Jacinda Ardern’s resignation as prime minister in January was a courageous and pragmatic decision for herself, her family and her party.

Although many said she had done a great job as leader, she rightly reminded us that a great leader is “one who knows when it’s time to go”.

Since hitting stellar heights in mid-2020, Ardern’s Labour Party had dropped significantly in the polls and was trailing the opposition National Party throughout 2022.

• READ MORE: NZ election 2020: Jacinda Ardern promised transformation — instead, the times transformed her
• Anniversary of a landslide: new research reveals what really swung New Zealand’s 2020 ‘covid election’
• Women leaders and coronavirus: look beyond stereotypes to find the secret to their success

The “Jacinda effect” had switched from being a uniting force to a polarising one. With an election coming in October, it was time for a change.

Her decision to stand down was as politically astute and timely as her elevation to leader of the Labour Party in August 2017. After all, Labour is now ahead of National in recent polls.

By the time she gives her valedictory statement to parliament later today, Ardern will have served as an MP for nearly 15 years. While the intervening period has undoubtedly changed her, she remains in many ways the same person she was as a novice backbencher.

In her maiden speech to the House of Representatives in 2008, she expressed the small-town values that got her started:

Some people have asked me whether I am a radical. My answer to that question is very simple: I am from Morrinsville. Where I come from a radical is someone who chooses to drive a Toyota rather than a Holden or a Ford.

She described herself as a social democrat who believed in human rights, social justice, equality and democracy. She spoke especially about work, education, community and the reduction of poverty – child poverty in particular.

All fine aspirations. But back then, Ardern’s Labour Party was looking at nine long years in opposition after Helen Clark’s three-term government lost power.

Unable to break the run National’s John Key enjoyed as prime minister, Labour went through one leader after another while Ardern rose through the ranks.

In mid-2017, despite a mood for change, it still looked like the election wouldn’t go well for Labour, at the time polling down around 25 percent. Then, at the beginning of August, Andrew Little handed leadership of the party to Ardern. With just seven weeks until the election, it was either an inspired move or the ultimate hospital pass.

As history shows, however, Ardern’s elevation immediately energised Labour’s campaign. It also drew international attention to the New Zealand election, as what became known as “Jacindamania” changed the mood on the streets and in the media.

Accidents of history
Critics sometimes labelled Ardern the “accidental prime minister” — a rookie “appointed” by Winston Peters, whose New Zealand First party held the balance of power in post-election negotiations. Conventional wisdom has it that Ardern simply offered Peters a better coalition deal, despite her party having won fewer seats than National.

But Peters gave those critics some more ammunition during a recent TV interview. He appeared to reveal that New Zealand First was forced to choose coalition with Labour when then-National leader Bill English alerted him to a potential leadership coup by Judith Collins.

According to Peters, English had assured him Collins didn’t have the numbers to pull it off. (Collins would eventually become National leader, of course, losing spectacularly to Ardern at the 2020 election.)

This sliding-doors version of events may be conjecture. But Peters can’t have forgotten how Jenny Shipley had rolled previous National leader and prime minister Jim Bolger in 1997.

That ultimately led to the breakup of the National-New Zealand First coalition in which Peters had been deputy prime minister and treasurer.

Perhaps, then, we have Collins to thank for Ardern’s elevation to the top job. We’ll probably never know.

Rise and fall
The “Jacinda effect” wasn’t a flash in the pan, however. Labour’s election support went from 25 percent in 2014 to 37 percent in 2017, and then to an extraordinary 50 percent in 2020. Coming on the back of Ardern’s exemplary leadership through the covid pandemic, it was an unprecedented result under the country’s proportional MMP system.

Her belief in “kindness” as a political force appeared to have been vindicated, if not for long. While New Zealand eventually recorded the world’s lowest excess mortality rate during the pandemic, this success was far from cost-free. In particular, there was a human and political price to pay for the lockdowns and border closures.

Businesses struggled, many New Zealanders abroad couldn’t return, and many resisted the pressure to be vaccinated. No nation escaped unscathed, and in New Zealand resistance to vaccine mandates boiled over on the grounds of parliament in early 2022.

Some protesters were angered by Ardern’s trademark empathy and kindness, which they now perceived as a false front. Due to the extremist elements among the protests, she refused to address them directly.

Ardern’s positive leadership reputation was earned on her responses to tragedies: the Christchurch terror attack, the Whakaari-White Island eruption, and the pandemic. But no sane politician would have welcomed such crises.

Nor were they part of Ardern’s social democratic plan. In fact, they hindered it. She did a lot for child poverty and family incomes, in line with her core values. But those achievements were overshadowed by a pandemic response that upended her government’s fiscal policy.

Promise unfulfilled
So, if catastrophes were the making of Jacinda’s career as prime minister, they were also the breaking of it. From her first campaign speech in August 2017, she had created a sense of promise that her government was ultimately unable to fulfil.

She claimed climate change was her generation’s “nuclear-free moment”, and that a decent, affordable home was everyone’s right. It sounded great, but on both counts progress fell short of expectation and need. Later, she would capitulate on a full capital gains tax to help solve the housing crisis. That allowed coalition partner Peters to claim credit for the backdown.

But it would also be wrong if the lasting narrative was one of failure to deliver. Her government’s Child Poverty Reduction Act now mandates reporting on progress towards poverty targets, bringing the problem into the engine room of fiscal policy. The Healthy School Lunches program helped reduce food insecurity.

Future governments will encounter strong political resistance if they try to rescind those measures.

Even those tireless advocates for children, the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), gave Ardern qualified approval following her resignation — although the truce didn’t last long. CPAG was back on the attack when Stats NZ reported “child poverty rates for the year ended June 2022 were unchanged compared with the previous year”.

A complex legacy
In the end, Ardern did not use the single-party majority she won in 2020 to fix the things she had wanted to fix. When her government saw a problem, its default setting was to say “let’s centralise it” — as if that would do. Good social democratic government was sidelined by bureaucratic shakeups in healthcare, education and (before the plan was cancelled) public broadcasting.

An elaborate structural reform of water services became mired in controversy over Māori co-governance and loss of local democratic control. The sixth Labour government’s only potentially historic contribution to the development of New Zealand’s social security system — a proposed unemployment insurance scheme — was quietly shelved after criticism from both left and right.

So, will Ardern be remembered as one the great Labour leaders? To do so would put her in the pantheon of Michael Joseph Savage and Peter Fraser, who achieved so much in social security, healthcare and education, and who led the country through the Second World War.

It would also place her next to Norman Kirk, whose 1972-75 government universalised accident compensation, introduced the domestic purposes benefit, and stood against French nuclear testing in the Pacific.

Ardern with baby Neve in 2018, the second prime minister to give birth while in office.
Getty Images

It’s a high bar, but not unreasonable to make the case. Ardern broke through barriers for women, most notably giving birth to her daughter while she held office. She united the country after the mosque shootings, soothing what could have become a divisive moment.

By listening to the scientific evidence and advice about covid, she helped save countless lives.

Ardern will undoubtedly be remembered as one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s outstanding prime ministers. This may not be for reasons of her choosing, though. Once the disaster management is accounted for, there are no major lasting achievements for which her government will be cited in the history books.

What will be remembered is Ardern’s exemplary and highly effective leadership through covid. Yet there is no “kind” pathway through an unkind pandemic.

Nevertheless, Jacinda Ardern is owed gratitude for all that she did — and acknowledgement of all she had to endure — to get her nation through it.

Dr Grant Duncan is associate professor, School of People, Environment and Planning, Massey University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

One aspect of May’s federal election in Australia has been strangely overlooked: Labor’s win follows a pattern among the main centre-left parties in Europe and comparable countries.

Traditional social democratic and labour-based parties are resurgent, and now hold office (on their own or in coalition) across all of Scandinavia and in Germany, Spain, Portugal and New Zealand.

Where the past decade has been dominated by talk of a crisis of the left, the debate is increasingly shifting to the crisis of the right.

• READ MORE: Labor has a huge health agenda ahead of it. What policies should we expect?
• Other Australian federal elections results

SREcholz ran an uncluttered campaign based on simple promises: a higher minimum wage, stable pensions, more affordable housing and a carbon-neutral economy.

The picture isn’t uniform, of course. Some countries have experienced the de facto demise of their main centre-left party. We might call this the “PASOKification” syndrome, after the sharp loss of support for Greece’s PASOK party, but it extends to other parts of Europe.

The Netherlands’ once-dominant Labour Party was placed sixth in last year’s election, with just 5.7 percent of the vote.

France’s main party of the left, the Socialist Party, was reduced to just 6.4 percent in the first round of the 2017 presidential elections and just 1.7 percent this year, but it sealed a deal to join the French Left’s first broad coalition pact in 20 years.

British Labour, meanwhile, lost the 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019 elections. Despite the toxicity that surrounds the Conservative government, Labour leader Keir Starmer remains unpopular and unlikely to win the next election.

In Belgium and Italy, the Left’s situation is less bleak, though its main parties are far from hegemonic. In the highly fragmented Belgian system, the Flemish and Walloon socialist parties are part of the seven-party (yes, seven!) “Vivaldi coalition”.

Italy’s Democratic Party is part of the current Draghi-led national unity government, and in more recent times has held the prime ministership.

Outside Europe, the new “pink tide” in South America has seen, for example, 35-year-old Gabriel Boric win Chile’s presidential election.

Scholz ran an uncluttered campaign based on simple promises: a higher minimum wage, stable pensions, more affordable housing and a carbon-neutral economy.

Great to see New Zealand PM @jacindaardern again at @The_ANZLF in Sydney.

We will work with businesses and governments across the Tasman to drive better paying jobs and to support free and open trade.

Working together, we can seize opportunities for our mutual benefit. pic.twitter.com/cgIn2fUXpv

— Anthony Albanese (@AlboMP) July 7, 2022

Why the bounce back?
Some common factors help us understand the partial return of the left.

First, the vote share of the two main centre-right and centre-left parties has declined in most of these countries, yet the centre-left can still assemble a majority where the electoral system enables it.

Australian Labor’s record low primary vote of 32.6 percent is part of that trend, with centre-left parties in Norway, Sweden and Spain now capturing between 25 percent and 30 percent of the vote. And even when parties win larger vote shares (as in Portugal), they have usually needed coalition partners.

Nevertheless, centre-left parties remain a fixture in many party systems, and have found ways of getting back into office.

Second, the reinvigorated centre-left parties — including Anthony Albanese’s Labor — share common policy positions. We might sum them up as a “back to basics” strategy, with a clear focus on improved wages and conditions, job security and reinvigorated public institutions.

Albanese’s win has parallels with the victory of Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrat–led “rainbow coalition” in Germany. As one commentator described it:

Scholz ran an uncluttered campaign based on simple promises: a higher minimum wage, stable pensions, more affordable housing and a carbon-neutral economy.

Social democrats have sought to (mildly) rebuild public institutions. The Danish Social Democrats have pledged to increase public and welfare spending by 0.8 percent per year for five years.

Jacinda Ardern’s NZ Labour government has increased the minimum wage. Antonio Costa’s recent majority government in Portugal was built on a coalition united in seeking to reverse the austerity measures that followed the eurozone crisis.

Labor’s win follows a pattern of centre-left parties holding office in a number of countries.

The pandemic has also helped fuel a resurgence of social democratic parties, and @RobManwaring says some factors could help explain this bounce back. @Flinders https://t.co/ij414vCGsL

— The Conversation (@ConversationEDU) July 10, 2022

Common features …
This “new” minimalist social democracy has several entwined elements. First, the incoming governments have captured a mood, amplified by the pandemic, that centre-right governments have neglected key public goods.

Second, these centre-left governments have turned away from “third way” policies associated with leaders like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. As catalogued here, centre-left parties have turned leftwards since the 1990s and 2000s.

Many of their party manifestos have a renewed focus on tackling inequality and increasing welfare spending.

Third, the centre-left parties have been gradually “greening”. Many are seeking to make renewables part of their reinvigorated industry and manufacturing agendas.

As Albanese and his colleagues know, this is a delicate balancing act, aimed at protecting employees in fossil-fuel-intensive industries while setting out modest climate targets. This “balance” seems to be hitting the electoral sweet spot by capturing public demand for action while allaying fears about the speed of transition — even if the targets fail to keep up with the science.

The final element is the longstanding “feminisation” of the parties. Many are reaping the rewards of the struggles by feminist MPs, allies and members to improve representation.

It’s no coincidence that four of Scandinavia’s five current centre-left prime ministers are female. The centre-left parties look modern and representative, and most have strong gender policies, especially on issues like the gender pay gap.

… And one significance difference
It’s worth noting a key difference between Australian Labor and its resurgent counterparts. Many centre-left parties in Europe have made strong pledges to invest in their welfare states — in part to see off the welfare chauvinism of radical right challengers.

In New Zealand, the Ardern government has announced a new unemployment insurance scheme.

The dynamics seem different in Australia, and Labor apparently sees little electoral value in shifting from its “modest” welfare agenda.

One important lesson for Labor is that in almost all the cases internationally, the centre-left has had to learn to govern in partnership with other key players.

This will be a pressing issue for Albanese as he deals with a record crossbench in both houses. It could even determine how long Australia’s centre-left party governs.

Dr Rob Manwaring is associate professor, Politics and Public Policy, Flinders University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

How determined are Labour to take the necessary steps to fix inequality and poverty? Will electoral calculations triumph over their principles and stated ambitions?

These are some of the questions being asked on the political left, as Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s government looks determined to stand by while social problems continue to get worse under their watch.

During their last term in government, Ardern and colleagues failed to be transformational on their key promise of fixing inequality and poverty. And now they are choosing policies that massively increase inequality, while ignoring the plight of those at the bottom.

• READ MORE: ‘You can’t eat kindness’

That’s why this week more than 60 charities and NGOs made an open plea to the government to increase welfare benefits before Christmas.

Despite the extraordinary conditions at the moment, Ardern response was a firm “no”. Poverty advocates say Labour should be “ashamed”, with many suggesting that the prime minister’s own advocacy of kindness and compassion is directly contradicted by her actual decisions.

Writing in The New Zealand Herald today, Matthew Hooton argues that the poverty advocates “have a point” in their dissatisfaction, as “Ardern’s response to these issues is unsatisfactory”. He argues that this week’s rejection of benefit increases “has prompted the first mini-rebellion on her left”.

Hooton is particularly dismissive of Ardern’s plea for more time to consider benefit levels: “she says more ‘work’ is needed but it is not clear what ‘work’ is required to make a basic decision on benefit levels.

Why is more ‘work’ needed?
Ruth Richardson, after all, took just 53 days after the October 27 1990 election to announce her benefit cuts. It is not obvious why any more “work” is needed to make the opposite decision.

In any case, the “work” was presumably already done in Ardern’s now eight and a half years in the children’s portfolio and by her [Welfare Expert Advisory Group].”

So should the left be rebelling? And is Labour putting hanging on to power above tackling poverty? Hooton seems to believe so: “The Prime Minister just emotes her usual concern.

“This is not economically or socially sustainable — and surely not politically sustainable either. There must come a time when Ardern’s own political base demands something more on such issues than her frowny-concerned face.

“It will be another 100 years before Labour again wins a mandate like the one Ardern secured last month. If she won’t act now on the issues she says concern her, left-wing activists will be entitled to ask whether hungry children and young couples struggling to buy a house really mean anything to her beyond being useful walk-on parts during election campaigns.”

Similarly, writing in the National Business Review yesterday, Brent Edwards says the debate “is a pointed rejoinder to Ardern from those who do not believe she is as committed to reducing child poverty as her rhetoric suggests”, and he argues that the decision to keep benefits down is unsurprising, given that Ardern’s decisions are guided by electoral considerations.

Brent Edwards contrasts the benefit decision with the first policy announcement of the Finance Minister: “Grant Robertson announced the Cabinet had decided to extend the small business cashflow loan scheme, which was due to end next month, for another three years and extend the interest-free period from one to two years.

Wooing the business community
“It is also looking at other changes to make the scheme more accessible for small businesses. It was the new government’s first decision of this term and is part of its attempt to woo the business community.”

So, just how long will beneficiaries and others in poverty have to wait until Labour delivers? Today’s Stuff newspaper editorial asks: “It takes more than one term to solve it, but will it take more than two?”

The editorial says Ardern is risking damage to her own brand by talking about kindness but doing the opposite: “Poverty advocates are used to hearing governments say one thing about poverty, especially the emotionally powerful issue of child poverty, but do another.”

They also ask: “What is the political cost of kindness? Or conversely, what is the political cost of doing nothing?”

Poverty advocates are understandably upset by Ardern’s rejection of action on poverty, and some are starting to speak out strongly against her and the government. Auckland Action Against Poverty’s coordinator Brooke Stanley Pao has said that Ardern is “choosing to keep people and families in poverty”.

According to this article, Pao “challenged the prime minister and other politicians to try and live on the current benefit for a month and ‘see how they find themselves’.”

Brooke Stanley Pao also wrote about this just prior to the election, saying, “You can’t eat kindness“. Responding to Ardern’s mantra, she says “We want more than kindness. We want the political bravery necessary to lift people out of poverty. Anything else is lip service.”

Leftwing bloggers losing faith
Other leftwing bloggers are losing their faith that Labour and Ardern really believe in progressive politics. For example, No Right Turn says: “The message is clear: their ‘kindness’ extends only to rich people, who will be exempted from paying their fair share of the costs of the pandemic (or society in general).

“As for poor kids, they can keep on starving. Which once again invites the question: what is Labour for, exactly, if they’re not going to ever deliver anything?”

The Child Poverty Action Group reports “the dismayed, disappointed and, in some cases, furious response to its dismissal” of benefit increases by Ardern and asks of the Government, “What, exactly, are they waiting for?”

She argues that increased payments would have an immediate impact on alleviating poverty.

McAllister also draws attention to the Government making decisions in the Covid environment that are likely to worsen inequality while ignoring the needs of those at the bottom: “Using children as economic shock absorbers – that’s unreasonable.

“Covid-response policies that stretch inequity even further – that’s unreasonable. Child Poverty Action Group research this year has shown that core entitlements for those receiving benefits are mostly far below key poverty lines, and in some cases will be tipping people into severest poverty.

“We modelled a scenario that shows 70,000 additional children are at risk of poverty due to Covid-19 on current policy settings.”

Why Labour is ‘tinkering’
For more on what Janet McAllister thinks is wrong with the current government policies, see Why Labour’s tinkering of our welfare system just isn’t enough.

Looking back at what Labour have implemented over the last term, she concludes: “By themselves, these policies are disappointing. It’s still just tinkering around the edges and far from big, bold moves to cut the mustard.

“They’re of no use to many of our poorest families.”

Another poverty advocate, Max Rashbrooke of Victoria University of Wellington, has written in The Guardian about how disappointed he is with progress on child poverty under the government, and how things look set to get worse unless policies are implemented that live up to the lofty targets set by Ardern.

The problem according to Rashbrooke is that Ardern “has relied largely on the ‘third way’ policies of her Labour predecessor, Helen Clark, in her fight against child poverty.”

And so although there has been some “modest progress” on some poverty measures, these are essentially the result of picking the low-hanging fruit. He points to Treasury modelling showing that “the number of families in ‘material hardship’ – those reporting they are unable to afford basic items – will ‘rise sharply’.”

Is it true that the government can’t afford to increase benefits? Not according to business journalist Bernard Hickey, whose must-read column this week argues that Ardern and Robertson seem determined to massively increase inequality by following outdated economic philosophies.

Making homeowners richer
He asks: “Is it more important that homeowners are $100 billion richer? Or that hundreds of thousands of children are left unnecessarily in poverty?”

Here’s Hickey’s main point: “It is bizarre that a Labour government and a Reserve Bank that talk a big game on their social responsibilities and sustainability are choosing to pump up to $150 billion into increasing housing market valuations for the richest half of New Zealanders who own homes, but don’t think they can afford increasing benefits at a cost of $5.2 billion for the hundreds of thousands of kids and their parents living in poverty.”

He points out that “economists as conservative as those at the OECD, the IMF and the World Bank are now begging Governments to do things differently by spending money on the poor and on infrastructure, rather than just pumping up asset prices to make the rich even richer.”

Hickey also refers to a report out this week with findings from the Growing Up in New Zealand longitudinal study. You can read the report here: Now we are eight: Life in middle childhood.

Hickey sums up the inequality findings: “Nearly 40 per cent are living in cold, mouldy and damp homes. About a third are obese. About 20 per cent of the families surveyed did not have enough money to eat properly.

“Nearly 15 per cent of the eight-year-olds had already moved school twice, largely because of having to move from one rental property to the next.”

Not everyone is criticising Labour’s rejection of benefit increases. Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking says that giving into such a demand would take the government down a “slippery slope”, and be too expensive for little real gain.

Urgent need for relief
There is no doubt there is urgent need for relief for those at the bottom. And this week the Auckland City Mission launched a campaign to replenish their run-down stocks of food, noting that prior to covid they estimated “10 percent of Kiwis experienced food insecurity on a regular basis.

“Due to covid-19, it believes the figure is now closer to 20 percent – or one million people – who do not have enough good food to eat on a weekly basis.”

And today it’s being reported that the government’s two-tier welfare payments have come to an end.

Finally, what’s to be done about poverty and inequality, given this government has no great interest in being transformational on this issue? According to veteran leftwing commentator Chris Trotter, “it’s time for some ‘earnest struggle'”. He argues that Labour will only ever carry out leftwing reforms if they are forced to.

Trotter wants to see less reliance on appeals to Ardern and Robertson to “be kind”, and more mass marches down Auckland’s Queen St.

Dr Bryce Edwards is a New Zealand-based political scientist of reliability and prominence. His analysis and commentary is regularly published on EveningReport.nz. This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre with permission.

Indonesia’s West Papua province has again been recorded as having the worst democracy index in the republic, reports CNN Indonesia.

This year (2019), the West Papuan Democracy Index (IDI) was 57.62, even dropping lower from 2018 when it was 58.29 points.

Based on data from the National Statistics Agency (BPS), West Papua has the lowest score and is in last position – below South-East Sulawesi with a score of 65.21 points.

[Pacific Media Centre editor: West Papua in the Pacific is generally taken to mean the combined mainly Melanesian region of two provinces – Papua and West Papua.]

Following next is Papua province with a score of 62.25 points, North Sumatra with 67.65 points, West Sumatra with 67.69 points, Maluku with 68.22 points, West Java with 69.0 points and Jambi province with 69.76 points.

The BPS Democracy Index categorises the level of democracy as being good, moderate and poor. A Democracy Index score under 60 is classified as a poor democracy while a score of 60-80 represents a moderate democracy and a score above 80 is a good democracy.

Among all 32 provinces in Indonesia, West Papua was the only province with a poor Democracy Index.

BPS head Kecuk Suhariyanto said that there were seven provinces in Indonesia that were categorised as good.

Two provinces improve
“In 2018 there were only five provinces, in 2019 there are seven provinces with a category of good. From five there have been two additions making seven, namely Riau Islands and Central Kalimantan provinces,” he said during an online press conference.

Suhariyanto said Jakarta was the top rated province with a score of 88.29 points followed by North Kalimantan Utara with 83.45 points and Riau Islands with 81.64 points.

This is followed by Bali with 81.38 points, Central Kalimantan with 81.16 points, East Nusa Tenggara with 81,02 points and Yogyakarta Special Province with 80,67 points.

Nationally, Indonesia’s Democracy Index rose slightly to 74.92 in 2019. Last year in 2018 it was recorded at 72.39 points. As a whole, Indonesia’s democratic score is still categorised as moderate.

Nevertheless, looking at this in detail there are six indicators which still rated poorly in the index.

Namely threats of or the use of violence by the public which obstructs freedom of expression with a score of 57.35 points followed by the percentage of women elected as members of provincial parliaments (DPRD) with a score of 58.63 points.

This is followed by violent demonstrations or labour strikes with a score of 34.91 points, regional regulations imitated by DPRDs with a score of 46.16 points, DPRD recommendations to the executive with 16.70 points and finally efforts to provide budgetary information by regional government with a score of 53.43 points.

The Democracy Index is assessed based on three main aspects, namely civil freedoms, political rights and democratic institutions. Each of these three aspects has 11 variables and 28 indicators which are used to make an assessment.

Decline in civil freedoms
Although there was a 4.92 point increase in political rights and a 4.48 point increase in democratic institutions, there was a 1.26 decline in civil freedoms. The score for civil freedoms based on the IDI for this year stood at 77.20 points.

“The index for civil freedoms in 2019 was 77.20. A slight decline compared with the position in 2018 and its respective category is moderately [democratic]”, said Suhariyanto.

Civil freedoms were assessed using four variables with freedom of assembly and freedom of association scoring 78.03 points, a decline of 4,32 points compared with 2018.

Freedom of expression, which stood at 84.29 points, declined by 1.88 points, freedom of belief scored 83.03 points, rising by 0.17 points compared with 2018 and freedom from discrimination scored 92.35 points, rising by 0.58.

If looked at in detail, there was a step back in the indicators which covered threats of or the use of violence by government agencies which obstruct freedom of expression, assembly and association, and the threat of or use of violence by social organisations related to religious teachings.

Next, actions or statements by government officials which were discriminative in terms of gender, ethnicity or other vulnerable groups and or which restricted the freedom to worship.

Meanwhile improvements were found in the indicators covering the threat of or use of violence by the public which obstructed freedom of expression, assembly and association and or on the grounds of gender, ethnicity or other vulnerable groups.

Discriminatory regulations
There were also improvements in written regulations which restrict freedom of worship and religion and or which discriminate against gender, ethnicity or other vulnerable groups.

In the aspect of political rights, two variables were assessed. The breakdown was the right to vote and be elected which scored 79.27 points, rising by 3,5 points, public participation in decision making and government supervision which scored 56.72, rising 2.44 points.

Although this was still categorised as poor.

In terms of democratic institutions, five variables were assessed. The breakdown was free and fair elections which scored 85.75 points, declining by 9.73 points followed by the role of regional parliaments (DPRD) with a score of 61.74, a rise of 2.82 points.

Then the role of the political parties which scored 80.62 points, a decline of 1.48 points followed by the role of regional government bureaucracy which scored 62.58 points, a rise of 6.84 points and the role of an independent judiciary which scored 93.66 points, a rise of
2.94 points.

This abridged translation by James Balowski of IndoLeft News is based on two articles by CNN Indonesia published on August 3. The original title of the first article was “Indeks Demokrasi Papua Barat Paling Buruk, Jakarta Terbaik”. The title of the second article was “Kebebasan Sipil Turun, Indeks Demokrasi Indonesia Naik.”

By Walden Bello in Manila

Fascism, someone wrote, comes in different forms to different societies so that people expecting fascism to develop in the “classic way” fail to recognise it even when it is already upon them. In 2016, fascism came to the Philippines in the form of Rodrigo Duterte, but this event continues to elude a large part of the citizenry, some owing to fierce loyalty to the president, some out of fear of what the political and ethical consequences would be of admitting that naked force is now the ruling principle in Philippine politics.

Why Duterte fits the ‘F’ word
At a panel I was part of in last August, one month after Duterte ascended to the presidency, there was considerable hesitation in using what panelists euphemistically called the “F” word to characterise the new Executive. There is an understandable reluctance to use the term fascist, undoubtedly because the word has been applied very loosely to all kinds of movements and leaders that depart, in some fashion, from liberal democratic practices, such as their propensity to resort to the use of force to achieve their political objectives.

However, there would probably be considerably less objection to the use of the word to describe Duterte if we see as central to the definition of a fascist leader a) a charismatic individual with strong inclinations toward authoritarian rule who b) derives his or her strength from a heated multiclass mass base, c) is engaged in or supports the systematic and massive violation of basic human, civil, and political rights, and d) proposes a political project that contradicts the fundamental values and aims of liberal democracy or social democracy.

If one were to accept these elements provisionally as the key characteristics of a fascist leader, then Duterte would easily fit the bill.

A fascist original
Having said that, one must nevertheless acknowledge that Duterte is a fascist personality that is an original.

His charisma is not the demiurgic sort like Hitler’s, nor does it derive so much from an emotional personal identification with the people and nation as in the case with some populists. Duterte’s charisma would probably be best described as “carino brutal,” a volatile mix of will to power, a commanding personality, and gangster charm that fulfills his followers’ deep-seated yearning for a father figure who will finally end the national chaos.

Duterte is not a reactionary seeking to restore a mythical past. He is not a conservative dedicated to defending the status quo. His project is oriented towards an authoritarian future.

He is best described, using Arno Mayer’s term, as a counterrevolutionary. Unlike some of his predecessors, like Hitler and Mussolini, however, he is not waging a counterrevolution against the left or socialism.

In Duterte’s case, the target, one can infer from his discourse and his actions, is liberal democracy, the dominant ideology and political system of our time. In this sense, he is both a local expression as well as a pioneer of an ongoing global phenomenon: the rebellion against liberal democratic values and liberal democratic discourse that Francis Fukuyama had declared as the “end of history” in the early 1990s.

Counterrevolutionaries are not always clear about what their next moves are, but they often have an instinctive sense of what would bring them closer to power. Ideological purity is not high on their agenda, with them putting the premium on the emotional power of their message rather on its ideological coherence. The low priority accorded to ideological coherence is also extended to political alliances.

Duterte’s mobilisation of a multiclass base and his ruling with the support of virtually all of the elite is unexceptional. However, one of the things that makes him a fascist original is that he has brought the dominant section of the left into his ruling coalition, something that would have been unthinkable with most previous fascist leaders.

But perhaps Duterte’s distinctive contribution to fascism as a political phenomenon is in the area of political methodology. The stylised paradigm of fascism coming to power has the fascist leader or party begin with violations of civil rights, followed by the power grab, then indiscriminate repression.

Duterte turns this “Marcosian model” of “creeping fascism” around. He begins with impunity on a massive scale, that is, the extrajudicial killing of thousands of alleged drug users and pushers, and leaves the violations of civil liberties and the grab for absolute power as mopping up operations in a political landscape devoid of significant organized opposition.

A product of EDSA
Duterte’s ascendancy cannot be understood without taking into consideration the debacle of the EDSA liberal democratic republic that was born in the uprising of 1986. In fact, EDSA’s failure was a condition for Duterte’s success.

What destroyed the EDSA project and paved the way for Duterte was the deadly combination of elite monopoly of the electoral system and neoliberal economic policies and the priority placed on foreign debt repayment imposed by Washington. By 2016, there was a yawning gap between the EDSA Republic’s promise of popular empowerment and wealth redistribution and the reality of massive poverty, scandalous inequality, and pervasive corruption.

And the EDSA Republic’s discourse of democracy, human rights, and rule of law had become a suffocating straitjacket for a majority of Filipinos who simply could not relate to it owing to the overpowering reality of their powerlessness.

Duterte’s discourse – a mixture of outright death threats, basag-ulero language, and frenzied railing coupled with disdainful humor directed at the elite, whom he called “coños” – was a potent formula that proved exhilarating to his audience who felt themselves liberated from the stifling hypocrisy of the EDSA discourse.

Fascism in power
Probably no fascist personality since Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 has used the mandate of a plurality at the polls to reshape the political arena more swiftly and decisively than Duterte in 2016. Even before he formally assumed office, the extrajudicial killings began; the elite opposition disintegrated, with some 98 percent of the so-called “Yellow Party,” the Liberals, joining the Duterte Coalition; and Duterte achieved total control of both houses of Congress.

The Supreme Court, shying away from a confrontation, chose not to challenge the President’s decision to have the former dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, buried in the Libingan ng mg Bayani.

A traditional bulwark of defence of human rights, the Catholic Church, exercised self-censorship, afraid that in a confrontation with a popular president who threatened to expose bishops and priests with mistresses and clerical child abusers, it was going to be a sure loser.

A novice in foreign policy, Duterte was able to combine personal resentment with acute political instinct to radically reshape the Philippines’ relationship with the big powers, notably the United States. What surprised many though was that there was very little protest in the Philippines at Duterte’s geopolitical reorientation given the stereotype of Filipinos being “little brown brothers.”

What protest there was came mainly from traditional anti-American quarters which evinced scepticism about the President’s avowed intentions.

Here, Duterte again showed himself to be a masterful instinctive politician. As many have observed, coexisting with admiration for the US and US institutions exhibited by ordinary Filipinos is a strong undercurrent of resentment at the colonial subjugation of the country by the US, the unequal treaties that Washington has foisted on the country, and the overwhelming impact of the “American way of life” on local culture.

One need not delve into the complex psychology of Hegel’s master-servant dialectic to understand that the undercurrent of the US-Philippine relationship has been the “struggle for recognition” of the dominated party.

Duterte has been able to tap into this emotional underside of Filipinos in a way that the left has never been able to with its anti-imperialist programme.

The anti-American comments from Duterte supporters that filled cyberspace were just as fierce as their attacks on critics of his war on drugs. Like many of his authoritarian predecessors elsewhere, Duterte has been able to splice nationalism and authoritarianism in a very effective fashion, though many progressives have seen this as mainly motivated by opportunism.

What surprises are in store for us?
So what other surprises should we expect from this fascist original?

Perhaps the best way to approach the question of what is likely to come is to ask the following: What are the chinks in Duterte’s armour? How would they affect the pursuit of Duterte’s programme? What are the prospects for the opposition?

There are chinks in the Duterte armour, and one of them is the health and age of the President. Duterte has been candid about his medical problems and his dependence on the drug fentanyl, reportedly a strongly addictive substance that is 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine and has the same effects as heroin. The age factor is not unimportant, considering that the President is turning 72. Hitler became chancellor at 44 and Mussolini became prime minister at 39. For the successful pursuit of an ambitious political project, one’s energy level is not unimportant.

More problematic is the issue of institutionalising the movement. The force driving Duterte’s electoral insurgency has not yet been converted into a mass movement. Duterte’s key advisers have recognised this, their analysis being that the reason Joseph Estrada was ousted in 2001 was because he was not able to fall back on an organised mass movement to protect him. Jun Evasco, the secretary of the cabinet and a long-time Duterte aide, is the key person the President is relying on to fill the breach by forming the Kilusang Pagbabago (Movement for Reform) that was launched in August 2016.

Evasco’s vision is apparently a mass organization along the lines of those of the National Democratic Front, where he cut his political teeth. This won’t be easy since, as some analysts have pointed out, he would have to contend with competing projects from Duterte’s political allies, like the Pimentels, the Marcoses, and the Arroyos, who would prefer an old-style political formation that brings together elite personalities. Needless to say, a political formation along the lines of the latter would be the kiss of death for Duterte’s electoral insurgency.

A bigger hurdle would be failure to deliver on political and social reforms. Practically all of the key political and economic elites have declared allegiance to Duterte, so that one finds it difficult to see how he can deliver on his political and economic reform agenda without alienating key supporters.

The Marcoses, who still have their ill-gotten wealth stashed abroad, the Arroyos, who have been implicated in so many shady deals, and so many other elites, many of whom have cases pending before the Ombudsman, are not likely to be disciplined for corruption, especially given their very close links to Duterte.

Nor will the Visayan Bloc, that has come in full force behind Duterte, agree to a law that will extend the very incomplete agrarian reform program. Nor will the big monopolists like Manuel Pangilinan and Ramon Ang, who have pledged fealty to him, submit without resistance to being divested of their corporate holdings.

This is not to say that Duterte is a puppet of the elites. Having a power base of his own that he can easily turn on friend or foe, he is beholden to no one. Indeed, one can argue that most of the elite have joined him mainly for their own protection, like small merchants paying protection money to the mafia.

The issue, rather, is how serious he is about social reform and how willing he is to alienate his supporters among the elite.

The same goes for economic reform. Ending contractualisation (or ENDO, for “End of Contract”), one of the President’s most prominent promises, is currently bogged down in efforts to arrive at a “win-win” solution for management and labor, and all the major labor federations are fast losing hope the administration will deliver on this.

As for macroeconomic policy, any departure from neoliberal principles on the part of orthodox technocrats like Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno and National Economic and Development Authority Director General Ernesto Pernia is far-fetched.

Again, the question lies in how convinced Duterte is that neoliberalism is a dead end and how willing he is to incur the technocratic and bureaucratic displeasure and loss of confidence on the part of foreign investors that would be elicited by adopting a different economic paradigm.

Social and economic reform is Duterte’s Achilles heel, and the President himself is aware that popularity is a commodity that can disappear quickly in the absence of meaningful reforms. Dissatisfaction is fertile ground for the build-up of opposition. This spells danger for the country in the medium term.

Even if he is able to quickly create a mass-based party, Duterte, to stay securely in power, would find that he would need to resort to the repressive apparatuses of the state to quell discontent and opposition. This may not be too difficult a course to follow.

As noted earlier, having led a bloody campaign that has already claimed more than 7000 lives, the suspension of civil liberties and the imposition of permanent emergency rule would be in the nature of “mopping up” operations for Duterte. It would be a walk in the park.

The opposition
Does the opposition matter? The elite opposition is extremely weak at this point, with most of the Liberal Party having joined the Duterte bandwagon out of opportunism or fear. An opposition led by Vice-President Leni Robredo, who resigned from Duterte’s cabinet after being told not to attend meetings, is not likely to be viable.

While undoubtedly possessing integrity, Robredo has shown poor judgment, receptiveness to bad advice, and little demonstrated capacity for national leadership, and is, in the view even of some of her supporters, largely a political creation of Liberal Party operatives who wanted to convert the name of her deceased husband, former Department of the Interior and Local Government head Jesse Robredo, into political capital.

Moreover, her continuing strong ties to the double-faced Liberal Party and the former administration lend her to becoming easily discredited among both Duterte supporters and opponents.

The Left in crisis
This brings up the Left.

Duterte’s coming to power created a crisis for the Left. For one sector of the Left, Akbayan, the social democratic Left that had allied itself uncritically with the Aquino administration, Duterte’s ascendancy meant their marginalisation from power along with the Liberal Party, for which they had, with their leadership’s eyes wide open, become the grassroots organising arm.

For the traditional, or what some called the “extreme left,” Duterte posed a problem of another kind. While the National Democratic Front and Communist Party had not supported Duterte’s candidacy, they accepted Duterte’s offer of three cabinet or Cabinet-level positions, as secretaries of the Department of Agrarian Reform and the Department of Social Welfare and Development and chair of the National Anti-Poverty Commission.

They also accepted the president’s offer to initiate negotiations to arrive at a final peace agreement.

For Duterte, the entry of personalities associated with the Communist Party into his Cabinet provided a left gloss to his regime, a proof that he was progressive, “a socialist, but only up to my armpits,” as he put it colourfully during his victory speech in Davao City on 4 June 2016.

It soon became clear that Duterte had the better part of the bargain. As the regime’s central policy of killing drug users and pushers without due process escalated, the Left’s role in the Cabinet became increasingly difficult to justify.

This dilemma was compounded by the fact that no new land reform law was passed that would allow agrarian reform to continue, there was little movement in the administration’s promise to end contractualisation, and macroeconomic policy continued along neoliberal lines.

The Left, however, found it hard to shelve the peace negotiations, from which they had already made some gains, and to part from heading up government agencies that gave them unparalleled governmental resources to expand their mass base.

Duterte had again displayed his acute political instincts. Knowing that the traditional Left was at ebb in its fortunes, he gambled that they would accept his offer of Cabinet positions. And having accepted these and agreeing to open up peace negotiations from which it could get many more concessions than it would have gotten under previous administrations, the Left, he knew, would find it extremely difficult to part from the positions of power it had gained.

The price, the leaders of the Left realised, would be high, and this was their association with a bloodthirsty regime. The Communist Party and its mass organisations tried to alleviate the contradiction by issuing statements condemning Duterte’s bloody policies.

But this only made their dilemma keener, since people would ask, why then do you continue to provide legitimacy to this administration by staying on in the Cabinet? Unlike Hitler and Mussolini, Duterte brought the Left into his regime, but in doing so, he has been able to sandbag it and subordinate it as a political force.

So far, that is.

Whether he is fully conscious of it or not, Duterte’s ascendancy has severely shaken all significant political institutions and political players in the country, from right to left.

Civil society mobilises
Where opposition to Duterte has developed over the last six months has been from civil society. A leading force is I Defend, a broad grouping of over 50 people’s organisations and non-governmental organisations that has waged an unremitting struggle against the extra-judicial killings. Another is the coalition against the Marcos burial at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.

While Malacañang has painted these formations as “dilawan,” or yellow, the reality is that most of their partisans are progressives that are as opposed to a “yellow restoration” as they are to Duterte’s policies, as well as newer and younger forces drawn from the post-EDSA and millennial generations that have become alarmed at Duterte’s fascist turn.

This growing opposition does not seek a reprise of 1986, perhaps heeding Marx’s warning that “history first unfolds as tragedy, then repeats itself as comedy.” It is increasingly realising that the fight for human rights and due process must be joined to a revolutionary program of participatory politics and economic democracy – to socialism, in the view of many – if it is to turn the fascist tide. There is no going back to EDSA.

What the opposition still has to internalise though is that opposing fascism in power will not be, to borrow a saying from Mao, “a dinner party,” that it will indeed be exceedingly difficult and demand great sacrifices.

Moreover, there is no guarantee of success in the short or medium term. Fascism in power can be extraordinarily long-lived. The Franco regime in Spain lasted 39 years, while Salazar’s Estado Novo in neighbouring Portugal went on for 42 years.

Like the anti-Marcos resistance four decades back, the only certainty members of the anti-fascist front can count on is that they’re doing the right thing. And that, for some, is a certainty worth dying for.

• Walden Bello made the only recorded resignation out of principle in the history of the Congress of the Republic of the Philippines in 2015 owing to what he saw as the Aquino administration’s double standards in dealing with corruption, failure to deliver economic and social reform, and subservience to the United States. An anti-dictatorship activist, he was principal author of Development Debacle: The World Bank in the Philippines, which exposed the Marcos-World Bank alliance in forging the export-oriented capitalist development model. A retired professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines, he is currently senior research fellow at Kyoto University and professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

This article by Walden Bello is an abbreviated adaptation of a much longer piece to be published in the Philippine Sociological Review and is published by Asia Pacific Report with the permission of the author. Other Walden Bello articles on Rappler.