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THE POLITICAL SITUATION IN EUROPE: THREATS AND OPPORTUNITIES
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Justice Party under Jaroslaw Kaczynski and
prime minister Beata Szidlo has adopted serious
decisions designed to impede the operation of
the rule of law and to control the media, under-
mining democracy and the independence of the
judiciary, and in clear contravention of the val-
ues of the EU.
Faced with these actions, the European
Commission has for the first time implemented
an early warning mechanism (Figure 2) designed
to collect information and opinions from differ-
ent bodies in order to identify whether there is
a systemic threat to the rule of law in a member
state, with two objectives: to force the govern-
ment of the member state to negotiate a solu-
tion to remove these threats or, in the worst-
case scenario, to activate Article 7 of the Treaty
of Lisbon, which provides both for a preventive
mechanism and a sanctioning mechanism that,
while it does not provide for the expulsion or
suspension of a member from membership of
the EU, does allow for the suspension of the
state’s voting rights.
New actors on the far left (when nobody
believed in them)
As noted above, there are two other types of
populism in the EU: populism that has no clear
ideological affiliation, and populism of the far
left. The prime example of the first is Italy’s Five
Star Movement, whose clearest connection to
the second (particularly in the case of Podemos
in Spain) is its rejection of the “political caste”,
without differentiating between parties, based
on the accusation that this caste has occupied
the state and constructed a generalised system
of privileges and corruption.
The most outstanding –indeed the only–
representatives of the far left have been Syriza
and Podemos, the first in government, the sec-
ond in opposition. It’s also important to note
that these parties lack any close or even distant
forebears within the EU, in so far as they do not
openly recognise the heritage either of classical
communist parties or of green parties, with
their only direct inspiration being the mild re-
covery of the French radical left in the 1990s
and the first decade of this millennium.
The discourse of both parties is based on a
radical critique of the “neoliberal” economic
and social policies applied by conservative and
socialist parties and imposed by the EU, com-
bined with a denunciation of the behaviour in
power of these two forces, whom they consider
in reality to constitute a single entity, defined as
a “caste” (a usage first coined in Italy) or a
“bunker”. Using this line of attack, and in the
wake of the economic crisis, both of these po-
litical forces made very significant progress in
2015, although their actions on the ground
have diverged.
Once in government, Syriza went from pro-
voking a full-blown crisis in the EU in the first
half of 2015 to become the principal guarantor
of Brussels’ latest economic rescue package for
Greece, which had been agreed and applied
successively by the social democratic left
(PASOK) and the traditional right (New Democ-
racy), to the point where the executive of Alexis
Tsipras has become the target of new general
strikes against cuts to spending and welfare
provision. In other words, Greek left-wing pop-
ulism has transformed into a party that com-
bines radical slogans with traditional decisions,
and is no longer a problem for the operation of
the EU.
For its part, Podemos proposes a programme
of radical reform to state spending, income and
operations, signalling its opposition to the EU’s
policy of economic austerity, without ever for-