24 Apr 2024, 07:36

Review of the Two Worlds

The failure of elite politics

The Statebuilding Party is dead. Almost all of its leaders have been discredited completely in Istkalenic politics; the organization itself has been absorbed by the already moribund Agrarian Union. The "moderate social democracy" it claimed to represent has been left without support popular or institutional; in every way, the project it spearheaded has failed. And the few of its most prominent figures who remain influential and popular - Yasemin Demirkol, Lauri Laakonen, Eliise Sepp - have spurned it completely.

Political commentators say, now, that this extraordinary collapse was entirely predictable - that it was easy to see that the Statebuilders were doomed from the very beginning. But this was not the tune they were singing but two months ago. Their insistence, which they claim now only the foolish could have believed, was that the Statebuilders were not on the path to implosion but instead ascendant - that their politics, a synthesis of the reformist and moderate left with the technocratic, law-and-order right, were the future of an Istkalen disillusioned, through the misrule of Vistek Rikkalek and the NSC, with populism and extremism. Only with the failure of the 4 March elections, in which the Statebuilders, defying polling that had pointed to them being the country's second most popular party, failed to make any significant showing outside of the associations of the elite - of the civil service, the security service, and the financiers, merchants, and economic planners of the Commerce Association - did they even begin to change their minds.

The mirage of Statebuilder-success, in essence, was one that was, at the time, very convincing to all - and not without reason. The popularity of the technocratic government of Ursula Orlich, the rapid decline of the far-right, and, above all, the rapid growth of the Statebuilders themselves in polling at the time painted a clear picture of a new Istkalen, an Istkalen that had grown to hate the old parties and politicians, an Istkalen entirely eager to embrace order and firm authority.

Why then, a mirage and not reality? With everything pointing so clearly to the inevitability of change, why did change ultimately not happen?

As the political commentators now quite correctly insist, the answer is simple.

The Republic of Istkalen is an oligarchy. It is a state in which politics is conducted by unaccountable elites, in smoky backrooms, for their own benefit; a state whose republicanism is nothing more than a paper-thin facade meant to obscure a reality of corruption and authoritarianism.

It is because of this that populism-as-strategy has been so enduring; there being no real democracy in Istkalen, its politicians, fearing retribution, must create with their words a facsimile of it, radical enough in its appearance to distract from its obvious falseness.

Everyone with real power pretends to be a populist; no one who shies away from this mask has any hope of remaining in office. Even women like Ursula Orlich, the President of the Censorate and an example par excellence of the closed and elitist nature of governance in Istkalen, center in their words a people fighting against an elite of patrons and compradors and now, in the aftermath of the occupation, Reitzmic and Vardic spies, a brave people who must be defended, who must be represented, who must be helped and strengthened so that they may win their struggle and thereafter establish a state of their own over and against their erstwhile oppressors.

The Statebuilders saw simply that those who had held power before and through the NSC period, who had been left without support, had attempted to portray themselves, as all Istkalenic politicians had been wont to do, as populists, and so tried to reject that same populism to avoid the same fate.

And without a populist approach, they could come across as being nothing more than, like the Union Party, active and open supporters of corruption, authoritarianism, and reaction in Istkalen. In a period still characterized by widespread fear of punishment for dissent, this is enough to create the appearance of widespread public support - but not enough to produce the same in a secret ballotage held among and for a population wanting, however secretly, nothing more than reform, opening, and democracy.

Now, as this same elitism, in the face of the deep unpopularity of Elizabeth Ikrat and her government, seems to make a resurgence, it is important to keep this experience in mind. The most aristocratic and authoritarian aspects of state remain, as they were just a few months ago, deeply unpopular; though the idea of order may now be in demand, Istkaleners do not cry out for a dictatorship of the courts. An embrace of elitist rhetoric and appearance continues to be politically suicidal; politicians, especially those in the opposition, internal or external, would do well to remember this in order to avoid being consigned to the same fate as the Statebuilders.