomorrow, there will be no more human life on Earth. The nativist right, for its part, is driven not by the fear of the end of life as such but by the fear that “our way of life” might be about to end.
Both share a sense that we are engaged in the “final struggle”. And while some of the concerns of either side are very real and require urgent societal action, radicalism has become the default way for dealing with complexity and confusion.
The problem is that democracy cannot work either when the stakes are too low or they are too high. Democracy loses credibility when the government changes but nothing else does. But it also forfeits self-restraint when the change of government changes everything.
In a democracy, the losers in an election concede defeat primarily because losing does not mean losing too much — and anyway the next elections are never that far away.
The art of democracy is to leave the future open. The job of the election is to turn madness into reason and to translate passions into interests. The vote gives every citizen a voice but deprives them of the ability to represent the intensity of their beliefs. The vote of the fanatic for whom elections are an issue of life and death, and the vote of a citizen who barely knows for whom she votes or why, have equal weight.
The result is that voting has a dual character: it allows us to replace those in power, thus defending us from the excessively repressive state; but it also keeps passions in check, and defends us from the excessively expressive citizen. Ideally, democracy makes the apathetic interested in public life, while cooling the passion of the zealot.
When elections are merely carnivals of passions, effective governance is impossible. And while it is true that we live in unsettling times and that the pressure for radical action is real, “C’est la lutte finale” is the wrong refrain.