Central European Round Table of Green Local Councillors, first day

Participation in Austria.

Kickert first informed about the Austrian tradition of participation which can be considered as an exclusive top-down-process. Except for the Local-Agenda 21 in Vienna, participation is reduced to opinion research or to ballot already elaborated political decisions via referendum. Kickert explained why this design of participation causes distrust and is clearly vulnerable to populist and manipulative political influence.

Current political practice to participate tends to undermine democracy.
When people get invited they are usually not expected to participate in decision-making, but to present only their attitudes and concerns on matters. They are asked for their opinions in a very late stage of consultation. Mostly the respective topics are emotionally conflictive and have already escalated. In this context, Kickert mentioned the participatory dilemma caused by the recent call for a referendum in the matter of Viennese parking space: To ask people if they want to pay for parking space without discussing and providing broader information not only threatens green policy goals but also democracy as a whole. In another case (2010), the Austrian Social Democrats transferred responsibility to citizens by lancing a referendum on the matter of congestion charges. The currently planned referendum on the design of military service seems to follow this pattern.

Need for standardized procedures and instruments.
In order to avoid distrust towards politicians and/or traditional political institutions and to make participation work, Kickert outlined several crucial requirements for successful participation processes. First, there is a need for transparency as well as for balanced, sufficient, and continuous information:  People have to be informed about their role in the decision-making-process in advance. They need to know if they are able to influence the decision or if they are only expected to present their opinion. They should receive information continuously from the very first and should also be invited at the first stage of the decision-making-process. The organizers of participation have to make sure that participants have sufficient time to discuss. Furthermore, there is a need for standardized direct democratic tools: Effective opinion polls and referendums require clear and comprehensible questionnaires, questions have to be designed in an adequate way. Last but not least, these direct democratic tools have to be controlled by a monitoring authority.  

Complementary remarks.

Andreas Novy (President of the Austrian Green Foundation GBW) stressed the need for understanding democracy and for systemic solutions to involve citizens and experts. A Hungarian participant questioned the presented biased views towards populism: He explained that he is not afraid to be populist and referred to Oscar Wilde who considered temptation to be essential for enlightening people and inspiring them for the idea of freedom. He also addressed the possible problem with referendums in Budapest where 70 percent of its population agree to put homeless people into jail.

Kickert considered Austria’s civil society as strong and engaged but regretted that politicians usually are not ready to discuss with their voters. Asked about educational matters in Austria she emphasized the need for more discussion and dialogue in schools in order to develop political awareness and skills of individuals and to reflect their limitation to the role to consumers.

The second presentation dealt with “Strategies to counteract right-wing populism on the local level” and was provided by Dirk Holemans (Member of Social Council of the Belgian city Ghent, coordinator of the Flemish Green Foundation Oikos, former President of the Flemish Green Party).

Holemans presented the experience of Ghent, a Flemish city of 250,000 inhabitants, including 68,000 students. The former industrial city has become a tourist sensation and appears quite exceptional in a Flemish environment where right-wing parties dispose about more than 30 percent of votes: In Ghent the Social Democratic and the Green Party are gaining while the right-wing party Vlaams Blok/Vlaams Belang continuously lost influence since 2000.
Holemans figured out four striking features of populists: They claim to speak in the name of the people. They distance themselves from the elite. They treat certain groups, for example Roma, as scapegoats. And finally, they communicate in a demagogic way. To Holemans, the reason for growing influence of right-wing-populism is dedicated to a social change triggered by neoliberal dominated policies since the 1990ies: Phenomena like erosion of the welfare state, marketization of former public spaces, increasing migration, individual perception of loneliness, and uncertain future perspectives have led to a growing distrust towards traditional parties and prepared the breeding ground for populism.
Why does Ghent succeed in sailing against the wind? Holemans emphasized that local politics matters, although they cannot overcome national and European currents. But he showed himself convinced that it is due to the well-known, popular mayor, who knocks on the doors of his citizens every Saturday. Some politicians try to create a new political narrative, they know that the key task is to reconnect with voters, to create new networks and to care for security and solidarity. Besides, they do not shake hands with representatives of extreme right-wing parties.

How to cope with Nationalism?
Austrian Greens especially criticize the territorial concept of nationalism and its conflictive ideology which separates people by inclusion and exclusion.
Hungarian participants explained that the situation in Central and Eastern European countries is different, as they are hardly affected from migration. However, the Roma are excluded by populist parties. In Hungary the importance of national identity as well as of Europe has to be considered as a result of the post-communist era. For the Greens, this means that they have to focus on the new role of Hungarian nation state, if they want to recapture votes of the nationalist government party FIDESZ and the continuously growing right-wing party JOBBIK. Nationalist parties express themselves very simple and therefore are closer to the public while Green messages seem to be too intellectual for people.

The Hungarian green party “Lehet Más a Politika” (LMP) have to work together with nationalist parties in local parliaments and therefore are not able to isolate them. Currently they search for possibilities for reconciling the modern 21st Century-values of being sustainable and global with the traditional values of national and local identities. The crucial questions are: How to deal with the insecurity of people? And: What does it mean to be a European Nation?  Holemans encouraged the Austrian Greens to think “nation” not only in terms of the state and its institutions but also as cultural dimension which is binding. He stressed that people do not live by ideas, instead they need certain reference points on the structural and on the cultural level. Therefore the political narrative of the Greens should also provide flexible and open cultural elements for a common identity. It should respond to the question: What is a political community?

After this input participants discussed the concept of social artist houses in Ghent and similar projects in other countries which foster the feeling of local belonging. In Hungary on the contrary, cultural centers disappeared. However, the promoting of traditional harvest and wine festivals leads to the pleasant side-effect, that the available generous funds also permit the LMP to finance partnership and educational activities.

The author, Gerhild Schutti, studied Political Science and is a member of the editorial staff of the Green Foundation.