(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
In this timely study of why the superficial charm of right-wing populist parties continues to seduce Europe,
rich filmmaker Robert Schabus gives us an insight into the human stories behind today's political and social upheavals in Europe.
In 2016 he debuted with the documentary Farmer ours (Our Farmer), where Schabus investigated the "faster, cheaper, more" mantra behind Austria's industrialized food production and the many links between economic politics, industry and society. With Democracy Ltd he expands the field of impact and takes a closer look at the sharp dividing lines in Europe. He spends time with striking French workers in Amiens, where thousands of low-skilled industrial jobs have recently disappeared. He also talks to the Poles who are now performing these jobs for the fraction of a French salary after multinationals have moved production eastward, and he is investigating the feeling of betrayal and degradation in the north-east of England – moods that contributed to the Brexit shock after the vote i 2016.
It's not just about the "yellow west" of the thousands who are protesting the savings policy, which appeared last fall in the streets of Paris, as Schabus points out at the beginning of the film. It is also about the ordinary Austrian grandmother who lives in a pre-war art-deco-inspired block of flats and who feels overrun in a society where changes have affected her as well as the Greek working class. Greeks Oxi! – "No!" – to the humiliating and rigorous economic measures imposed on them by faceless governing powers in Brussels when Grexit was threatened, screamed loudly long before Brexit appeared on the horizon.
Schabus also accommodates a handful of experts who are carefree dismissed by British Brexit supporters, and one faceless' EU bureaucrat, Günter Verheugen – former EU Commissioner for enlargement processes, business and industry. The commentators appear intelligent and sensible; Verheugen is a member of the German Social Democratic Party, the SPD, which has a key role in the German Grand Coalition as it has long focused on stability rather than political marking by supporting Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
Schabus weaves these seemingly incompatible threads together at a time when the EU is teetering on the brink of collapse, with falling confidence in political parties and a European center that has begun to tremble now as it is known that Angela Merkel (a synonym of stability) will step down in 2021.
But their careful analysis and intellectual arguments do little to dampen the raw pain and fierce mind of such as the 50-year-old French factory worker, who takes Schabus on a tour of the closed and abandoned factories in the blown-up suburbs of Amiens .
Replaced by unskilled workers
"I have two children, one is 18, the other 12. Finding another job for me as a 50-year-old is not easy," he says as he drives around an empty, overgrown industrial area where there once were "thousands of jobs ».
"Finding another job as a 50-year-old is not easy."
Amiens is the regional capital of Sommes, where British, French and German soldiers with a working background a century ago lost their lives when millions fought in a war that can be said to have sprung from the same capitalist greed and reckless exploitation that threatens to overwhelm Europe today. But far from Amiens, at another battlefield in Lódz, Poland, the job that earned him 2000 euros a month, plus social benefits, is now being performed for a staggering 447 euros a month by professionally weaker Polish (and Ukrainian) workers.
This begs the question: What is the free flow of people worth when the free flow of goods and services takes their jobs?
Schabus points out the main reasons why a small majority of Britons who voted in the Brexit referendum in June 2016 voted yes to the EU's resignation.
"Everybody wanted to show these politicians that we were breaking broken promises," says the owner of a tattoo parlor in Sunderland, adding that attempts to use state intervention to save factories from shutting down are prevented by "EU rules".
It is an argument also used by the opposition leader in the British parliament, pro-Brexit Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn. However, this is a truth with modifications, as the EU allows several forms of state aid to industry.
Nevertheless, the lies that are faltered by the sugary supporters of Brexit (and by populist parties all over Europe) are swallowed up by ordinary people who will suffer most from the consequences of Brexit.
"The more things change, the more they remain the same," as the French critic and writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote in 1849 – in a time of other historical upheavals in Europe.
Europe "goes to sleep"
Belgian historian David Van Reybrouck, one of the expert commentators, summarizes why ordinary Europeans feel so frustrated: "What we are seeing now is a massive distrust between politicians and citizens." He claims this is a result of the shift of power to capitalism and the markets, and away from the politicians and the people – a shift in power that has been going on since the 1980s.
"We have a Dutch phrase that says: If two dogs fight for a bone, a third dog runs away with it, and that's exactly what we're seeing now."
It's an ancient Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times.
According to Van Reybrouck, even 41 per cent of the population in Norway – widely regarded as a guarantor of social (and economic) stability – believe that political parties are corrupt. The figures for EU member states are even worse: 67 per cent in Belgium, 70 per cent in France and over 90 per cent in Greece. As long as this persists, it is difficult to get Europe's global capitalists on better minds.
It is a topic that is increasingly attracting attention. In mid-February, financier George Soros wrote for Project Syndicate – a liberal organization for international press freedom – a warning that the EU is going "asleep to oblivion" and can collapse as fast as the Soviet Union did in 1991 unless the Union awakens its "sleeping pro- European Majority 'before the European Parliament elections in May, where populist Euro-skeptic parties are expected to do well.
It's an ancient Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times, and Democracy Ltd is really a movie for interesting times. It concludes with an analogy to the democratic process, saying that it is preferable (although quite awkward) to repair a car at speed rather than to repair it after you crash.
