Published in La Repubblica on 4 November 2019
Good news, people say of course, because nothing is more right and comforting than reasons that unite so many men and women in huge processions in every corner of the world.
In Hong Kong as in Beirut, in La Paz as in Bagdad, in Conakry as in Alger, and in many other towns, these crowds demonstrate for the rule of law and against social inequalities, for freedom and against corruption, for redistribution by taxation and against the destruction of nature, for democracy and against military, presidential, oligarchic or communist dictatorships. How could anyone fail to see that what now takes place in Lebanon, Sudan, Iraq and Algeria is the second act of the Arab revolutions, thought dead and buried so quickly, now resurfacing, still in the name of human rights and not out of identity and religious fanaticism?
Seeing the courage of the Iraqi, the constancy of the Algerians, the cross-community brotherhood of the Lebanese, or the political intelligence of the Sudanese, how could anyone keep denying that there is no,, not even the slightest incompatibility between Islam and democracy, which has never been more vibrant than in the hope and the mobilisation of the Arab world today? How could anyone ignore, from Guinea to Bolivia, that people have had enough of elected dictatorships and presidents for life, and that this reality is so powerful that it had already been felt in Budapest, Ankara and Moscow?
And while Chileans reject so massively the privatisation of the whole economy and growth for the benefit of the wealthiest, how can anyone not realise that Margaret Thatcher’s and Ronald Reagan’s conservative revolution is running out, that the wheel is turning, that again the State becomes the solution which people yearn for, and that the refusal to pay taxes led to the shattering of social solidarity upon which human dignity and civil peace are based?
“Democracy”, “equity”, “solidarity” is what is being called out today on every continent. How could anyone not rejoice to witness the great return to the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, to the three essential words engraved on all the pediments of the Republic: “Liberty, equality, brotherhood”?
No one can say today that these values of social justice and political freedom are not universal. No dictator can claim that the Russians, the Chinese or the Africans would not have the same understanding of them. But where will this decade opened by Tunisians, reopened by Hong Kong and Algeria lead us? Maybe we will speak of it as the new Sixties, which had also completely and permanently changed the situation everywhere, from Prague to Tokyo, from Los Angeles to Paris?
We would like to believe that the fruit will outdo the promise of the flower and that a new Spring of peoples can be announced. Unfortunately, no, this certainty is not there. We want to hope. We want to believe that the new setbacks would not charge the future with a heavier toll than what followed the revolutions of 2011. We would like to expect so much from the urban middle classes, who are fraternising with those left behind in cities and on the countryside in so many countries right now, but between hope and its realisation there are two obstacles not to be underestimated.
The first one is that the side of fraternity, the left, the centre and the progressives has not regained the intellectual momentum that it lost in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The party of freedom is in outage of ideas, a complete outage, even more dramatic because it has allowed the rebirth and confirmation, a primacy maybe, of reactionary ideas born in the 19th century of the criticism of the French revolution and of the objection to the Enlightenment. Even in minority, the most overbearing political forces are today the extreme right and the authoritarian and xenophobic nationalists that could jump on the bandwagon of the ongoing revolt in the same way as fascism and Nazism did at the beginning of the last century.
The aspiration for the return of a state defending the weakest could lead to the return of a strong state in the hands of dictatorial regimes. The rejection of economic neo-liberalism can visibly lead to a rejection of political liberties, not only in the East, but also in large areas of western democracies. The game is evidently not over yet, but this danger is in no way improbable, because the first economic and military power of the world has, at this moment, left the side of freedom of which it has constantly been the leader in the past.
With Donald Trump, freedom has lost its principal ally. Here is the second concern, but America’s Nero has gone to such extremes, even though he is not an emperor, only a president, that a new chapter could soon be written in the United States. Never before have such credible democratic candidates than the ones competing now been so critical of social injustice and of the state’s withdrawal from the economy. What we hear in the marches of the global revolt will be heard from dawn to dusk in the next six months of primaries and then at the Democratic Convention. Donald Trump could be re-elected, but if the polls appear to be confirmed and if these new democrats manage to be in charge, then, within a year, the United States could take the lead in a major social upheaval, with priority on public utilities, taxes on the largest fortunes, increase in the taxation of earnings, and establishment of a public health care system. It has already happened before.
