Kapok | Impotence in politics

Eric Sautedé

Several reasons can explain why many governments around the world, in democratic or partially democratic and at least liberal settings, have become impotent, incapable of solving clearly identified issues and designing ill-suited public policies resulting from compromises that ultimately satisfy nobody.
When the blame is put on outside forces, globalisation often becomes the big villain and supra-national entities, the United Nations and the WTO worldwide or the European Union institutions on a regional scale, are common embodiments of this wicked and not-so-distant influence.
When the ailment appears to be coming from within, then the elites and especially political elites are being held responsible: alleged deadlocks and deficiencies originate from the excess of institutionalisation of traditional political organisations and the overly intimate relations between stakeholders, be them in the political, economic, social or cultural spheres. Innovation is thus constantly frustrated and conflicts of interests grow on the back of an overall sense of unaccountability and impunity.
What often tie all these together is a perceived submission to the unrestricted and nefarious forces of the “free-market”, and henceforth the dominant position that self-centred corporations tend to acquire in polities. In a nutshell, governments and their ability to act fall victim of constraints coming from all sides: the sense of what makes a community holds together is being challenged persistently, hence the discomfort felt regarding the authenticity and logic of established forms of representativity.
Symptoms of this defiance towards traditional and “representative” politics, whatever its arrangements, are aplenty. In 2011, we had the Geração à Rasca (struggling generation) movement in Portugal and the Indignants in Spain. Later in the year, there was the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States, with its inspiration admittedly coming from the massive occupation of the Puerta del Sol.
Closer to us, we had the Sunflower student movement in Taiwan in 2014 — a distant echo of the Wild Lily student movement of 1990 — that ultimately led to the occupation of the Legislative Yuan on March 18. In Macao, we had the short-lived Anti-Compensation movement of May 25 and 27 of the same year that eventually forced the government to back down on an overly generous perks bill tailor-made for its soon-to-be retiring senior officials. In Hong Kong, the Occupy Central movement transformed into a city-wide Umbrella movement in late autumn 2014 and led to the youthful and politically boisterous occupation of several key parts of the city for more than two months.
In my home country, the birthplace of revolutionary movements that led to the demise of the “old regime”, to paraphrase Tocqueville, we have had the “Nuit debout” (literally “Night, Standing Up”) on the place de la République for about a month now. Beside the baroque mix of denunciations taking aim at such varied issues as “‘speciesism’, multinational corporations, capitalism, G.M.O.s, the police and nuclear power’, the motivations are the same: letting go with worn out traditional forms of representation — individuals are to be trusted more than groups — and founding a new political culture — beyond the left and right devide, with the possibility to express oneself at any time, with the recognition that an individual is as much a citizen as he or she is a consumer and resolutely grounded in digital networks. In the end, these movements want to reconcile the apparent antagonism between “making society” — binding together — and respecting the singularity of each and every individual, without having to subsume under a collective identity.
In Macao, the clothes of the emperor are wearing out. Beyond the issue of legality — tax evasion is not, tax optimisation supposedly is — the Panama Papers question the exemplarity and trustworthiness of the ones in power: how can a personality holding an official mandate lie about his assets to a court of justice? How can an official serving in the CPPCC or NPC hold concurrent nationalities, be them Singaporean, American, Australian, Canadian, British or Portuguese? How can a supposed Beijing loyalist give lessons in patriotism while cultivating back door escape routes only available to the happy few? Are these “persons representative of various strata and sectors of society” really so?