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?
