WHAT TO LEARN FROM THE ELECTION OF DONALD TRUMP
On Tuesday 8 November, I was in Washington, ready to spend the evening in front of a big screen, along with about 500 election experts from 80 countries, who were taking part with me to the biannual
Global Electoral Organization Conference.
After a few days spent listening to experts and US politicians, intensive CNN sessions and television debates with mainly the same faces, and after a long day hopping from one polling station in Virginia to one in Maryland and then Washington DC, today I can admit that I have a rather different idea on the "great" American democracy.
We should of course not overlook the flaws of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and of her candidacy itself, nor should we disregard those arguments on the revenge of white males and on the “angry” rural areas. Yet it is fundamental to understand that Trump won the Presidency also through an electoral system that favored him, even after losing the popular vote by 2 million votes. This victory seems a contradiction in purely “democratic” terms.
The "quality" of the political debate and the rules of the political game are clearly emerging as a determining factor which favors “populist” options, as proven during the US elections, the referendum on Brexit, but also the growing possibility of the electoral success of Hofer in Austria, Marine Le Pen in France or Alternative fur Deutschland in Germany. Social exclusion, alienation, fear of unemployment, these are not the only factors explaining why so many people want to build walls and throw out migrants, do not care about "details" such as civil rights or the risks of climate change, and decide to trust a well-known tax evader, whose mentor planned the McCarthy witch-hunt, and who just nominated a white supremacist as his strategic advisor.
In addition to responding to the inadequacies of economic and social policies, we must understand what the role of the rules of the game (or lack thereof) is in turning policy options - which are likely to undermine the cohesion and peaceful co-existence in many of our societies - into alternatives that sound attractive and convincing.
Let us take for instance the issue of the Constituency (the fact that the US President is not directly elected by the citizens, but by the Great electors, chosen by each state based on the number of Congress members and of the population). This 18
th century system originated from the idea that a gentleman does not campaign for himself, and that political parties were unbecoming. It was even believed that, if granted (male) universal suffrage, candidates of the most populous states would always win (the same argument used today in Europe to reject the idea of transnational lists for the European Parliament). In the words of Hamilton, one of the fathers of American federalism, voters had to choose "a small number of persons, selected by their fellow citizens from the general mass, probably between those able to possess the information and discernment necessary for these complex tasks."
However, the reason why the system has remained the same in the following decades is that Southern States demanded to count among the number of voters slaves too, who obviously could not vote. Today there are no more slaves, but what was kept is the over-representation of smaller states (similar to the over-representation of small Member States in the European Parliament). Like in Europe, there is not a single constituency, but 50 different ones (plus Washington DC). Moreover, Trump won in a "winner takes it all" way: who gets the most votes, no matter how many, takes all the voters of a certain state. Some influential constituents were outraged by this practice, because it had turned the voters in "lackeys of the party and entities without brains".
Despite attempts, the latest in the 1960s, this system has never been completely changed, although it is clearly outdated in comparison to modern democracies. The consequences are there for all to see. Hillary Clinton would have easily won the election with almost a million more votes if citizens had voted by universal suffrage. A wider margin than Al Gore.
And what about financing? During the conference in Washington, Anne Ravel, the President of the Federal Commission on Elections (whose mandate is to apply the rules on campaign financing), has explicitly admitted that the commission does not work, does not apply the law, it is constantly blocked by the vetoes of its Republican members to any rule (it has 6 members, 3 Republicans, 3 Democrats). Imagine the effect of these statements on the African delegates at the conference, who are constantly reprimanded about corruption and undue funding...
Moreover, the Supreme Court’s decision in the "Citizen United" case of 2010 has effectively re-introduced the possibility of unlimited funding to organizations that support this or that candidate: Anne Ravel explained that, although in theory donors must be declared, there is a parallel system that is impossible to penetrate. The total cost of the campaign was calculated to 6.9 billion dollars (6.3 in 2012), of which 1.2 from Super-Pacs associations (political action committees) and 2 billion from 100 "families". Anne Ravel always said that the political system and the media are in the hands of few economic actors, and this has a certain impact on the campaign, on who has the power to nominate and who is elected. Just one example: women and minority representatives still have real problems of access to politics, not the least because donors are, for the most part, white males.
It is important to note that, to the general lack of transparency and to the dizzying spending by a few, in the specific case Donald Trump’s campaign we should add a twist, one we in Italy know very well: the “celebrity” effect. Jed Bush had managed to raise more than $ 100 million just for the primary, but this money seemed peanuts compared to the $2 billion estimated to be the value of the free campaign given by the media to Donald Trump, because he was already a reality show celebrity and a piece of "walking news". A death trap, one in which money determines whether you "are at the table or you are the menu”, as a fundraiser effectively summed up during the discussion. How can you compete "democratically" in this context?
The issue of campaign financing is tricky everywhere, and definitely a perfect system does not exist. If I have to think of my own personal experience, when I was elected in Belgium in the European Parliament a long time ago, I had to pay about € 200 out of my own pocket, because the Greens’ campaign is collective. When I took part to the 2004 European elections (with the pseudo-democratic system of big constituencies preferences), we were around 60,000, and colleagues from larger parties could talk about hundreds of thousands of euros spent. Today, even if I wanted to, it would be absolutely impossible to get close to any candidacy in Italy because of purely economic reasons. In Belgium, the rules of political financing are such that each party can spend a maximum of 1 million Euros and of 10,000 Euros per candidate in the European elections. These expenses must be reported accurately, otherwise parties incur in heavy fines. No TV ads or billboards over a certain size , clearly defined and regulated timeslots for media. Personally, I consider that the issue of political financing is one of the key issues to be solved in this time of rampant populism: the best solution is the Italian Radicals’ proposal to provide "services" to political activities and not subsidies, in addition to a real rebalancing of the access to media, at least during election campaigns. I believe that the illusion of the 5 Star Movement, trying to convince people that politics can be done without money, depends largely on the fact that their leaders and the Casaleggio Associates were able to count on the "celebrity" effect and on considerable resources early in their history.
But let us go back to the US. Immediately after the election result, the American media (just like the British media did after the referendum) began a process of self-analysis to understand whether they played a role in Trump’s victory, because of the way they conveyed information, because completely underestimated the signs from Bernie Sanders’ and Donald Trump’s campaigns, and because of their complete inability to counter Trump’s mysoginistic, racist and xenopohobic boutades. Not to mention Facebook and Twitter’s ambiguous roles of propagators of false news and of offensive content (are they even media?).
The question of media regulation in terms of political pluralism and concentration is a dusty old battle to many of us at the European level. Someone may recall that, in the early 90s, former Commissioner Monti proposed a directive on the subject, which representatives of many of the 15 Member States contemptuously rejected. Since then the Commission (despite pompous speeches on the freedom of press and countless initiatives and votes by the European Parliament and many NGOs at the time of Berlusconi) has never agreed to reconsider the matter. A gigantic mistake, which opened a highway to the various Orbans and Kaczynskys and to their reforms limiting freedom of press and of speech. The EU’s visible powerlessness on these serious abuses in turn prevents us from saying anything meaningful against Erdogan’s purges and arrests.
In view of the 2019 elections, I am convinced that the issue of campaign financing and the role of the media should be discussed at EU level. Will it not pass the scrutiny of a Council of Ministers which is now totally hostile to any joint action? Maybe. But it is very important that the debate on these issues, which are constitutive of the democratic quality of our societies, is on the same level of the battle for the change of concrete policies. Otherwise, we could resign ourselves to the idea that universal suffrage can be the most powerful weapon to dismantle Western civilization, as an anonymous Tweet read, right after the US elections.
A theme that instead does not seem to worry Americans at all is voting participation: in spite of the global resonance of the event, only 53% of those eligible voted. Of course, the issue of access to votes is different in Europe than in the United States. Here in Belgium voting is compulsory, participation is between 85 and 90%, and I am of the opinion that it is a good thing. Despite the small penalties, which are anyway not applied, the compulsory nature of the vote makes it a duty and not a right, and this has a "psychological" and cultural effect which should not be underestimated. In a system like that of the United States, it would force the government to make voting accessible to everyone. One example: during the election day, I noticed that in Maryland, governed by a Republican, a polling station used mainly by African Americans only had one only one machine and a long queue of impatient people, given that the election is on a working day, and it is not possible to take time off to vote. In a predominantly white area there were 5 machines and no queue. A coincidence? I don’t think so.
If we want to work harder on political issues, from social and civic rights to the economy, from climate change to the fight against racism and xenophobia, we cannot consider the rules of the democratic game a mere technical question. Otherwise we will not be able to make populist and anti-democratic options less attractive than they are today, nor will we return politics to its noble role of healthy competition between ideas and people, and not to a superficial choice based on lies or insults.
Brussels, 28 November 2016