Hubris

Hubris

 

“I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.”, Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

 

 

London, 31st March 1990. A large peaceful protest against the implementation of the Community Charge (commonly known as the Poll Tax) ended up in looting and rampaging amidst large confrontations with the police. Eight months later the most sucessfull British Prime - Minister of the post-war era, winner of three elections and with the Labour Party still finding its voice, was thrown out of office after a sucessfull putsch led by Conservative Party grandees. Curiously enough, the British electorate didn't reject the Conservative Party. Two years later, John Major won another term for the party and Tony Blair saw himself as an heir to the Iron Lady and still won three elections. The same thing happened in another corner of Europe in 1994, when the Portuguese Prime Minister, also winner of three elections and visibly unbeateable in the ballot box, was confronted by huge protests folowing an apparently minor decision of raising the toll price of the major Lisbon bridge. 

These events came to my mind this year, first in Turkey and now in Brazil where I live. The same mix is present. Apparently successfull leaders. Years of prosperity. Political opposition struggling to find its place. A minor decision. Protests. Initial violent reaction of the police. Spreading out of the protests. So, what is going on? 

 

 

 

It gets to the BRICS as well...

 

 

What many people forget is that growth and prosperity are as socially dislocating as recessions. What Turkey and Brazil are finding is that there is a flipside to success. Starting with Turkey, it's a complete nonsense to say that Erdogan is transforming the country into a proto-Islamic Republic and that the alcohol restrictions are just a step away from Islamist theocracy. Using that standard, the United States and its Calvinistic view of alcohol consumption and purchase (just buy spirits in many of the American states and try carry them in the street in other than non-transparent brown bags) would be a Christian one. What AKP did in terms of the presence of religion in Turkey was re-balance the social engineering of Kemal Ataturk which was clearly unsustainable in the long-run given the country's cultural and religious moorings. And that was fine with most of the Turkish society. That in part was why he successfully won three elections in a row and managed to beat the army into submission. But three more things happened. First, the total collapse of the Kemalist opposition preventing that any dissenting voices make themselves heard inside the political system. Secondly, the social dislocation, seen clearly with rise of the Anatolian elite as opposed to the traditional Istanbul based one, following many years of growth and the emergence of a much more pluralistic society. And lastly, that ancient sin of hubris which tends to infect successful political leaders. Margaret Thatcher thought she could break the poll tax protests the same way she broke the back of the coal workers and unions one decade before. She overlook the fact that those that were protesting in 1990 were not a dying minority fighting for its privileges but the new Britain that emerged from her reforms. Erdogan is following the same path by forgetting that the people in Taksim square are not the Kemalist officers he brushed from power by precisely mobilizing the street. It is one side of that same street he commanded in the past that today sits comfortably with the balance found in Turkish society and that demands inclusion in the decision making process. 

The events in Brazil have many similarities with the Turkish ones. Once more, we have ten years of growth and prosperity and consequently of social change. And then major social protests born out of apparently minor decisions. To understand the social change dimension I normally use the example of the shift in the political base of the governing party, the PT. While in the 90's, the PT was the party of the industrial belt of São Paulo. It is today the Party of the emerging middle class of Brazil located many miles outside São Paulo, in perennial poor regions of the country like the Northeast. If the political base of one of the major parties in the political system changes that much it is because the underlying social fabric of the country has also suffered a major upheaval. 

Everytime I talked about the economic crisis in Europe, and in particularly in my country, I was always met by a mixture of surprise and incomprehension by the average Brazilian. "You have security, education, a health system that works and public transportation, so why do you feel so depressed?" was the typical question I received here. And freed from the survival trap following ten years of prosperity that is precisely what they are demanding from their political system. Lula was always too conscious that he was running a successful software that he inherited from the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso and while he intelligently adapted it to his agenda of inclusion, he never questioned that the main objective was to keep the "pie growing". Except for the last year in government where he finally succumbed to a more ideological agenda (true, hubris again) he always maintained his own radicals at bay and outside economic policy. President Dilma is not made of the same cloth. She truly believes  in a leftist nationalistic and state centric development agenda forgetting that after a decade of growth what Brazilians were going to demand was a true reform of the state and specially the delivery of essential services. Had she maintained a high tempo of growth probably this day of reckoning could have been delayed, like the Chinese have been doing for decades. But the incapacity of producing results combined with a very centralizing and autocratic way of exercising power merely accelerated the demands of the new Brazilian middle class.

Should a further slowdown in China make this country the next on the list?