George Kakouris
One evening recently, we were sitting around the kitchen table at a friend’s house in Cologne, Germany, discussing how it feels to live in a country where a significant percentage of voters have no qualms about supporting the far right. Especially in Cologne, where Nazism is not just a theoretical concept, as the city was heavily destroyed during World War II.
The children were sleeping in the next room, and the mixed-nationality couple (one German, the other from a third country) spoke about an acquaintance of theirs—someone who has lived in Germany for years but comes from a third country—who was trying to convince them to vote for the far right. She justified her stance by citing poverty and the influx of immigrants she had noticed when she moved to the city center, as well as the sense of insecurity she felt. I imagined that this kind of confusion, this distrust in the choices of fellow citizens, relatives, and friends, must have also been felt by people sitting around kitchen tables, with children sleeping in the next room, when the Nazi party was rising to power. And in every similar moment in history, when the political establishment either turns toward or compromises with authoritarianism as an easy solution—whether leading or being led by public discontent.
Even in Germany, where the collective guilt of World War II makes even justified criticism of Israel a sensitive issue, Friedrich Merz, the leader of the Christian Democrats and a likely future chancellor, agreed to pass a non-binding resolution on immigration with the support of the far right. What hope, then, does Cyprus have, where the Speaker of Parliament sees no obligation or tarnish in having been elected with votes from ELAM?
The American anthropologist David Graeber remarked in early 2020, shortly before his death, that the problem with the political center is that "it doesn’t really stand for anything positive"—that a leader like Obama succeeded because "he seemed like someone who naturally had a vision, acted like a visionary, spoke and carried himself in a way that made it look like he believed in something."
Graeber noted that the center has become a collection of symbols that give the liberal establishment a sense of superiority, creating "a symbiosis where the right pretends to be stupid," as George W. Bush did, for example. This, according to Graeber, led people who despise the elite for its privileges to vote for Bush simply because they assumed, "I guess they feel the same way about me as they do about him."
Trump, Graeber argued, "is just the most extreme version of the same thing," as was Boris Johnson. "People fall for the same stupid trick over and over again—there’s a symbiotic relationship between these centrist elites, who are arrogant and elitist, and these con artists who pretend to be country bumpkins, pretend to be fools, or pretend to be fascists," attempting to create a situation where "these are the only two viable political choices because they feed off each other and reinforce one another."
David Graeber was ideologically an anarchist, and these references come from a video by the leftist British website Double Down News. I mention this at the end, hoping that the readership of K—including, for example, the esteemed Ioulia Palaiologou-Wilson—won't dismiss it outright by wrinkling their noses at the real (but mostly imagined) flaws of this particular school of thought. However, despite the contradictions within the Anglophone urban right of Nicosia to which she belongs, I believe Palaiologou-Wilson is among those who can distinguish the frivolous from the substantial.
We are in a historical moment where the majority of the political elite has run out of proposals and is elected based on likability and the projection of a moderate image—much like President Christodoulides. But the far-right, though it has always consisted of a core of zealots alongside a broader circle of opportunists and frauds, will not fade into obscurity and irrelevance simply through good vibes.
It will return there when the left begins offering real solutions again and engages in self-criticism for its mistakes, when the center returns to true pragmatism by synthesizing ideas, and when the right resists its worst impulses. Only then will there once again be real, not just superficial, choices. Because, even in Cyprus, if today's politics of image fail, plenty of zealots, opportunists, and useful idiots are waiting in the wings.
This opinion was translated from its Greek original.
