Facing the Menace
In this episode, we’re not looking away. We’re acknowledging the cracks in our democracies and asking what can still be done. Recorded live at the Conduit Club in early 2024, this powerful conversation brings together two sharp, prescient voices: political strategist and pollster Paul Hilder, and author and journalist Ece Temelkuran. Paul has worked on elections across Europe, uncovering the deeper trends shaping our politics. Ece, whose book How to Lose a Country warned of creeping authoritarianism back in 2019, draws urgent lessons from Turkey and beyond. Their insights feel even more vital now than they did then.
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Transcript
Welcome to How to Save Democracy.
I am Omezine. And I'm John. We love democracy, genuinely and wholeheartedly. But it's like a dysfunctional relationship, and democracy today is full of flaws. It's not by the people for the people anymore. There are resentments and frustrations and anger, and frankly, we can't go on like this. We wanna make this relationship work, and it's a long term thing. It's valuable. We need to work through this. And for that to happen, we need to have the tough conversations. And that's what we will be doing.
This episode is about acknowledging the problems, not pretending they don't exist. We'll be listening to a conversation I hosted at the Conduit Club in London back in early twenty twenty four with Paul Hilda and EJ Temelkuran. It might be from a little while ago, but as you'll hear, the discussion was very powerful, and the two of them were pretty much bang on with what they predicted too. Paul is one of Europe's leading pollsters and political strategists, someone who's been looking at data and working on elections all over Europe and drawing together the threads. And Ece is the multi award winning author of How to Lose a Country, a book which warned of the rise of fascism as early as 2019, seeking to teach the world the lessons from the rise of Erdogan in her native Turkey.
We start with Paul reflecting on the elections in Poland back in October 2023. Frankly, it feels like a breath of fresh air in these times where the far right seem to be taking over government everywhere.
I think we are in a dark moment, and it's important to ground ourselves in that reality and understand its scope, its extent, and its dynamics. But it's very easy to just get dispirited by that dark reality. And so I think these questions of where is the hope, how can we find faith, and who has the will to act are the ones which determine whether the dark grows or whether it shrinks. There was a long time when people thought that the law and justice populist right government was there forever. It had taken over many of the state institutions. The public broadcaster was an instrument of, extreme propaganda, completely skewed. The Catholic church was playing a huge role in reinforcing the regime, and they had all these state owned enterprises, including Wallend, the state owned fossil fuel company, throwing lots of money into politics. It was a horrible situation. And really until two weeks before the election according to our polling, they were winning, but they lost. And they lost quite convincingly to a diverse three party alliance who've now formed a governing coalition. It's not perfect. There's a lot of work for them to do. But how did that happen? There are a lot of things that happened. But, fundamentally, this is the outcome. That turnout went up by almost 13% from the preceding election, which which was already reasonably high. And under thirties turnout went up by over 22%. Young women's turnout, typically well below the average, went up the most for reasons to do with the kind of frustration and anger. And the question of who can capture the fuck you vote is probably going to determine a lot of elections this year, of which there are a lot.
This idea of the fuck you vote, so many people really want to reject all the options. And where do these votes go?
But before we get into it, let's get a bit more of a grounding in what's going on. Because Paul went on to say a few words about Austria and the far right freedom party there. They went on to become the biggest party in the parliament, nearly doubling their share from the last election. And he'll also talk about The UK where he predicted Labour's comfortable victory, but had a cautionary tale to tell. Herbert Kickel
is running under the banner of project Fox Councilor, which is a term with a history in Austria and Germany. The last person to be called Volkskannsler was Adolf Hitler. And this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of who they are and what they're doing. UK, looking more positive to lots of people. I will say that what you see here is a volatile political landscape. And a lot of the fuck you vote is going in Labour's direction on the last election. A lot of it's going to reform. And the question of whether after the next elections, the conservative party moves radically to the right itself or whether it is in fact overtaken and supplanted by reform is really one of the biggest questions in our politics today. Labour is going to have to make a lot of people it's going to have to live up to promises that it is not making. And at that point, Ajay came in. When I say fascism is coming,
many people tend to say it's not really fascism. It's like right wing populism, far right, and there is this new word called illiberal democracy, which is not a thing, actually. How did we come here for Western democracies? I think they didn't listen to people like me enough. People from India, from Italy, from Turkey, several other countries who have been through the same terrain, let's say, they were telling in London, in Paris, in Berlin that this is coming towards you. We see the first signs, so why not we do something together? And that was the main argument of how to lose a country. It wasn't to say that, okay, I am your Cassandra. Fascism is coming towards you. It was for a global call, a a call for global solidarity because this is how we get out of this political insanity, bringing together the experience in those countries that has been through the same path and the stamina of countries like UK, France, and Germany because we are exhausted. We lost our countries to a serious degree. For Western countries, this is how it happened, but this is a global problem. This is not about Brexit. This is not about Trump. This is a global problem of the system. The main conflict we are seeing today is the fundamental promise of neoliberal democracy, which is equality, basically, is in conflict with the fundamental promise of neoliberalism, which is not you're not equal. Some of you will survive. Some of you will will die, and we're going to watch the news about you dying on evening news while we're having our you know, whatever. Since democracy could not deliver equality and human dignity that it promised, people not interested in democracy. It's not easy to call people to action for democracy because it doesn't really change anything in their life. It didn't change anything in their life in the most important, sectors of life for them. So why would they be willing to sacrifice their lives or their time to stop democracy from, being, ruined or, you know, vanished?
People are angry, and they feel betrayed. And this is particularly true of the people who decide elections, swing voters. And swing voters are not the kind of old ideal of, oh, there's somebody rational who's sitting in the middle, and they're a bit centrist. And they'll sit in a suburb and they'll make an economic calculation about the offer that's no. Swing voters today are people who are there's there's lots of different types of them, but they're generally struggling and pissed off in one way or another. And there's a version of that which is people in left behind communities, people who are old and on Facebook is another example. Pretty much everyone 30 who feels generationally fucked by climate change, fucked by the housing market, fucked by the disappearance of the idea that you might be able to have a better life than your parents. People are angry. And it's not just that democracy isn't delivering. It's that a lot of people think that it is delivering progressively worse outcomes year on year. And a context in which progress starts looking like a false promise that will never be kept is the point at which people start roiling the dice. Argentina is a country which has been poorly governed for a long time, which has a history of military dictatorship, which has a history of largely poorly executed left populism and intense corruption, which has a recent history of hyperinflation. And, really, one of the most brutal elections that happened was the Argentinian election in which the former Peronist finance minister, who was responsible for hyperinflation, was running against Javier Millet with his chainsaw. And I think you've probably all seen the chainsaw. It's a very vivid image and the guy who wants to gut the state. I first saw this in 2016 looking at what was going on Reddit with The Donald, which is a community for Donald Trump, and all of the social memes that were being shared by the young people for Trump. There was a real sense of objection, overlap with incel culture and all sorts of other things, and just a sense of we're really fucked, but we need some motherfucker on our side. And the attraction of that, of the the strong leader, of the hyper leader, almost and especially if there's something not to like about them, it feels a bit more real. They they might be evil, but we know where they stand.
Wow. There's a lot to unpack already. Right? Where do you wanna start?
Fascism, of course.
Fascism.
No. It's it it's it's terrible, but I think this conversation reminds me of conversation I had with young people in Italy Mhmm. Who you could call progressive or be natural voters for the left, but they are not. They're completely out of the process of elections. They don't feel at all impacted. And they say, oh, Melania's government is not fascism because fascism is dead with World War two. And I believe this is symptomatic of the kind of blockage or being stuck in leftist movement where we stop at ideas, right, between us, like people who share the same values. And we have stimulating debates. So we debate whether it's fascism or not. We talk about whether this is a thing. Yeah. How to name it. Right. Right? Instead of talking about the real undermining of democratic institutions and the life threats that journalists, for example, are facing when they are investigating real corruption cases or students who are protesting the war and the occupation and the genocide in Gaza or the judges who are doing their job by making politicians accountable. The real undermining of our established democracy.
We're in theory rather than practice.
Yes. I think that that's the issue. We are not talking about solidarity, about resilience and resistance. It's really the time for action and to be in concretely, openly, proudly anti fascist and doing something about it together collectively.
Let's get back to the conversation then because we're starting to get into the challenges to politicians and parties and politics and to all of us, to people, and what we can do about it.
What we don't see is the past story of these countries, and it is always the same story. These people before warning for the sky, they actually resisted. Yeah. And they wanted to change the country. I was in Buenos Aires in 2003 when economic crisis happened. There was this big picatero moment and they people actually, out of poverty, they created a system without the money. So they really truly resisted, and they really wanted another type of government. But then the world and the dynamics of the country did not allow that change. That's why they are now voting for this. It's not like suddenly they're crazy and they're doing this. Just the resistance has been co opted or the anger, as you call it, is co opted by these anarchic capitalists as they call them in in in Argentina. But then I think enough self beating because one of the reasons why it took so long for Western democracies to understand what's happening is that because they chose to laugh at it. And because I know how it feels because we go went through the same thing in Turkey. As so as long as you laugh at it, it's it's going to be okay. You're safe. You are distancing yourself from the reality, but the reality, as you said, we have to land in the reality or assess the reality. Reality is this and Hitler actually actually came to power like that, and Franco, which is actually more similar to current dictators, came to power exactly like this with the power of religion and so on and so forth. Every every country has a sensitive issue or a fragile consensus. And one of the political tactics that far right or fascism, uses in every country almost in an identical way is to poke on these fragile consensuses. In Turkey, it's the Kurdish issue, for instance. If you poke on it, any coalition would break. And for Western democracies, nowadays, that issue is immigration. Any coalition that would happen in this country, political coalition, leftist, progressive, you will see second day that these fascists, far right, people on social media and otherwise in conventional media as well, they're going to poke this issue, immigration. What do you think about immigration? But you'd to think differently. And they're going to divide any coalition like this. One of the things that Polish coalition did was to, for instance, avoid immigration, which was the most important, dividing issue in the country. It's so interesting. I was in Berlin in Berlin demonstration. Demonstration was interesting, especially coming from Turkey. I expect some action. However, punctual Germans came to the venue, given time, everything is okay, few slogans, and then we went our homes. And I was walking towards and I saw this group of people. There was a lot of energy. They were chanting, slogans, singing, jumping, dancing, and so on, and they were behind the police corridor. And I noticed that there were some Palestinian flags. So I thought, okay. This is going to be the crack that fascism will put its hand in and then make it bigger and bigger. These big demonstrations in Germany are about the secret meeting that is revealed, which is joined by I IFTA members and Christian Democrats and big money in Germany. And in these secret meetings, the plan, was discussed in detail and the plan is about deportation of immigrants that are not assimilated enough plus Germans who support them. For obvious reasons, deport the word deportation is very important to Germany, so it was alarming. So in every city, there was there were these big demonstrations. However, these demonstrations were not really including those immigrants that talk about Gaza. But then we know that if we have a fragile consensus, this is something one should actually keep in mind all the time. If there is a fragile consensus, it's going to be attacked by the fascists, and this is going to be the reason that they're going to come to power. And one of these fragile consensus and the most important of them is actually democracy cannot change anything anymore. In Europe, over the pond, in Turkey as well, the conventional parties, cannot accommodate fully the energy political energy that's growing, the anger. They cannot organize it. They cannot accommodate it, and they cannot accommodate the variety of political demands. This is getting bigger and bigger, and it has to be sold very quickly because that's our only chance. I think the political, structures that we have been using since, I don't know, nineteenth century, political parties, representative democracy, and so on and so forth, they're like wreck now. They're dead, including the supranational networks, organizations such as UN. UN general secretary is shouting from the top of his lungs about Gaza, and nothing is happening. It's it's it's painful to see this. Anyway, these are I I think they're they look like wrecks. They look like wrecks to me. I don't know. Shipwrecks. And then these new political movements, new political formations, they are germinating, and they're becoming like shoaling fish around these wrecks. And they still could not turn the wreck, the political structures, into the reef, a living organism, a new political structure. And this is our going to be our job, how to do it.
So I love EJ's image of the wreck, turning into a reef, of of choosing the reef over the wreck. And actually, she writes about it in her book, which is called Together 10 Choices for a Better Now, the choice of the reef over the wreck. And I wanna read it to you in full, if that's okay. In the 2016, a junked Airbus was laid down underwater in Kusadasi Bay, a holiday destination on Turkey's Aegean Coast. The idea had been to create a new spot for divers to explore, and in time the wreck would be accepted and slowly embraced by the creatures of the sea. The dead plane would accommodate life. The metal skeleton this time covered with a different flesh made of a vibrating multiplicity would revive. Eventually it wouldn't be called a wreck but a reef. A new sovereignty would arise in Mare Nostrum housing a multitude of creatures. Until recently the stories concerning this underwater attraction had been about how the plane was made to sink But soon, the divers would be telling tales of the octopus sprawling in the cockpit or the sea turtles making love in the business class toilet. Eventually, life would transform the skeleton leaving no trace of the wreck. The schooling and shoaling fish that had been homeless would have a new shelter. And she closes, and this is what politics might look like in the coming decades. It's beautiful.
Let me say a couple of words about Poland and about politics and then connect that back to Germany, if that's okay. I talked to lots of people in Poland about lots of things, and we did a few things there. And lots of people in the media like saying Donald Tusk won the Polish elections, and this could not be further from the truth. Donald Tusk had an important role, but Donald Tusk was one of the more hated people in Poland and still is. There was a very grave risk that Donald Tusk was going to lead to the opposition losing that election. Look, Tusk did just enough, and there are important things that he did like move civic platform, a traditionally center right, quite socially conservative party in a liberal direction on things like abortion and come out for abortion up to twelve weeks, which was critically important in giving some hope to these young women that something might change. It's interesting. The top issues in that election, if you ask people what are the biggest problems, cost of living, very high, health, very high. Nobody thought anyone could do anything about either of those. So we're already starting from a really broken place. And I will say pretty much everyone with half a brain cell who wasn't telling themselves a lying story in Poland, a year and a half ago, two years ago, was in the place that you were describing of, we're fucked. We're never changing this. They're here forever. And I was very pessimistic and worried until two weeks beforehand. There was a point in the summer of last year where the fuck you vote was flooding to a outright pro Russian under 30 incel party called Confederastia. And they were up to 14% in the polls, and they were gonna be in government with law and justice. So it was gonna be even more crazy right wing government. They went down to 7%. They halved between June and November because politics is volatile today and because people went and used social media and the media and various other means to say, you know what? Their new sexy leader, economist, and a businessman in his thirties, and he's huge on TikTok, and he's talking about economic freedom, and everybody should have a house and two cars and a barbecue and meat on the barbecue and fuck the globalists. And COVID was a conspiracy, by the way. But, anyway, meat on the barbecue. Anyway, Menson, this guy in 2019, fortunately, gave a speech where he said, we are against Jews, gays, abortion, taxes, and the European Union. People saw that video a lot, I will say, in different forms. And, yeah, their their support halved, and the fuck you vote went in other directions. But it was things like freedom and women's rights and European Union and a vision of a different kind of society and just the overreach of the populist right, which ended up being the levers which I think brought people into the polls. And also something went viral in those last two weeks. It became like one of these social viral phenomena, like what happened with GameStop where all of these kids in America started buying shares in this totally fucked secondhand games business and rundown shopping arcades all over the country and bankrupted a $15,000,000,000 hedge fund, which was short selling this business. It was that kind of thing. It went viral. And so everyone was, like, started challenging each other. It's like, how many people are they gonna bring to the polls with them? There were these long queues until three in the morning when everybody knew that the opposition had already won because everybody wanted to vote. And something magical happened. And you talk to the polls afterwards, even this far afterwards, and it shines off the apple a little bit, but the light in their eyes in the sense that you can actually have a revolution. So what I'm saying is things can happen, and they can happen very fast. And a huge amount of that energy, and and that outcome was driven not by the parties. The parties had to do a certain number of things. They had to be vessels and vehicles and channels. But that's how parties, I think, have to think of themselves now rather than as the people with all the answers and the hyperleaders that everyone else has to follow. You have to have a slightly different approach. It's hard to get politicians to adopt that approach. So for me, this is it. We we have to build our reef
out of the wreck. We have to acknowledge that our existing systems just aren't fit for purpose. And we also have to work with them. We have to grow the new life in them. We don't have a choice to just throw them all out. And I think Paul is speaking to what that means in practice when he says that politicians and parties have to be vessels and vehicles and channels rather than being the people with all the answers and the hyper leaders that everyone else has to follow.
I am actually hopeful about Germany right now because we're seeing a significant level of social mobilization, not just marches on the street, but also, what's happening in the trade unions and in business and in the cultural sector, among creatives and digital consultants. And there something's gonna happen. Try and stop this in Germany. It's gonna happen in Austria. Some things are gonna happen in France. And these are gonna come out of society rather than out of politics in the first instance. I think there are some hard conversations we need to have. Immigration is one of those issues. I'm not gonna go into the kind of hard conversations we need to have because I think it's on multiple levels. But I think progressives have fallen out of step with public opinion on this, And we need to understand what they're getting wrong and what we're getting wrong and try and find some solutions on that. The war in Gaza is very possibly, if you look at some of the open source intelligence, sparked at least partly by Russian training and and material support, damas, and encouragement, and other kinds of motives and incentives that people have to deliver a Trump victory. Because if you look at the British cyber politician called Stafford Beer who worked in Chile with Allende, one of his great quotes was the purpose of the system is what it does. You look at what the war in Gaza does, Atlantic politics to America and to Europe, It cleaves progressives right down the middle. My polling in Germany finds that more Germans, particularly on the progressive side of things, think that you should have a ceasefire rather than support Israel to destroy Hamas. And that's not where the current German government is really at in terms of its policy, shall we say. I'm not making normative statements. I'm making objective factual statements about what people from the bottom up think about these things. We do need to get serious on the substance, and there's a piece of work that needs to be done there. But, honestly, we are now in a cauldron of boiling discontent. And unless we find ways to channel that energy in more constructive directions, and that's a social project, It's not in the first instance a political project because politics is too slow.
I think we haven't found found a solution yet to what do we do when divisions arise. Right. Because sometimes we feel they come from the outside trying to divide us as people who believe in the same values. But sometimes these are real issues that we need to find a way to democratically and openly talk about them without imploding. And so do we take the risk of implosions? Because we cannot control the outcome of an open hearted, transparent conversation where we bring people who don't who disagree, and we still wanna come out of this conversation more united than ever. The result could be that we all are not together anymore, which is a disaster in a in a time where fascism is really,
the threat for democracies. We shouldn't pretend this is easy. Right? But by not even having the discussion, we're not we're not healing those divides where or or finding ways through them we didn't anticipate. We're just pretending they're not there. And actually, the result of pretending they're not there is is that the division happens anyway because then the far right, as as AJ says, will just put their thumb on that fragile consensus and lean on it. There is, as we say, not a not a simple answer, but there is something clearly in our populations. We we were walking along, the street in London last time you were here and saw that artwork that's that says the words antisemitism is Islamophobia.
And Islamophobia is antisemitism because it's all racism. It's all an attempt to divide. It's all an attempt to divide us because it's being against antisemitism. And against Islamophobia is the uniting value should be the uniting value for people who believe in universal human rights. But how do we make sure that we are united? And how do you express being pro rights and universal human rights today in the context of genocide, in a context of threat because you are a Jewish person or because you are a Muslim person? I think the real divide here today is really Zionism. Are you a Zionist or you are not? Which is not linked to being Jewish or being Muslim or being Christian. Because Zionism is an ideology that is colonialist, This gives ethnical superiority to one religion over the others. It's justifying apartheid. It's justifying genocide. So as a human being, do you justify these things? If it was South Africa apartheid, would you support South African apartheid, or would you support the liberation of the people who are oppressed by apartheid? That's the question. Right? Like, every time, every context has these very fundamental issues, and this is the real line of divide. It's not antisemitism. It's not Islamophobia. These are just things that are brought there to divide us over our identities. Right? But it's not about that. It's about our rights as human beings for to have a dignified life where we are. Determination
for possibility. We always look back from a point further on in time. There's a wonderful title of a new book that's out called One Day Everyone Will Have Been Against This. And and it looks so simple from there. And everyone likes to think that what they would have done would have been a certain thing. But when you're in that moment as we are, sometimes it doesn't seem so simple. I was talking to a friend, who's just moved back to The UK from living in Los Angeles for a long time and she said that the reason she was moving was because she couldn't even say anything about what was going on in Gaza because Zionism was equated with being anti Semitic without without any gray area whatsoever, any any conversation possible.
Do you realize that when you say that you can't discuss a topic openly without being threatened, whether in your work or your personal life, this is the symptom of dictatorship? Right. This is authoritarianism? I mean, I grew up in a dictatorship, and I know what it is when you're afraid to speak your mind. And we are afraid at a global level. We're talking about a lady who I imagine is English or American or or and she's raised in a democracy, and now she can speak her mind and she needs to leave a country. Right. And she's able to leave the country, by the way, because she still has a freedom of movement, which is not possible for many other people. But we need to acknowledge that. It's a time where freedom of speech is not possible anymore for everything, and some topics just you have the mic removed from you. We are at the heart of the dysfunction of our relationship with democracy Because we are seeing the flaws, and they are very toxic. But we are in it, and we wanna make it quirk. And so I think acknowledging these flaws that are very threats now, more than flaws. And we know that democracy should be a good partner. Right?
Take the dysfunctional relationship and maybe go to counseling. Right? Like, we've gotta have those difficult conversations rather than just break up because breaking up with democracy is
dictatorship. And we need to learn how to have these conversations peacefully and listening really to each other, deep listening and understanding. And
It must be possible.
We need to make it possible.
First of all, I think political organizers should work talk about these things more than me as a writer. Yes. I do think about politics. I follow politics. Since I'm 19, I'm writing professionally about politics. But on the ground, things are happening so changing so fast, and political organizers should be given more value or, like, you know, they should be listened to more carefully than the political gurus or whatever. There is an energy flow towards who says something is broken, whereas those who pretend that its center is still holding are not interesting anymore to people. That is so true, and at the end, you end up like France, actually. Emmanuel Macron was the poster boy of liberal democracy center for entire Europe, but then his last immigration law was so horrible that Marine Le Pen said that this is our ideological victory. One of the reasons that Europe has been so late in realizing what's happening to her has been this misunderstanding or, like, mistake rather, political mistake. They really thought that they have to focus on the center to strengthen the center against the far right. Whereas a center is such a ambiguous, untrustworthy thing, you can easily pull pull it towards right. In order to strengthen the center, you have to strengthen the left side of the spectrum. I think Europe, European establishment has to decide which was it is more terrifying, socialism or fascism. I don't want to bring right away those concepts of kindness, truth, faith, and so on, but I cannot talk about this these topics only through data or observations and so on and so forth. What we need to call the spade a spade in a completely different manner. What fascism today new form of fascism today is doing is being the master of politics of emotions. They're not necessarily promising anything. They're not giving you a political program. It's so easy to be far right. You you're against abortion. Yeah. Women are really annoying. Yeah. Oh, okay. You're one of us. If we want to tell the truth, first, we have to be humble. We are not enlightened citizens who are going to enlighten the other citizens. It's not going to work. Those days of stages and people preaching are gone. Everybody has a microphone. There is no stage. So the sense of equality should be really deeply acknowledged, first of all. And second, we have to understand that reality is never ever dark as it seems when you look at it from a distance. When you're in reality, the remedy of all the darkness is there. So reality is not something that we have to, you know, distance ourselves from or protect ourselves from. Reality is where we have to be. These are big concepts, but I do think that this is the way that we talk have to talk about politics now. Yes. We can talk about party politics and we should every day maybe. We should talk about numbers, but we also need to find inspiring and believable truthful way of talking about politics. And we have to admit that we need a progressive politics of emotions. What are we actually for? I'm like, we have to go back to basics. This is my main argument.
So I wanna wind back a bit to this challenge that Ece poses where she says, the European establishment needs to decide whether it's more scared of socialism or more scared of fascism. Is that how you see it? I mean, that's a powerful
sentence she's that she said. I've been hearing a lot of people equating between the extremes as if someone who's radical towards the left and radical towards the right are the same kind of people. For me, like, a a left extremist would be like an activist for climate to save the planet or social justice wants equality for all, while a far right extremist would kill others because they think they have a superior race or a superior religion, and I don't think we can equate between these. And there is no extremes for me. There is the far right extremist who wants to just violence, use violence as a means to their xenophobic superior race end. Well, there are other people who are finding that usual ways of making change are not working, so they go in to throw paint on a painting or or, I don't know, what type of, I think, peaceful kinda way of fighting this injustice and bringing attention to what really matters, which is humanity saved and planet safe.
I hear you. I I think this is somewhere where you and I see the world a little bit differently. And don't get me wrong, I'm not equating those two things. But like in my view and in the work I'm trying to do this, this notion of like citizen democracy where actually we have an opportunity to shape what the options are, not just choose between them, which I sort of talk about as consumer democracy. That distinction is a bit different to the sort of left right thing. I would argue that across the political spectrum as it's sort of conventionally understood, there's actually a sort of participatory space at any of those places and an authoritarian space in a lot of those places. And I do think that the far left can be quite dangerous in that sense as well. In conservatism, there is potentially a really positive tradition of family and community and responsibility. But there is also and what we're seeing at the moment with the far right, like and I am absolutely there as you know that that is the great threat of our time. There is a very myopic kind of them and us separation hierarchy, a power concentration that is deeply unhealthy. There's an authoritarian right and there is a communitarian right potentially. At least at least the possibility of that. And equally, like, while the left may in some ways seem a kind of natural home and can be in many places a natural home for the idea that everyone should be involved, It can also become a kind of big state should make everything equal for everyone in a way that also crushes individual agency participation contribution. If I have a political hero, it was probably Paddy Ashdown who was the leader of the Liberal Democrats in Britain for a long time. And Paddy wrote a book in 1989 that was called Citizens Britain, a Radical Agenda for the nineteen nineties. And actually, he's talked about an awful lot of things that that I think we could deal with now. He talks about participatory democracy and and universal basic income and all of these sorts of things. But critically at the center of his offer, the center of his diagnosis, he talked about two possible futures. Citadel Britain, where Britain retreats behind the English Channel and power centralizes in Whitehall and the police become a militarized arm of state. Sound a bit familiar? And he contrasted that with Citizens Britain. This lovely phrase where people's homes in all their messy diversity are the true centers of power. And then obviously, that's a sort of centrist position in many ways. The Liberal Democrats are conventionally centrist party. And actually, the version of centrism that is arguably too present in the world today is one that's just a bit wishy washy, a bit sort of neither one thing nor the other, and actually quite technocratic and and thinking that there are experts who should decide for people. And in a sense, that's a kind of authoritarian centrism. Whereas what Paddy was talking about I think was a was a participatory, an open citizen centrism. And so I think the way I want to see this is rather than it being a question of choosing between fascism and socialism, I would rather see it as a moment to move the whole political debate into a space of we want everyone to be able to make the contribution they're capable of. And that sort of participatory space that that citizen democracy can have space for all of the existing political spectrum. It just isn't gonna look like what we're getting right now.
I don't think what you're saying and what I'm saying are con in contradiction. I believe opening the conversation and having participatory mechanisms is not antagonistic with bringing your political values into the conversation. I think the center nowadays has become, as you said, completely it's it's for me, it's void who claim the the parties who claim to be centrist have moved towards the right, and they are supporting far right when the far right is powerful in the geography they're active in. And so I guess what you're saying is, like, we are probably more oligarchies at this point than democracies, which means that small group of people, elite, are deciding for all of us, and we need to go back to the core principles of democracy, where it's people discussing, deciding, participating together, and having political systems that are inclusive of everyone, not just a few who are kind of powerful enough to maintain themselves in the system.
Actually, I'm almost as frightened, almost as maybe more worried in some ways about the technocrats who think they'll save us from the rise of the far right, who think that they'll do it for us than I am about the far right themselves. Because it's when you suppress the agency that you actually end up pushing people into the arms of those things. So, for me, if we don't open up the systems and processes, if politicians and parties don't become vessels and vehicles to use Paul's language, then that's when we're really stuck. And I think, actually, anyone who gets elected within that frame will end up being shaped by the systems and processes that we've got. I I would go so far as to argue that even Obama, like, campaigned on a in the in 2008 and on this, yes, we can. And then was elected and went into a system where, thanks for electing me. You've done your bit. Now I'll go and do it. It wasn't really, yes, we can. It was,
alright, off I go. I recognize this. I mean, as a former politician, that's exactly how the system is built. You see one person, one vote. And so you see a person as a way to be elected and be in office. And I don't think it's more than that. In my political training, I knew that as a political party, we had to do stuff between elections, but the time was tight. The resources were small. And when your office is difficult to also be active as a party. I mean, that's why also there are separate functions in a political party. Radical change needs to happen where in political parties, they see people with new ideas, innovation as a source of getting more power and not being afraid of having newcomers and, like, steal your power away as a political leader.
When people are only understood as voters, their only agency is at election time, and they become only a kind of means to the end of power for a political party or for a politician. And yet actually the opportunity in this time, I think, is that people can be sources of ideas and energy and resources. We can have a a society where we get to better outcomes because we're tapping into that collective energy and wisdom and resource. We can face the challenge of our time with a logic that says all of us are smarter than any of us. But it's very hard to do that from within existing political systems and structures that that incentivize politicians as you experienced as a politician to keep thinking about to keep such a close focus on can I get over the line at the next election? It tends to build us into a space where we're competing rather than channeling, I guess, rather than drawing on all of that creativity and energy that could be. And that in itself pushes people away. And I don't wanna be too hard on politicians
as well because when the system incentivizes this type of behavior, it feels like almost impossible to do something more than what is already super exhausting, which is running campaigns, getting elected, and doing the job you've been elected for. And so it takes a lot of courage and leadership, but also time out of all the things that you need to do to try to implement these participatory approaches. Right. And so how do we encourage more politicians to do that? Because we're saying basically that we need to change the system. As it is, it's not working anymore. The relationship is dysfunctional. And so how we can we have these leaders as well be open and how can we support them to do these changes? Otherwise, people will still feel left out, disposable, and they will be just even more disgusted by the system.
Where we are now is that almost everyone is left out, almost everyone really. And the few who are left in are under unsustainable pressure as well. Like, this isn't working for anyone actually. And how we open that up is such a challenge.
Yes. Totally agree. And we should go back to Paul and AJ now because they ended with some real calls to arms.
We are all human beings, and emotions is the thing that makes us tick. And, you know, if you anchor into your intuitions and encourage people to do the same, give them just enough, then they they can make better decisions. But they need better options in order to be able to do that. I started 25 ago being much more interested in and invested in things like participatory democracy and how do we reorganize how we're doing society to bring people in so that we can make better decisions that have more legitimacy, go from an empty stadium into a living forum. And these are great and important things. And the reality is you need politics to open the space for that, for it to have any purchase. You know, because these things don't have constitutional force in most of our countries, and politics has to midwife participation. That's the critical path. And what I see is a central scenario of electoral democracy moving towards authoritarianism and populist right politics in a large number of these elections. And, you know, what we showed you Austria and Germany and France and and so on and so forth. This is a pretty, forbidding landscape. All of that is not inevitable, and things that people do over the course of this year can make a difference. We're talking to lots of people and and helping lots of people who are seeking to make a difference in different parts of that landscape. Many people have pieces of the puzzle. People who are connected to movements and communities and campaigning organizations, people who have talents, people who are creatives, people who are in marketing, people who have money, because this is not something that people sitting on a stage solve. This is something that that that society, the communities, the change agents can address. And good things can snowball very fast in this environment as well as bad things. That's the world that we live in. Part of my job is to help try and make the politicians better vehicles, better channels, and to meet society in a better way. Part of my job is to help society in some of these battleground places to mobilize in the right way so that the right kind of bottom up energy is coming through. A lot of it is wandering around talking to smart people and trying to connect them. And each of us will have a different answer to what is what's mine to do. I don't want to get to the end of this year and look back and think, you know what? There are all these things I could have done, and I didn't try them because it does feel very nineteen thirties to me.
I've been going to places, talking to people, talking with people, and I'm mostly in rooms like this one. And I try to leave the room. I will I will not say hopeful, but faithful. This is something I've been writing about. Hope is too fragile a word for our times because these are times that we might have to act when there is no hope. At the end of the day, it comes at the very bottom of it, it's actually we believe in humankind. Even though everything is horrible and, like, insane, we somehow believe that things can be good. The other day, I watched a documentary about second World War. Actually, it's not about city. It's about city planning. I do these nerdy things sometimes. And there was a bit about second world war. Warsaw, Poland had suffered most in second world war, probably. And the city was leveled. Years later, when the war was over, they rebuilt the entire city, including the old city, which was centuries old. So they actually faked it. Warsaw is fake. And the head planner actually told this, yeah, we know it's fake, but we have to recreate beauty and so on. The interesting part of this story is, I think, is that the blueprint of the city was saved during the war by the city planners. In concentration camps in several other places, it was, you know, hand to hand and so on. So I see here faith in humankind. There is no hope. There is nothing you can depend on. But then they do not only believe in future. You might think that. But, actually, it's more important that we have to learn from today, speaking of good examples. They believed in what they did. I am not sure many of us believe have faith in ourselves as much as we'd like to think. I know a guy who runs an institute about future of democracy, and he's a secret prepper. And he is running a program about future of democracy. Not many people not enough people, I'm afraid, believe in what they do, what they say, and that we can do this together. When I say faith, many people think that I'm talking about religion because religion has monopolized the word, the concept of faith, and the ability to believe for thousands of years. When I talk about faith, I talk about faith in humanity, in humans, and so on. And that is the most important skill of humankind. That is the biggest invention of human history, actually, faith. Not God because our ability to have faith actually created God, ability, and the need. However, funny thing about faith, it you cannot prove it. You just have it or not. It's just a decision. It's a stance. I think first before doing anything, we have to look in ourselves and in each other. How much faith do you do we have? And we have to calibrate our actions accordingly. Otherwise, you're going to get exhausted, but only the faithful will not get exhausted. This is where everything begins. Because when you believe, you can do anything. As opposed to what the system is telling us, humans are, by default, prone to sacrifice as opposed to what social Darwinists think. We become happy. We find meaning in life by sacrificing, by giving. We have to go back to these basics because it is only then we can explain what kind of world we want, what kind of democracy we want, what kind of humanity we want. Otherwise, nobody would believe us, I think. And there are pretty good things that we can say. It's just that we have to remember to talk in that language, in the language of basics, in the language of emotions, and in the language of why we are doing this, really.
I love where Ajay ends here. I think it's such a powerful idea, this idea that hope is too fragile a word. I've always found Rebecca Solnit's idea of hope quite powerful. She has this idea in her book, Hope in the Dark, where she says that optimism is the belief that things will be alright no matter what we do. And pessimism is the belief that things will be terrible no matter what we do. And both excuse us from action. And what she's doing there is she's distinguishing hope from optimism. She's saying that hope is something where actually it demands action. And I think that's part of what Ece is reacting against, this idea of optimism being, like, you can just get on with it and and everything will be okay. But I think Ece is going a step further than Solnit, actually. I think she's saying sometimes there might be moments when we have to act even when it doesn't seem possible that there's a positive outcome. We might and in those circumstances, we're acting not actually from anything external, but something internal, like a belief in humanity, a faith in humanity. And the more I sit with that, the more I feel like actually that's the most essential thing.
I grew up not believing in people. That's really the consequence of being brought up in a dictatorship. My parents. This is like a couple of Tunisian intellectuals, hard believer believers in universal human rights, but what can you do when you speak up your mind, when you're part of the resistance? You get the risk to be jailed and thrown and exile or lose your job. And so they had two kids to raise. And, they basically the discourse was we deserve, as people, our regime. Right? And we need to be afraid of our neighbors because who knows? They can be informing about us, and this is how the regime sustained itself. And I think when Tunisian people started to protest peacefully back in 2010, it was a Tunisian revolution. We didn't know it then. Now it's called the Arab Spring. Right? I I felt that something big was going on, but my father would said, no. Don't get involved. This is yet another Intifada, which is in Arabic means an uprising. And usually for us, it means that it ends in a bloodbath, and it's gonna be repressed. Because, you know, in our history, it's not like people accept and submit oppression. They revolt against it. They try to do something. But the story that remains is the end. Right? All the violence and the dead people and the sacrificed lives. And so the fear is maintained. But because I grew up not knowing about these things, I felt the hope, I guess, that you mentioned. And lots of people felt that. People of my generation, not my parents' generation. This is how we all gave what we could to participate in this movement that for us was clear it was a revolution. Right? My father still says it today. Umizi knew it was a revolution. I didn't believe it was anything that a revolt that will end up in violent end. And so I guess what AJ is saying is the this faith. Right? Like, this faith that humanity is gonna rise up against oppression whether we like it or not, whether we participate or not. There will be people who will say no and will be risking their lives to liberate all of us. And so I have this faith that even when there is no hope because you the risk is so high, the faith that people will rise up because it has always happened in history and I witnessed and I was part of it in my country, but it happens everywhere else. It's the story of humanity. So the faith that it's going to happen because it already happened, and this is the story of human being evolution.
It's going to happen. So powerful. Thank you. Should we leave it there?
This was How to Save Democracy, the podcast for people who love democracy but know we've got serious work to do to save it. This episode was hosted by John Alexander and me, Omi Zin Khalifa, and produced by Joe Barrett.
How to Save Democracy is produced in partnership with The Conduit and wouldn't be possible without the kind support of Open Society Foundations and you, our listeners. We've got big plans. So if you can chip in to help us make them happen, we'd love to have you on board.