In the space of a few days, the two most important female politicians from the two largest powers in the West have won two crucial political battles. Ursula von der Leyen has won a tough vote in the European Parliament and has been re-elected as President of the European Commission.
And Kamala Harris looks set to win the Democratic Party nomination for the US presidential election in November after President Biden decided not to run again.
Gender representation is, however, the only positive aspect in two processes that otherwise raise questions and highlight extremely worrying trends for the functioning of democracy in the West.
Harris’s “coronation”
The Harris case is obviously the most problematic. Her coronation by Biden and the creation of the Democratic Party are essentially done under the pressure of time and rivalry with Trump, but it is still a deviation from any concept of intra-party democracy, which surprisingly all the major media outlets in the US avoid touching on.
It may have gone unnoticed, but the Democratic Party held primaries, that Biden, as the sitting president, won comfortably. The timing of the resignation and the rally around Harris means that for the first time in history, at least since mass primaries became the norm for both major parties in the 1970s, a major party chooses a candidate (who is not yet president) without any debate or internal competition.
The comparison with the Republicans
The comparison with the demonized Republican Party, where Trump had to defeat 16 challengers to win the nomination, is apt. And of course it does nothing to alleviate the impression that exists, especially after Hillary Clinton’s landslide victory over Bernie Sanders in 2016, that the Democratic Party is now the preeminent elitist party in the US, with its “royal” dynasties (the Clintons and Obamas) and vested interests predetermining the outcome. In a sense, the Democratic Party is now the “conservative” party in the US, just as the Republican Party was until 2016.
Within 5 years on the brink of the presidency
Harris’s personal journey is compelling. She is a politician who, in five years, found herself on the brink of the presidency, without once winning the trust of voters. As a candidate in the 2020 Democratic primaries, her campaign collapsed within months. She was, however, chosen by Biden as his running mate and has now been anointed as the Democratic nominee, literally overnight.
Despite initial enthusiasm for his candidacy, his candidacy casts doubt on his ability to defeat Trump.
The case of Von der Leyen
Von der Leyen’s case is in some ways different, since her own re-election as Commission President took place under EU rules. As the candidate of the largest political family after the European elections, the European People’s Party, she won the approval of EU heads of government and then survived a marginal vote in the European Parliament.
European elites like to present this process as a democratic legitimization of the new Commission, but the reality is quite different.
Exorbitant pressures
Firstly, one cannot ignore the atmosphere in which the vote took place in the European Parliament, where MEPs were pressured to vote for von der Leyen.
On the one hand, it was said that in the midst of the war in Ukraine and the uncertainty in the US, the EU cannot afford to go through a political crisis. On the other hand, it became clear that von der Leyen was the only alternative on the table and that if she lost, the EU would lose. It would essentially be headless. Of course, this was logically and constitutionally absurd – if von der Leyen lost, the heads of state would simply have to find a new candidate – but it shows that von der Leyen was playing “no opposition” for her re-election from the very beginning.
Her frantic last-minute effort to find the votes she needed to win is more indicative of a complete lack of enthusiasm for herself than any democracy in the process.
Contempt for democracy
The farce of von der Leyen’s re-election, of course, began months before the Strasbourg vote, with her being nominated as the EPP’s “presidential candidate”. Presumably the other political families (Socialists, Liberals, Greens) would have done the same, but they all chose comically colourless and unknown candidates, some of whom even grudgingly admitted that the end result of the process should be von der Leyen’s re-election – corrosive phenomena that would be laughable if they involved elections in a third world autocracy or Putin’s Russia.
Von der Leyen’s disdain for democracy was such that she did not even want to submit herself to the judgment of her party’s voters, refusing to be on the CDU list for the European elections. And of course, her case dates back to 2019, when her name appeared literally out of nowhere in the governments’ negotiations for the Commission President and in complete violation of the result of the then European elections, where the EPP had won with another candidate (Manfred Weber, who is now a loyal soldier of Von der Leyen and helped in her election).
The common element
If there is something in common in the cases of Harris and von der Leyen, it is that they both capture the way democracy is understood today, particularly by the political camp of its supposed defenders against the “danger of populism”: as a formalistic process that serves to produce an a posteriori legitimation for top-down choices, which are often presented as the only alternative to enemies, crises and threats.
Worse still, democracy is now understood as a necessary evil, as a “bullet” that must be “overcome” each time so that political systems can return to the “normality” of day-to-day management until the next crisis (which they usually produce themselves).
* Angelos Chrysogelos is Associate Professor of International Relations at London Metropolitan University