Past and current threats to parliamentary democracy

By John Keane

This is the second part of a keynote address, delivered in the presence of King Felipe VI, at the conference to commemorate the International Day of Parliamentarism hosted by the Inter Pares: EU Global Project to Strengthen the Capacity of Parliaments (Cortes Generales, León, Spain, June 30, 2023).

The first part of the keynote on the invention of the cortes model can be read here and the third part discussing the future of parliaments as watchdogs here.

What about the subsequent fate of the cortes of León? Encouraged by military victories over the Moors, the surviving evidence shows that the cortes managed to survive for several centuries. Long distance government based on the consent of its subjects worked. 

By the end of the fourteenth century, following a merger of the neighbouring kingdoms of León and Castile, the kingdom’s representatives enjoyed considerable powers. Their right of gathering and presenting petitions, and their insistence that agreements struck by the parliament were legally binding, became customary.

Constitutional monarchy produced plenty of strife. The cortes was the site of intense bargaining about definitions of the welfare of the realm. Money was often the key cause of friction. Representatives constantly emphasized that kings were forbidden from manipulating coinage or levying extraordinary taxes without the explicit consent of all the estates. Before the end of the fourteenth century, there were times when the cortes reportedly demanded an audit of the court’s expenditure, even rebates on taxes that had already been paid.

The new León style of government proved geographically infectious. During the thirteenth century, parliaments spread from León and Castile to Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia and Navarre, to Sicily and Portugal, England and Ireland, and across the empires of Austria and Brandenburg. During the next two centuries, parliaments appeared in the large majority of German principalities, in Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Poland and Hungary. Nearly all these late medieval and early modern parliaments survived until the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Despite the growth of absolutist states, which crushed the assemblies of Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia, many continued to function until the irruption of the French Revolution in 1789. The Navarrese cortes, the Swedish Riksdag and the Hungarian Diéta lasted into the nineteenth century. The powerful Estates of the Duchy of Mecklenburg survived intact until 1918.

By that time, in the aftermath of the collapse of empires and a catastrophic world war, Europe, noted Tomáš Masaryk, had become ‘a laboratory atop a vast graveyard’, a laboratory of democracy in which most European parliaments were besieged by political parties, trade unions, suffragists and other citizens demanding universal suffrage. Many observers expected the dawn of parliamentary democracy, but as we know, the cruel opposite happened. The butterfly of parliamentary democracy became the caterpillar of arbitrary rule. The long democratic revolution unleashed by young King Alfonso IX had run its course.

Here’s another irony: just as ‘the people’ mounted the stage of history, demanding ‘one person, one vote’, parliaments were racked by factional disputes, fierce backlashes and acts of violent sabotage. In countries like Yugoslavia and Romania, monarchs strangled parliaments. Military-backed dictators also savaged their parliaments, as happened in Piłsudski’s Poland and Horthy’s Hungary. Totalitarian rule triumphed in Italy, Germany, Russia and Spain, and also in China, which might otherwise have become the world’s largest parliamentary republic.

During these first decades of the 20th century, the downfall and disappearance of parliaments gathered pace. Politicians dressed in frock coats and top hats grew scared. The spirit of ‘dead bourgeois parliamentarism’ (Lenin) fractured and paralysed parliaments. Governments rose and fell in quick succession.

In Portugal, whose first 15 years of republican government had been marred by dozens of governments, eight presidents and countless attempted coups, the words of the new dictator Salazar blew like a winter wind across the whole continent, and well beyond. ‘So long as there is not some retrograde movement in political evolution,’ he said in 1934, ‘I am convinced that within 20 years there will be no legislative assemblies left in Europe.’

Rump parliaments

Salazar’s wishful prediction almost came true. By 1941, there were only 11 parliamentary democracies left on our planet. Only three survived in Europe: Britain, Sweden, and Switzerland.

Historians and political scientists tell us the good news that after World War Two parliamentary government made a stupendous political comeback. The not-so-good news is that the long post-1945 renaissance of parliaments is today losing momentum.

There’s writing on the walls of parliaments. We’re living through times in which parliaments are again plagued by legitimacy and performance problems. We need to pay special attention to this new trend. 

We aren’t backsliding to former times, say, to the catastrophes of the 1920s and 1930s. We aren’t even facing the kind of overnight emergencies that gripped Spain on February 23^rd 1981 –the moment described with great precision in Javier Cercas’s Anatomía de un instante when, in a hail of bullets, a frightened Cortes fell to the floor and was held hostage for six hours by golpistas.

More recent events in Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Mali, Myanmar, Sudan, Thailand and Yemen suggest that armies are still enemies of parliaments, but the main forces threatening the integrity of parliaments are nowadays different. They seem more banal. Their rhythm is different. But these new threats, if left untreated, are bound in the long run to destroy parliaments as effectively as happened a century ago in the heartlands of Europe.

What are these new sources of ruination? Most obviously, rising tides of reputational damage are lapping around parliament’s doorsteps. Cynicism, grumbling, ressentiment and angry citizens’ protests are becoming commonplace. On an already overheated planet, parliaments are said to be hot air chambers, mere talk shops, fabricators of unreality, quarrelsome kindergartens, warehouses of division, irrelevance and incompetence. Parliaments are the butt of bitter jokes. My Irish working class father – who knew something of the 1605 Gunpowder Treason Plot by supporters of Catholic Spain to blow up England’s House of Lords – liked to say that only one man ever entered parliament with honest intentions, and that was Guy Fawkes.

Tomfoolery and contempt for politicians hurt and harm parliaments from the outside, but just as worrying are the forces of decadence within the walls of parliaments. There’s not just the grandstanding, slam-bang rancour, misogyny and cluelessness of more than a few politicians. Or the ‘dead hand of party discipline’, as Michael Ignatieff put it.

Parliaments are materially corrupted by the combined forces of lobbyists, dark money merchants and revolving doors. In Washington DC, this tangled complex of government agencies, think tanks, corporations, academics and lobbyists with big toes in the lawmaking world of legislatures is known (for obvious reasons) as ‘the blob’.

Something similar is happening in the European Union where, in Brussels alone, nearly 12,000 organisations on the current voluntary EU lobby register declare that each year they spend a total of around 1.8 billion euros on their craft. At least 7,500 organisations operate without scrutiny in and around the European Parliament. Whatever is thought of the ethics of lobbying, the fact is government by moonlight is a growing problem in every parliamentary democracy. Mandatory accountability registers and comprehensive integrity checks to prevent ‘Qatargate’ corruption scandals and to ensure ethical fair play among lobbyists are typically in short supply.

India’s lower chamber Lok Sabha is the nightmare instance of what happens when lobbying, dirty money, shady deals, blackmail and criminality get the upper hand. In what’s known as the world’s largest democracy, more money is spent on elections than in the United States, even though average per capita income is only 3 per cent of US levels.

There’s no state funding for political parties and no proper regulation of party finances. 75 per cent of party funding comes from ‘unknown’ sources, including tax-free electoral bonds bought from the state-owned Bank of India (SBI) and anonymously deposited into the parties’ registered bank accounts. An estimated one-quarter of total election campaign expenditure goes directly to voters as cash and gifts. The upshot is that in Modi’s India parliament becomes a place of business deals, organised crime and ‘resort politics’ (an Indian specialty: party bosses buying off recalcitrant lawmakers in luxury hotel hideaways).¹ Following the 2019 elections, unsurprisingly, 43 per cent of MPs in the directly elected Lok Sabha had declared criminal cases against them (self-declaration is an election rule); 29 per cent confessed to ‘serious’ criminal charges, which include murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, rape and other crimes against women.

The Indian case shows how, in the name of democracy, parliaments can slowly degrade into mere meetings of more or less corrupted souls. The old saying that the word politics comes from poly, meaning many, and ticks, meaning bloodsucking parasites, then applies with a cruel vengeance. The decadence is perfected when parliaments fall victim to executive capture, to what Thomas Jefferson originally called ‘elective despotism’. In more than a few of today’s democracies, the centre of gravity of government is shifting from parliaments towards media-spun presidential rule. Take note how growing numbers of political oligarchs do everything they can to prorogue their parliaments, take decisions without consultation, all the while ignoring calls for accountability. They boast, contradict themselves and lie with impunity. Their media performances are reality shows. Excrement without nutrient – commonly called bullshit – is their specialty.

When this colonization of parliaments happens, the spirit of the León cortes is replaced by the mantra of Charles de Gaulle: that politics is much too serious a matter to be left to time-wasting, dithering politicians. The trend resembles a slow-motion coup d’état. It is backed by tactics such as government whipping, gag orders, gerrymandering and voter deregistration, emergency rule, compulsory budget limits, and the punishment of dissenting members. There are also kickbacks and favours and, lest we underestimate, sly efforts to outflank parliaments and silence their committees with the help of hand-picked, loyal bureaucrats, journalists, judges and other high officials, as Donald J. Trump attempted during his post-2016 presidency.

Things grow worse when populist parties and their demagogues get their paws on the levers of government. Populism accelerates the transition to elective despotism. Populists like Erdoğan, Kais Saied, Vučić, López Obrador and Kaczyński favour executive rule. They have a taste for prorogued legislatures, or what the English used to call rump parliaments: chambers that resemble chunks of rotting meat infected with maggots, parliamentary representatives who in the name of the people do little more than serve their executive masters on bended knees.

Things grow much worse when populist governments de-regulate, privatize and commodify public services. When neo-liberalism gets the upper hand, parliaments are blindsided. They become complicit in the growth of what should be called democracy exclusion zones: self-regulating banks, lawless tax havens, secret military-industrial complexes, and buccaneer data-harvesting media corporations which elude parliamentary scrutiny and legislative restraint.

The final part discusses the future of parliaments as watchdogs. Please continue reading here.

About the author

John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and Professorial Fellow at the WZB (Berlin). His latest book is The Shortest History of Democracy (2022), which has already been published in more than 12 languages.

1. See Chowdhury & Keane (2021), To Kill a Democracy, Oxford University Press. ↩︎