What Europe’s hopeful left can learn from Latin America

After years of austerity and economic turmoil, mass movements based on hope are finally taking root in Europe – and not just on the streets. Syriza is now in power in Greece, and enjoying a surge in the opinion polls. Meanwhile, its success is inspiring Spain’s Podemos to make a serious stand in elections there; its rallies are drawing Spaniards in their tens of thousands.

These movements are not just part of the everyday turnover of domestic politics. They are a real rejection of the insidious politics of austerity, and the beginning of the end of the politics of fear.

Austerity politics, after all, depends on fear. It relies on worries about the future to justify swingeing cuts and sacrifices in the present. Creating a sense of hopelessness is a very efficient way to quickly implement irreversible structural economic changes, even if they degrade living standards, worsen working conditions, and generally spread fear and unhappiness.

And as it goes in Europe today, so it went in Latin America in the 1990s.

• Primary Source

ESO: Background information: The winds are changing: a new left populism for Europe http://www.europeansources.info/record/the-winds-are-changing-a-new-left-populism-for-europe/

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