A claim that is commonly shared by all politiciains is that they have stayed and will stay “close to the people”. To be honest, I find it somewhat confused as a statement. In a small country like ours, necessarily we all live close to everybody else. That one listens to what people have to say might be a more accurate claim, even if begs the question: But what happens after one has listened? Or the question: Who are the people who are being listened to?

Clearly the slogan of being “close to the people” is intended to emphasize how politicians (on both the government and opposition sides) have not become isolated from the ordinary lives of citizens. They’re not living in some ivory tower.

Perhaps it is hard to believe this, at least in the majority of cases.

The most effective manner by which the idea has been expressed recently was when in the US, Bill Clinton addressed the Democratic Convention which nominated Kamala Harris its candidate for the presidential elections of the fall. Harris as President, Clinton said with a playful frown, would break his own record of being the President who had spent most time at McDonald’s.                   

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COALITIONS

Coalitions run the majority of European countries. Some insist that this is the best way to govern in a parliamentary democracy for it avoids the “dictatorship” that results from a one-party government and avoids as well extremist policies. So went the argument before “extremist” parties made their entry in governmental coalitions (in Austria, Finland, Italy (?), Slovakia and recently Holland).

It is more difficult to judge how efficient coalitions can be. If they are too widely based, the time taken to arrive at compromise arrangements might encourage the belief that the government is not going places. Even more, if disputes between different members of the government go public. An example of this is being provided by the present German government, a coalition labelled traffic lights because it is made up of the greens, the yellows and the reds.

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TERRORISM

As a word, terrorism has lost all usefulness to denote the nature of a certain kind of violent action. That the Russians use the word against the Ukrainians and vice-versa makes no sense. Even as propaganda, it is not credible. Similarly when the Israelis use it against the Palestinians.

Originally, if memory serves me right, the word used to mean violent action organised by  a person or persons who stand against the legitimate or established rule, who consider they are cut off from all say in a community’s decision-making and therefore decide, even at the cost of losing their own life, to organize some massacre.

Today what gets labelled as terrorism is also including state action against another state, or even the action of a community against another one. It can always be used to blame  the actions of an actor who happens to be your enemy but never for action you carry out against your enemy. Unsurprisingly, the word has lost its original significance and meaning.