The Pitfalls of Client Politics by Dr W B Vosloo*, Wollongong, August 2015
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1 The Pitfalls of Client Politics by Dr W B Vosloo*, Wollongong, August 2015 Client politics enables a segment of society to benefit at the expense of the public interest. Such a segment or interest group may be based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender or class. The segments or groups usually benefit by trading their support for beneficial outputs from the public decision-making process. Examples of political clientelism include the populist Syriza party in Greece, “Old Labour” factions in the UK and Australia controlled by the trade unions, the anti-austerity voters in Spain supporting Podemos, the anti-establishment Five Star Movement led by opportunist Beppe Grillo in Italy, the Scottish National Party in Westminster Parliament and the Socialist Party in France which is controlled by the Confédération Général du Travail (CGT). Party formations usually reflect the ideological and socio-cultural fissures in societies. Greece has caused much anxiety amongst euro zone members resulting from its efforts to shun its debt obligations. It expects euro creditors to write down Greek debt while Greek taxpayers merrily continue their culture of tax evasion and the featherbedding of Greek public sector workers continues unabated. To add insult to injury, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, leader of the extreme left-wing populist Suriza party, mobilised the Greek electorate by way of a referendum to reject the bail-out package offered by the European Union – in effect asking the debtors whether they support the idea of a debt write-off by the creditors! Meanwhile, presumptuous Yanis Varoufakis, the unruly Minister of Finance, continued his negotiations with his country’s creditors with a strategy-playbook based on a fixed-sum game theory: heads I win, tails you lose! Despite the immense contributions made by ancient Greeks such as Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes and Pythagoras to Western Civilisation, the Greeks of modern times seem to have lost the plot of responsible democratic rule. As a result of serial bouts of fiscal recklessness, Greece has accumulated public debt levels of over 175 percent of GDP coupled with consistently declining income levels. It expects its euro partners to provide “bail-out” assistance – including debt “write downs” – while it refuses to impose sensible policies of “austerity” such as reducing spending on the public sector, privatising public assets and plugging tax evasion loopholes. Since 2009 Greek unpaid taxes accrued to €76 billion as a result of Greece’s vast unrecorded economy equal to an estimated quarter of the country’s GDP. The OECD estimates that tax evasion in Greece equals about 90 percent of collected annual tax revenue. During the country’s centuries-long occupation by Ottoman Turkey, avoiding taxes was considered as a sign of patriotism. Today this distrust is focussed on the corrupt, inefficient and unreliable standards of Greek government. Hence, many Greeks consider taxes as government theft. Tax evasion is endemic in the common practice of not recording retail transactions. The vast majority of tax evasion is said to occur among small and medium-sized enterprises whose accounts are seldom audited and who customarily supplement their workers’ pay under the table. Some employers give their workers special coupons that they can exchange in supermarkets, restaurants or other service providers. The Syriza party which came to power early in 2015 campaigned on an anti-tax platform. It is difficult to see how the Mediterranean business culture can be reconciled with the North- European Germanic standards. Italy and France have not produced a balanced budget for several decades while the fiscal history of all the Southern European countries tells a story of shortened work weeks, chronic budget deficits, disruptive labour relations and mountains of public debt. By contrast, Germany, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries are all imbued with the proverbial “Swabian 2 Hausfrau” economic mindset. It involves a culture of hard work and thrifty spending habits. Their model represents taking pride in hard work, opting for quality over quantity, delayed gratification and a focus on long-term goals. Wolfgang Schäuble, the German Finance Minister, a native of Baden Würtemburg, tirelessly tries to persuade his colleagues from Southern Europe to adopt the virtues of hard work, self-improvement and saving. He insists on structural reform rather than monetary easing to reduce debt levels. But there are limits to what a small cohort of “lifters” can achieve in a vast sea of parasitical “leaners” propelled by political clientelism. Experience has shown that marginal groups holding society at ransom with strikes, work stoppages or other forms of disruptive industrial action can only be countered by broadly based community counteraction. This type of response requires a deep-rooted consensus of civic responsibility based on cross-sectional leadership and electoral support. The condition of a country’s party system is the best possible evidence of the quality of any regime. Political parties play a determinative and creative role in the functioning of a democratic political system – contesting elections, organising government and controlling the exercise of executive power. To sustain a democratic political culture it is essential that the predominant political parties should be able to put together some kind of programme that will attract the maximum support of a maximum number of group interests in society. Parties with a narrow ideological focus and a correspondingly narrow support base will fail to bring voters together in significant numbers on some middle ground where they can combine to carry out a common policy to promote the general public interest. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ * Dr W B Vosloo, PhD, Cornell 1965, is a retired former professor of Political Science and Public Administration, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa (1966-1981) and was Chief Executive of the South African Small Business Development Corporation, Johannesburg (1981-1995). He is now retired and has been living in Wollongong, NSW, since 1998. .