Political change takes time

Even when there are peaceful political transitions, many societies take years to absorb the complex aftermath of elections that displace longstanding governments. Fifteen years ago, when Vicente Fox became president of Mexico, upsetting the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which had held power for seven decades, his administration needed several years to address the necessary reforms of state institutions — many of which had been hopelessly inefficient and corrupt for more than a generation.

When he left office six years later Fox’s loosening of the PRI’s grip on Mexico’s fledgling democracy was by far from complete. The country’s subsequent experience of democratic governance, including a sanguinary drugs war which has claimed more than 100,000 lives, is a cautionary tale for anyone who believes that watershed elections set the stage for straightforward fixes.

Political inertia is particularly hard to overcome when the new leaders have had long spells in opposition.

The New Democratic party’s victory in Alberta, Canada, for instance, will presently transfer power to a leader who — despite commitments to hiking petroleum royalties, corporate taxes and revisiting the Keystone pipeline deal — has little choice for the foreseeable future but to rely on her predecessor’s revenue streams, and the structures that produced them.

Imposing new taxes will likely erode her support significantly, but it may be the only way to address the sharp downturn in the province’s economy. After the euphoria of a successful campaign, voters often forget the slow pace of political reform, and the obvious fact that politicians of every stripe invariably promise more than they can deliver.

It is clear, not least from the Guyanese diaspora’s intense curiosity in the recent elections, that many of us hope for the advent of an “inclusionary democracy” — the subject of an editorial earlier this week —in which all of us have a role to play. This ideal may well require more patience and maturity than we are used to, especially in our political life.

If we are to move beyond the mind-forged manacles of racial politics, in which every embarrassment or failure is further proof of the other side’s bad faith, we need to adopt more modest ideas about what democratic governments can achieve. As the recently ended Liberal-Conservative coalition in the UK has shown, modern democracies are less about grand visions of remaking society and quite often boil down to little more than scores of tedious and heavily-negotiated compromises. The late Tony Judt, perhaps the most eloquent chronicler of postwar

Europe’s social democracy movements, once said that “If we have learned nothing else from the twentieth century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer [to a political question], the more terrifying its consequences.” Rather than indulge sweeping hopes of political change, he preferred an agenda closer to the ideals of Fabian socialism, arguing that “Imperfect improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek.” Judt’s insight would be a terrible campaign slogan, but our members of parliament could do worse than memorise it and try to live up to its quiet realism in their daily labours.

Decades of Guyanese politics have been wasted on fearmongering, divisiveness and ideological wrangling that had little relevance to the lives of ordinary people. One of the most encouraging developments of recent weeks and months is that political discourse seems to have shifted towards more practical questions of local government and civic engagement. Long may it remain there.