'The Right is Using the Political Touch Points of the Left to Justify Their Existence'

Hyderabad: The Telangana government hosted the Bharat Summit on April 25 and 26 in Hyderabad. It has been widely hailed as one of the biggest gatherings of global progressives from across the world in recent times. Elected leaders, activists and thinkers from nearly 100 countries congregated to find a road map to fight the surge of the right wing, globally.

On the sidelines of the summit, The Wire spoke to Arena Williams, a two-time member of parliament and youth leader from New Zealand about how New Zealand has been somewhat successful in tackling the rise of the Right, and lessons that progressives around the world can learn from India.

Williams, a member of New Zealand’s Labour Party, represents Manurewa, a suburb in South Auckland. The electorate of Manurewa has been sending a Labour Party representative to parliament since 1963.

Excerpts from the conversation follow.

At a time when we are seeing Europe and US moving to the far right politically, why is New Zealand not so prominently tilting towards it?

This is such an interesting observation. As a New Zealander with progressive values, sharing space at a forum like the Bharat Summit with a number of elected politicians from different parts of the world, I have thought about the rise of the Far Right; and what that would mean not only for me but for them too.

So, when I look at New Zealand, I think we have the privilege to be in a position where we have this system called MMP (mixed member proportional) of parliamentary representation, whereby voters have one vote to elect their member of parliament to represent their region, and another vote to represent the party which they wish to govern.

That electoral system means usually, the government is formed by two or more political parties, some of which could be minor parties too. At the moment, the governing party is a right-wing party (New Zealand National Party) but it is supported by New Zealand First, a small populist party, and the ACT Party which is a hard right neo-liberal party. I agree that one of the reasons why the far right hasn’t had a reactionary rise in New Zealand in the way we are seeing it unfolding in many of the European states and in the United States is because we have an outlet for those views, and because in a pluralist democracy like ours, we are able to debate them well, meaning, those views have a way of being represented within a dialogue.

However, I would also say that there are different conditions in New Zealand where we are not dealing with many of the challenges that countries represented at the Bharat Summit [from Europe] are. For example, New Zealand’s geographic distance means we have not seen the rising tensions of the threat of war at our doorstep that many of these countries have. We have also not had mass migrations in the last ten years of refugees. We will have to deal with climate refugees in our region of the Pacific but we have not seen people coming in numbers undocumented, and this is one of the reasons why our immigration debate is very different from many of the European countries.

People in New Zealand who have come to the country are there because they have come on a visa, either to work or to seek education; they are very few migrants who are undocumented. So, our migration debates can be about how many people we need to fill jobs in areas there have shortage; how many people the infrastructure can sustain; and their housing developments can sustain; and they are not about undocumented people like many of these countries that are seeing rash, reactionary anti migration discussions occurring.

New Zealand may be a little different at the moment because it is not directly affected by the refugee issue, but as a representative of a centre-left political party, does anything in particular about the global right wing concern you?

I am interested in thinking about the rise of the old right and how they are addressing issues like women’s emancipation, etc; how it is playing out in democratic discourses around the world, led by many of the old right strongman elected leaders. They are using, say, things like immigration, to state that women are losing their place in the society because of it; they are facing more misogynistic views because of migration. They are also pointing to the LGBTQ communities in their countries, saying that migration is undermining their place in society too.

So, what we see is, the Right is using the political touch points of the Left to justify their existence. It is something that I would say, is beginning to take hold in parts of Europe. For instance, Hungarian prime minister Victor Orban recently gave a speech at the European Union parliament where he very squarely pointed to migrants leading to the undermining of women, of gay people, of young people within his economy. Its a worrying trend for lot of reasons but the biggest one for me as an elected member is that there is a lack of focus from elected members globally to deal with the real problems facing people; say, for instance, women’s emancipation and the progress of working people require political focus, and we cannot exit a political narrative that sees that the reason why these people aren’t getting heard is because of migrants. We have to address and tackle the underlying economic factors that are holding such people back; why young women can’t be educated in many states; why young people can’t afford to buy houses and can’t afford to save for their futures; those are things that are symptoms of rising inequality in the world, and are not a symptom of migration.

A panel on economic justice at Bharat Summit in Hyderabad, Telangana. Photo: Ajoy Ashirwad

It is also true that a large number of undocumented migrants from countries like Syria, or now from Palestine, are heading to the West because of the foreign policy and military decisions of the First World and their friends.

You are completely right there. Those undocumented people who are seeking safety – seeking homes, jobs, for their families – absolutely deserve those things and we as a global community need to make sure that they have those things. However, the pressure that they didn’t put on the other states is also something we should be thinking about because we should also be keeping in mind those people who are receiving the refugees. I think, some ordinary working people who usually vote for left-wing politicians (in Europe) are seeing a lack of care and respect for the everyday experience they are feeling; that they might lose their jobs; their children’s education is suffering because of migration, etc. They say that there is no real response from the democratically-elected leaders from the progressive liberal space. So, the alternative Right is being able to fill that void.

I also think that pointing to those war-related issues is an uniting issue; its exactly what the democratic Left around the world needs to hear; that we do have models to address such issues and hope is not lost.

Do you have any particular model in mind? Can India provide any solution?

Yes, for instance, look at India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru who gave the Indian people not only the seeds of the nationhood but also a sense of national purpose by creating an industrial policy plan for India where every man, woman and child was called upon to join that national project of creating and building steel, dams, projects of making jobs, and that has to be the answer of the Left too.

When people are scared that they won’t be able to hold on to a job, when people are scared that they won’t have a house to live in, it is only the government that can step up to the challenge and provide those jobs. The governments can provide those jobs by creating industries, by working with private sector to unlock resources to be able to harness the collective power within a country to create something. I think that’s what we will see from Europe, to not only electrify but rearm Europe in the next decade which would be a huge call to the ordinary working class people that the government has a project where they will have a place. We will see it not only in Europe but also in the Trump Administration to some extent, re-industrialising America in what he is calling national resilience and self reliance as his project.

We need socially progressive democratically elected leaders to re-harness the tools of government to be able too recreate those jobs, and set up industries too; we can’t leave it to the Right because we will then see a consistent undermining of those rights that people have to be involved in. Prime Minister Nehru, long back, had got it very right; he included people, brought women too to the picture and that is the way forward even now.

We have seen thinkers, activists, elected leaders like you from nearly 100 countries congregating at the Bharat Summit to address various panel discussions and also to participate in closed-door conversations. Do you see a larger holding of hands of the progressive forces worldwide in the near future trying to find an answer to fight the Right?

There is value in bringing people together for such discussions, whether they are civic level elected leaders, or from the city or state level or leaders at the national level. But we have to be very conscious of the people who are not in the room. In the panel discussion held at the Summit on Youth and Politics of Tomorrow (on April 25), there were very good questions put by the audience about whether young marginalised domestic workers and gig workers are being represented in the conversation. What I mean to underlines is, we need to be conscious that the decisions we make here (at the Summit) are for the good of the people, and the people see themselves represented within the conversations.

Of course, the beauty of a democratic method of governance is that we all come with a community’s best interests at heart; likewise, we are all here representing a constituency – as different as they may be and with their interests informing not only the political discussions but also the values that we hold. Democracy is often described as having the best and the worst solutions; its a messy one, but it is also something that we all can work very hard to make it right.

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