John Lloyd

Liberals and leftists all over the democratic world have often called themselves progressives, because it seems, in a word, to put you on the tide of a better future. (Also because in some countries, the United States most of all, to call yourself any kind of socialist was a route to permanent marginalization.) Progress doesn’t just mean going forward: It means going forward to a better place.

But a better place isn’t currently available, not for the right, and not for the left.

In the past two decades, progressives hitched their wagons to several charismatic individuals who were generally successful, both in gaining and retaining power. Luiz da Silva (Lula) in Brazil; Gerhard Schroeder in Germany; Tony Blair in the UK; and Bill Clinton in the U.S. They improved the lot of the poor somewhat, and, social liberals all, worked to bring in women, gays and ethnic minorities from the cold of discrimination and inequality.

Their personal popularity buoyed them, but success came at a cost. All of them betrayed progressivism in some way, adopting or adapting ideas and programs of their competitors on the right.

Tony Blair’s alliance with George W. Bush in the invasion of Iraq saw him branded as a warmonger by much of his own party – though he won his third victory after it. Lula’s adoption of a moderate economic policy caused the left wing of his Workers’ Party to split in several directions (but it still won after him, and still rules Brazil). Gerhard Schroeder, who developed a program of radical modernization called Agenda 2010, was excoriated by his party for adopting what many of the social democrats thought were right-wing, neo-liberal policies – such as making it easier for employers to fire workers. He called a snap election to show who was boss – and lost, to the center-right coalition led by current German Chancellor Angela Merkel (who must now sometimes wish Schroeder had won).

At gloomy meetings of UK and U.S. progressives in Oxford and London earlier this month, the former Blair adviser Roger Liddle admitted that British Labourites hadn’t anticipated the huge growth of inequality and the rising popular anger that now attends it. The left could not now promise a growth in living standards. Instead, the strategy should be to propose a “social investment” model, one in which consumption was foregone in favor of state investment in infrastructure, both physical and human.

The Harvard economist Jeff Frieden (co-author of a 2011 book, with Menzie Chinn, called Lost Decades) said that the first decade of the new millennium was already “lost,” and the second was in danger of following. The vast imbalances between the indebted countries – with the U.S. in the lead and the UK and the southern European states close behind – and their creditor countries has to be addressed now, or disaster awaits. His cure: inflation of some 5 percent a year, to inflate away the debt. That is tough on savers and pensioners, but someone has to suffer. Government’s main task, he said, was to choose who suffered most, and attempt to equalize it, making the rich pay a proportionate share.

But how is that going to happen? In Europe there is a growing disenchantment with the market and a greater faith in the state to address problems, but there is no centralized European body of sufficient power to tackle an issue with ramifications for all of Europe, and maybe the world. In the U.S. there are competent, centralized, federal institutions, but a large part of the electorate (we will see how large come Nov. 6) think, like Ronald Reagan, that the state is not the solution, but the problem. Even if the right doesn’t win in November, its lock on the House and Senate stymies initiatives that involve state spending and threatens others like wider health coverage – even after the Obama health insurance plan narrowly won a judgment that it was constitutional from the Supreme Court last month.

It’s not all terrible for progressives, on either side of the Atlantic. Obama is ahead in the swing states, if narrowly; and in the European Union, President Hollande has formed a new axis with (technocratic) Prime Minister Mario Monti of Italy and (center-right) Mariano Rajoy of Spain to produce some softening from the Iron Chancellor Merkel earlier this month, at least in the matter of financing troubled banks and spending a bit more on growth. David Cameron trails the Labour opposition in the British polls, and the German social democrats are on a roll, with Hannelore Kraft taking her Social Democrats to a clear victory in the biggest state, North Rhine-Westphalia, in May.

But the question hangs heavy over the Western center-left. When and if power is won, in what way can it make progress? And if, as the growing consensus suggests, progress won’t be made in living standards, how is some equality to be obtained in retreat?

Democratic politics in the second decade of the millennium will mean – if it is not to be wasted – shaping up a citizenry used to growth and relative ease to accept stagnant, if not falling, incomes, longer and more productive work, and higher taxes. To shape a narrative of progress round these policies will task a center-left whose demand has always been, boiled down to a word: more. How do you fire up the sinews of a movement by calling for less? Tough, but that’s the current job description for progressives.

PHOTO: French President François Hollande (R) and German Chancellor Angela Merkel smile after kissing each other during the 50th anniversary ceremony of the reconciliation meeting between former French President Charles de Gaulle and German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer after World War Two, in Reims, July 8, 2012. REUTERS/Jacky Naegelen

For most of the world, the memory of the slaughter of the Jews, pursued with such disciplined ferocity to the bitter end, demands respect. It gets it, not just in the thousands of records of the event, but in art, too. Primo Levi, the Milanese Jew who survived Auschwitz itself, wrote memoirs (If This Is a Man; The Truce) and novels (The Wrench; If Not Now, When?) that have the power of understated horror and serve as a kind of standard for all others. Films – Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002) and Stephen Daldry’s The Reader (2008) – two of the better known of the past decade – are somber, tragic affairs, the subject matter with which they work precluding anything approaching a happy ending.

There are exceptions, and, oddly, they are very funny ones. The earliest is the Ernst Lubitsch comedy To Be or Not to Be, released in 1942 and starring Jack Benny as a Polish actor who, through a series of comic turns, plays an SS Officer, Colonel Erhardt, in an ultimately successful escape bid. At one point, the real Erhardt, speaking of the concentration camps, snaps – “we do the concentrating, the Poles do the camping” – a line that still gives a start, though written and spoken when what the camping meant was still genuinely unknown by most. There are more, of course: Mel Brooks’s The Producers and Roberto Benigni’s 1997 La Vita e Bella, most memorably. Neither was uncontroversial, but what controversy there was has largely died, and they’re mostly seen as classics.

Now the Holocaust has a new creative frontier. In a ceremony that seemed as if it were made for another Mel Brooks movie, Hava Hershkovits won the Miss Holocaust Survivor contest in Haifa, Israel, last Friday. The organizer, Shimon Sabag, director of Yad Ezer l’Haver (Helping Hand), an institution that aids poor Holocaust survivors, said that the contestants “feel good together. They are having a good time and laughing at the rehearsals.” In the published pictures, Hershkovits, at 78, looks radiant and is wearing the victor’s tiara.

The coverage, however, was – though cautious – on the negative side. The Huffington Post put it under the rubric of “Weird Tales,” together with a taxidermist who dressed his products up in outlandish costumes. Reports mentioned controversy in the introduction or the second paragraph, and quoted Colette Avital, the chairwoman of an umbrella group for Holocaust survivors, as saying that: “It sounds totally macabre to me … I am in favour of enriching lives, but a one-time pageant masquerading [survivors] with beautiful clothes is not what is going to make their lives more meaningful.”

Avital knows more about Holocaust survivors than I do, but I’d like to ask her how she knows that. Most people get a kick out of appearing elegant, and even if, in their seventies, there are some sighs over time passing, I can’t see why Holocaust survivors should be different, or shouldn’t enjoy attention, or shouldn’t want to win (they decided to enter the competition, after all). Does a night of enjoyment make one’s life more meaningful? Who knows, except the person doing it? Why shouldn’t it?

That last isn’t a rhetorical question, and the obvious answer is: because it doesn’t show respect and it doesn’t matter even if those who take part are themselves survivors. There are enough ill winds who wish to cast doubt on, or deny, or even exult over, the Holocaust for everyone who is concerned with it to be careful not to give them more power. Victims can mar their own memorials, however inadvertently.

But the larger matter is this: The Holocaust still has the power to shock, but the shock is now familiar, and the subject leaves room for irony and humor. It’s a good idea to read and re-read Primo Levi (and other memoirs and descriptions of the camps) to renew some part of one’s initial shocked revulsion, but most of us, Jew and Gentile, have the ability to separate laughter over absurdity from awe that humankind is capable of such barbarity. Lubitsch’s “Concentration Camp Erhardt”, Benigni’s Fascist knee, Brooks’s Springtime for Hitler are the products of artists – most of them Jewish – culling the exercise of wit from the most desperate of contexts. In doing so, they deprive the authors of the Holocaust of the posthumous satisfaction that they have exterminated, as well as many human beings, the springs of laughter.

Miss Holocaust Survivor may or may not continue. By its nature, it cannot last for very many years, since surviving death in the Holocaust cannot confer the ability to survive life. But even if this was the one bright flash, even if it was a publicity stunt, it has been more an exercise of high spirits than of bad taste, more an act of defiance than a lapse into vulgarity. It is not a self-inflicted wound on the Jewish people but a tribute to a sense of humor that, even after Auschwitz, can still light up the world.

PHOTO: Hava Hershkovitz, 79, (2nd R), a Holocaust survivor and winner of a beauty contest for survivors of the Nazi genocide, stands with other contestants during a contest in the northern Israeli city of Haifa, June 28, 2012. REUTERS/Avishag Shar-Yashuv

Julian Assange, a fallen angel, remains, as of this writing, a guest of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. There he has sought asylum to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faces rape charges that he denies, and, he believes, possible extradition to the U.S., where he fears he may be tried and found guilty of espionage and sedition, for which death is still the extreme penalty.

When we talk of fallen angels, we invoke the original fallen angel, Satan or Lucifer, once beloved of God, the highest in his closest council, whose pride impelled him to challenge for heaven’s rule – and came before his fall to Hell. Assange was an angel of a sort, at least to many. They saw his role as founder of WikiLeaks and leaker of thousands of pages of cables on Iraq and Afghanistan, and then from U.S. embassies all over the world, as the act of a liberator, a rebel with a cause, one who could poke the U.S. in the eye in a new way, with only a laptop at his disposal.

He did set himself up very high. He challenged the deities and sacred texts of journalism, contemptuous of a trade that he saw as largely a handmaiden to power. In one comment, he said that the problem with the late News of the World’s hacking into people’s phones was largely non-existent. They had “actually done original investigative work about people in this society that its readers were genuinely interested in.” In another, according to Guardian journalists who worked with him on the WikiLeaks material it published, he observed that if any of the informants who provided U.S. diplomats with the material in the leaked cables were to suffer retribution, they have “got it coming.” Now, he fears he does.

He saw political power as a conspiracy against the people. Mainstream journalism, describing governments’ activities in often respectful or at least neutral ways, was not exposing the conspiracy. Assange said he could.

He was, surprisingly often, taken at his own estimation. The common and confident forecast among media watchers was something to the effect of: “Journalism will never be the same again.” But for now, it doesn’t seem that way.

That’s partly because leakers have been deterred. The true angel, or devil (as you will), of the WikiLeaks’ leaks is U.S. Private First Class Bradley Manning, who passed on a huge cache of secret cables to WikiLeaks while undergoing something of a breakdown at the time. He has been in jail for nearly two years, the first nine months of which were in solitary confinement at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. He was transferred to less severe conditions at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in April 2011, and appears for a pretrial hearing before a military court at Fort Meade, Maryland, on Monday. Manning could face life imprisonment; he’s unlikely to be pardoned. The relative harshness of his punishment was meant to be, and probably has been, a sharp deterrent for others thinking of following his lead.

Those trying to emulate WikiLeaks have also come up short. Some of the most powerful criticism of Assange came from Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a collaborator on WikiLeaks, who broke bitterly with his boss. In 2010 Domscheit-Berg announced that he would found his own leak site, Open Leaks, with a more transparent and ethically grounded basis than WikiLeaks. As of now, it hasn’t appeared.

The news media are changing and will, indeed, never be the same again. But that’s nothing new. The change now is driven by technology, markets and popular empowerment. WikiLeaks played a part in all of these, but it now seems a minor one.

Throughout the past year Assange has behaved as his enemies would have wished him to. He has accused his critics of being involved with the CIA, and allegedly – this on the testimony of Ian Hislop, editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye, though Assange denies it – he blamed “Jews” at the Guardian for defaming him. He contracted with the publisher Canongate to do a memoir, changed his mind when it was largely done, then sought to have its publication stopped.

He took a job on Russia Today, Russia’s world-service TV channel, as an interviewer. Russia, on any count, does not have free media. It was on one of his shows that he interviewed President Rafael Correa of Ecuador – a hugely friendly discussion, in which the president expressed his esteem for Assange and was complimented in turn. President Correa, who expelled the U.S. ambassador when WikiLeaks cables revealed that she had told her government that the president knew of the extensive corruption in the Ecuadorian police force, is not a man known for his toleration of adverse comment in the media.

Correa has launched lawsuits against journalists and newspapers, his government has expropriated opposition media and has strongly promoted state-owned publications and channels loyal to the president. In a press release earlier this month, democracy advocate Freedom House noted “the closure of another independent media outlet and numerous public comments made by Correa attacking private media,” and calls the moves “an alarming illustration of Correa’s growing attempts to silence media critics.”

Assange is in the not-unfamiliar position of one who has concluded that his enemies’ enemies are his friends. It’s a posture often taken by states, both democratic and authoritarian. It doesn’t reflect well on someone whose pitch was that his movement would transcend such grubby, often secret, deals in the name of transparency.

Journalism of any but the most anodyne sort is in the world of compromise, of grubby deals, and sometimes of frank criminality. The only justification for these is large public interest, and the only procedure is to accept punishment under the law for breaking it. Leaks are among the tools of the trade, and for all the enlightenment they bring, they are usually the fruit of someone breaking the terms of a work contract – sometimes for morally good reasons, sometimes not. However they are obtained, they are nearly always only a beginning: They have to be explained, set in context, abridged and opened for debate.

In a democracy, the revelations are often worth getting, but rarely entirely surprising. It is in authoritarian states that leaks can be really valuable, because it’s there that governments really do keep very large secrets, about which the population often knows absolutely nothing. Indeed, they are sometimes told the opposite is the case.

Assange, at the beginning of his career, said that opening the secrets of tyrannies was his mission. But the mission turned into mere anti-Americanism. The presiding genius saw himself as a global liberator. And so he fell. Journalism, as ever in constant transformation, remained the same.

PHOTO: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange holds a document containing leaked information at a news conference in London, February 27, 2012. REUTERS/Finbarr O’Reilly

Everything in Europe has a ‘but’ attached to it these days. Spain got a bank bailout last week, but it hasn’t convinced the markets. Mario Monti is a great economist and wise man, but he’s losing support for his premiership of Italy. Angela Merkel is listening to the voices that try to persuade her that Germany should bankroll growth, but she hasn’t done anything yet.

The New Democracy party, a grouping that, broadly, wants Greece to stick with the euro and bear more austerity (though it will bargain hard for less) has won… but what its leader, Antonis Samaras, has just got for himself is the worst political job on the continent, and may not be able to deliver. If, in democracy’s cradle, he can forge a coalition, keep to the terms of the bailout his country has received, enact rapid and deep reforms, and preserve democratic rule, he will deserve a place in the pantheon – a Greek word, after all, meaning a temple for the gods.

And so far, he’s been no god. A fellow countryman, the Yale political scientist Stathis Kalyvas, wrote in Foreign Affairs in June that Samaras “is widely seen as representing the corrupt and ineffective Athens political establishment that led the country to ruin”. Yet it’s this man, with all of his history, faults and frailties, on whom the future of Greece – and by many measures, the future of the European Union – depends.

That the fate of the vast enterprise of a Greater Europe should come down to the calculations of one Greek politician is terrifying. But it’s the way great projects go. At many turning or tipping points, one event, move or person is – consciously or unconsciously – critical.

The European Union has always been a high-wire act, a fragile thing, rooted less in history than in hope, idealism and an envious desire to be a great power.

Idealism was its first expression. After World War Two, the Union’s founders wanted to make European war again unthinkable. Since nation states had created war, their nationalism needed to be suppressed in favor of a greater, more peaceful, order.

But idealism faded. The sheer success of European rebuilding, the rise of postwar generations, official and unofficial links between the states strengthening, the political unity formed by opposition to the Soviet bloc – it all meant that the founders’ dreams were rewarded… and progressively forgotten. There was union, but it grew comfortable, it grew to be taken for granted.

Another bond was needed. It came from an earthier source, from money.

The best expression of the leverage money can have came ironically from a very idealistic philosopher, the 18th century German Immanuel Kant, in his “Guarantee for Perpetual Peace” (1795):

The spirit of commerce sooner or later takes hold of every people and it cannot exist side by side with war … for among all those powers that belong to a nation, financial power may be the most reliable in forcing nations to pursue the noble cause of peace.

Well, commerce is surely a powerful spirit. In Europe it has certainly seemed to help peace. In buying and selling, acquiring and consuming, we express the secular, practical, everyday manifestation of peace, as we contentedly graze. For some Europeans, notably the British, this was enough. So long as the market fundamentals were free and respected, and a spirit of cooperation prevailed, what need of more?

But political ambition to build a great state, the richest in the world, remained strong. Kant’s commerce was the lever for a larger goal: political union, come to be seen as a necessary accompaniment to the union of finance and the market. And it is that lever that now bends with the strain, and is like to break.

The reckoning is now.

For those who press for a closer, more united Europe, the crisis, though dangerous, is also a large opportunity. If the only way to avoid making cynicism into reality is to convincingly mutualize the debt, then a credible banking and fiscal unity must be quickly achieved. For that to be acceptable, political mechanisms must be developed – and a European government with real power will begin to take shape.

But those who would turn disaster into triumph are cursed with a paradox – well expressed in a recent speech in Sweden by the Economist writer David Rennie:

On the one hand, Europe’s single market represents Europe’s best chance of pursuing rational strategies in the face of globalization. On the other, it is an affront to democracy … in country after country, voters would rise up against it.

The voters of Greece did not, on Sunday, rise up against it. That would have meant giving the radical left-wing Syriza party a mandate, and they narrowly avoided doing so. But they may yet, for their choice carried the large but – but Samaras spends a season in a circle of hell constructing a coalition, and a longer season in a lower circle trying to govern a country under largely German-imposed conditions on largely German-organized assistance. The exercise of democracy is a Pyrrhic victory for New Democracy, and no kind of victory at all – at least not for years – for the Greek electorate. For people used to instant gratification from their politicians, that will be hard to bear quietly.

As citizens, we are now obliged to understand that the assumption of good and peaceful times may no longer hold. In Europe; in the Middle East, where Egypt now stands on the brink of more – and more bitter – protests against the military’s reassumption of power; in a Russia locked in a struggle between civil society groups and the presidency over human rights; in a China whose outgoing prime minister, Wen Jiabao, has warned of a return to dictatorship if democracy is not developed – in all these and more, the dangers and the crises spread and grow, and every improvement has a “but.”

This is not yet a global disaster movie. Africa now grows, quite strongly in places. Latin America remains largely democratic, having convincingly shaken off the military “saviors” that plagued its 20th century. Even in Europe, not all is dark: The decisive victory of French President François Hollande’s Socialist Party in the weekend’s parliamentary elections will put more, and more convincing, pressure on Germany to go for growth. Above all, the U.S. and Canada remain strong and free, and – as the dean of “Soft Power,” Harvard’s Joseph Nye, asserts – the former remains the world’s hegemon and is likely to remain so for some decades.

But how much more of a pounding can democracy take without an eruption, perhaps one greater than we have seen since the war? How much longer must we put “but” behind every event?

PHOTO: Conservative New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras is greeted by supporters in Athens’ Syntagma square June 17, 2012. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis

Italy, one of the founders of the European Union, is now in the most critical of situations. If many different things do not go well for the bel paese in the next year, it may attract the use of the word “founder” in its other, more sinister meaning: to sink.

As the euro zone crisis – which has traumatized Greece, put painful squeezes on Ireland and Portugal, and now engulfs the banks and the economy of Spain – laps around the beaches of Italy’s peninsula, the mood has soured.

In the past week, interviewing some of Italy’s leading journalists for a book on journalism in Berlusconi’s Italy, the country I found was one of profound doubt. Italian journalists are not the least cynical of their profession and often greet new events with a we’ve-seen-it-all-before shrug. Not now. Now they follow and record and comment on the news with journalism’s customary hyperactivity. But they admit they have no notion of what will come – or even how their country will be governed. What might come is, by large consent, possibly, even probably, bad.

Mario Calabresi is the editor of La Stampa, the liberal daily published in the northern city of Turin and owned by the Agnelli clan, who control Fiat. He’s young for an Italian editor, at 42, and is seen as one of the profession’s brightest stars. He’s also the son of Luigi Calabresi, an officer in the Carabinieri who was murdered in Milan in 1972 at the age of 34 by far-left terrorists. Calabresi says, “I must be an optimist,” but he doesn’t sound like it:

This is a temporary government, and the true issue is what comes after. Unfortunately there aren’t many people with whom to have a debate about the future because there aren’t many real political players. There’s a large risk that next year there will be a trend towards populism, attracting protest votes rather than parties having a proper reformist agenda.

At a quite different place, but with the same lack of optimism, is Vittorio Feltri, in his late sixties, slim, white-haired, and courteous. He has been the doyen of Italian journalism of the right for the past 20 years, bringing some of the techniques of tabloid reporting into the world of Italy’s heavily political newspapers, attacking enemies on the left with both a scalpel and a bludgeon. Speaking in his office in Milan’s Il Giornale daily – owned by the Berlusconi family – he says:

There is no credible political force now; the right is disorganized and split, the left is weak, the center nowhere. Populism is the vogue. What comes after Monti is simply unknown; at present there is nothing.

When Mario Monti took over as prime minister in November, Silvio Berlusconi had lost all credibility with his peers in Europe, and had seen a once-secure base erode over two years of scandal and hollow assurances that all was fine when it was not. Berlusconi pledged the support of his People of Freedom party to Monti, as did the center-left Democratic Party. But now that support wavers as the parties’ power-seekers find it popular to distance themselves from, or even oppose, Monti’s politics of austerity.

Monti himself, in public as precise and calm as ever, talks up the problem rather than disguises it. In an interview last week with the Catholic magazine The Christian Family, he said previous governments had racked up huge debts that had “put a burden on Italians who were then children, or had not even been born – that’s the great harm that was done to families … eighty per cent of our time is taken up trying to secure a country devastated by irresponsibility.”

His government, he said, was in an unprecedented situation: having to impose “very harsh measures, necessary to remedy the failures of the past.” No greater contrast could be imagined between the baroque bluster of Berlusconi and the dispassionate dryness of Monti, in both style and substance. Italy switched, in a day, from a showman to a puritan. Yet whatever relief originally came with the country being in the hands of a grownup, albeit a gloomy one, now dissipates.

This leaves the temptation of populism. The roly-poly figure of Beppe Grillo is its manifestation. A comedian of great talent in his mid-sixties, Grillo’s exasperated incredulity at the corruption and uselessness of the political class has now made its way into politics. In local elections last month, his “Five Stars” civic movement confounded the skeptics, broke through, garnered some 15 percent of the vote nationally and won the mayoral seats of several towns.

Both right and left are transfixed by ”Grillismo”. Some of the up-and-coming figures of the left are pressing for an alliance with Grillo, or the creation of their own “civic lists” of ordinary, non-party people who will enter politics without the taint of a failing party system. Berlusconi is widely reported to be examining the possibility of becoming “Grillismo” of the right. He’s rallying those in the working and lower-middle classes who had been enchanted by his own brand of populism for nearly two decades. He believes, it is reported, that they can be roused once more by a leader who, at 75, seems still to have the heart, and certainly has the money, for a fight.

This in spite of yet another trial, now under way in Milan, in which he is accused of having sex two years ago with a then-underage girl, Karima El-Mahroug, a Moroccan known as Ruby Heart-Stealer. The weekly Espresso last week printed an interview with the Brazilian Michelle Conceicao, who claimed she was one of the “harem” paid by Berlusconi to attend his parties. She swears, and says she will do so again in court later this month, that Ruby had sex with the premier, and received 5,000 euros – apparently the going rate – for the coupling. A spokesman for Berlusconi dismissed the claims; as has, in the past and repeatedly, El-Mahroug herself.

Thus Berlusconi still titillates his country and the world from beyond the political grave. He still seems to be having fun, his trademark brilliant smile flashing in photographs and TV clips – while a dour Monti struggles in the coils of the Italian political serpent, a fearsomely powerful beast. Beauty, charm and creativity have done much for Italy in the decades since the war; it is now the turn of discipline, austerity and grind, and no one knows how it will take to that.

ILLUSTRATION: Elsa Jenna/REUTERS

The last few days of Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee celebration have prompted the outpouring of patriotism and affection. But it did not faze Britain’s most determined protester. Peter Tatchell generally campaigns against homophobia and for gay rights: In one of his many (and one of his best) public projects, he tried to make a citizen’s arrest of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe when the latter came shopping in London in 1999, drawing attention to the president having called gays “pigs and dogs”. (London’s finest arrested Tatchell, not the dictator, for that episode.)

He was out again this weekend, on a wet, cool and blustery day as a flotilla of boats sailed down the Thames to salute the monarch. Just by Westminster Bridge, he and fellow leaders of the British republican party rallied a crowd of like-minded folk and some hecklers, who heard him say that though he thought the queen was personally quite nice, she was at the pinnacle of a pernicious class system, possessed hundreds of flunkeys and hundreds of millions of pounds, and must now stand aside to let the British people elect their head of state, as people should in a democratic country.

This wasn’t popular, but my respect for Tatchell, already high, went up. It’s a cliché but also a truth that a democracy is tested by its tolerance for those people and things that majorities can’t stand, and certainly the majority can’t stand the message that the republicans were shouting as they stood across the river from the Mother of Parliaments and the Mother of the Nation passed by in her specially prepared barge. The majority, in varying degrees, love the queen.

Everyone knows the queen is rich, richer than the bankers and corporate bosses who are presently hated for their wealth. But few care, even as we grow more anxious about our own more meager prosperity. Recently, swords have leapt from the scabbards of her legion of defenders to proclaim that she deserves every penny, and more – in part because of the tourist money she pulls in, and in part because she, more than any other figure, has come to epitomize the essence of the state. That’s an essence we can define as we wish, since her steady refusal to be controversial or in any way betray a view allows her to be the passive receptacle of every self-serving myth about Great Britain.

She stamped herself on the country at the very beginning of her reign. She insisted her coronation, in 1953, be televised to a country in which there were few sets. I went with my mother and grandmother to the one TV set in our village, borrowed from its owner, to sit in the packed hall of the Scottish Women’s Rural Institute. As the blurry, tiny figures moved in mysterious ways across a little screen, its crackling sound was turned to full volume. The tensions and jealousies of our small community dissolved. The adults were drawn together to hear her promise, as if in a marriage vow, to serve her country.

As Simon Schama wrote last week, “the simplicity and sincerity of that promise of 1953 – handing over her life to the odd but indispensably comforting role of national matriarch so that a nation in all its stupendous peculiarity will endure – has never deserted her. That is why …  no one should begrudge her a sigh and a smile.”

Well, some, like Peter Tatchell, will. A recent poll showed that less than 20 percent of contemporary Britons thought the monarchy should be abolished and Britain should become a republic: That appears to represent some 12 million people, not negligible even if dwarfed by the 48 million who think otherwise.

The republicans have a few voices in the media: the Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee and the Observer commentator Nick Cohen among them, both of whom have written strongly phrased denunciations of the royal family. But they are drowned by the masses. Even the literati, usually left-leaning, are on the queen’s side, ironically or otherwise.

Indeed, almost everyone who puts pen to public paper finds something nice to say. The novelist William Boyd, introduced three times to the queen, recalls that on each occasion her one line of conversation was “so – you’re the writer” – but recalls fondly her unaffected guffaws at a colleague’s joke. The rebarbative Marina Hyde, who does gossip and show business in the Guardian, calls her “the last silent celebrity.” The waspish writer Simon Jenkins, to whom the queen gave a knighthood for services to journalism, wrote that in her reign, Britain had become “a better place” for almost all.

The British dramatist David Hare, whose prolific work has expressed continuous despair over successive British administrations, celebrated the queen as “one citizen not at the mercy of the market” (she isn’t a citizen), and admires the fact that “her irritation with the present crop of seedy parliamentarians seems obvious … [she is] floating some way above the stink”. This isn’t exactly adoration, but it’s a creative use of the unelected monarch to beat the (“seedy”) elected politician.

That crosses the political divide. Commentators of the right regularly draw the comparison between the monarch and the minister to the former’s advantage. In a piece in the weekly of the right, the Spectator, last week, biographer of the queen Robert Hardman pointed out that the Jubilee celebrations this past weekend cost the public purse £1 million, while the London Olympics, beloved by politicians, will cost the British taxpayers most of the £9.3 billion bill. “Much as it may irritate republicans, it is actually this celebration of monarchy which embodies these contemporary virtues of inclusivity and accessibility. It is the supposedly egalitarian Olympic movement which looks remote, outdated, arrogant”.

A danger lurks in all of this, which should give heart to republicans. Such is the veneration of the queen that no successor can match her – certainly not her eldest son. Now in his sixties, Prince Charles has habits, hesitations and hubris Britons well know (or think we know, from the tabloids who helped destroy his marriage to Princess Diana – though he did more). Prince Charles has certainly softened, and had made a bid for affection by doing things like the weather forecast on the BBC. But as the older generations remember the slight woman who said “I will” when called to reign, so do they remember Charles, who, when asked on television if he were in love with his first wife-to-be, followed Diana’s shy “of course” with  “whatever ‘in love’ means.” Elizabeth the Second may be the last monarch of these islands who knew what being enthroned meant in the 20th, and into the 21st, century. Uneasy will lie whatever head inherits her much more uncertain throne.

Peter Tatchell may win yet.

PHOTO: Britain’s Queen Elizabeth leaves St. Paul’s Cathedral after a thanksgiving service to mark her Diamond Jubilee in central London, June 5, 2012. REUTERS/Andrew Winning

Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, gave an interview to the Guardian last Friday. In it, she offered some advice to the people of Greece. A succinct summation: “Stop whining.”

She says that when she thinks of the Greeks, she has sympathy for their plight, but: “Do you know what? As far as Athens is concerned, I also think about all these people who are trying to escape tax all the time.” And there is greater sympathy for the absolutely poor: “I think more of the little kids from a school in a little village in Niger who get teaching two hours a day, sharing one chair for three of them, and who are very keen to get an education. I have them in my mind all the time.”

Lagarde does not in the least resemble my mother, except in one thing: When, as a child, I would whine “I don’t like it” about food she had prepared, she had a stock reply: “There’s some wee boy in Africa that would be glad of that!” (I would have been glad if he had had it – my mother was fond of tripe and couldn’t grasp my hatred of it.)

Lagarde is on the same track as my mother: Remember, in your refusal, that there are many who are infinitely worse off than you. Lagarde’s target was ostensibly Greece, but her real aim was at the countries of the West, including her own, that in the last two decades have luxuriated twice. First, in being the victors in the Cold War, as they watched their systems of a free market and democratic politics be judged superior by erstwhile enemies. Later, in enjoying a boom which, with blips, saw all boats rise, even as the super-yachts rose (and rise still) further and faster than the smaller craft.

Put simply – and in the welter of competing complexities with which we, especially those of us in Europe, are confronted, something should be simply put – the West, and particularly most of Europe, has made its beds too soft; and now no one can lie on them. We must exchange fluffy for harder, thinner mattresses, and we must hope it will be good for us.

There are exceptions. Although a receding tide beaches all boats, some countries are much fitter than others. Of these, Germany (among the larger countries) and Finland (among the smaller) stand out. Both conduct themselves with a blend of social democracy and bourgeois propriety, a mixture that emphasizes hard work and self-improvement, as well as a broadly egalitarian ethos.

There is too little of this elsewhere in Europe. Weak and partly corrupt governments in Greece were unable or unwilling to make its citizens observe their civic duties, including paying tax. In the past two decades, Italy’s dominant politician, Silvio Berlusconi, debauched an already wildly self-serving political class, in which the opposition was too split and uncertain to offer an alternative governing narrative. Spain and Ireland allowed property bubbles to grow huge. Britain racked up a vast external (both public and private) debt, second highest in the world in absolute terms, at nearly $10 trillion after the U.S.’s near $15 trillion.

The weaker economies needed to make large structural reforms, but those they did make were small and inadequate to the task. Yet for the 1990s and the 2000s, the closer union ushered in by the 1992 Maastrich Treaty and the waves of cheap credit allowed the unreconstructed states to disguise their problems with cheap credit.

The euro, which came into service on Jan. 1, 2002, and is now the second most widely traded currency (after the dollar), now reels. In a recent conversation with Martin Wolf of the FT, the U.S. economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said of the euro zone that:

I think it was basically fated, from the day the Maastricht Treaty was signed … the setup is fundamentally not workable. What’s interesting is that the euro itself created the asymmetric shocks that are now destroying it (via the capital flows it engendered). Not only have they created something incapable of dealing with shocks but the creation engendered the shocks that are destroying it.” (Emphasis mine.)

Krugman’s point about the incapacity of the zone to deal with its problems is the largest reason why the Brits and Americans are getting an easier ride than many members of the zone itself. The issue is as much political as economic: a fear on the part of the markets that the institutions for dealing with the crisis exist outside the zone. With each crisis meeting that passes with no solution, and with each forecast that a Greek exit is likely, that fear deepens.

We Europeans – in and out of the zone – are trapped, as the Economist put it, between “separate or superstate … one road leads to the full break-up of the euro with all its economic and political repercussions. The other involves an unprecedented transfer of wealth across Europe’s borders and, in return, a corresponding surrender of sovereignty.”

Characteristically, the magazine had a solution: a moderate version of “more Europe,” which it admitted was “tricky.” More Europe – that is, greater fiscal and oversight powers centralized in the European Commission – would, on most analyses, certainly be tricky. It would be less disruptive to the European and the world economy than a breakup, which would be very bad news for everyone. But Europe’s desire to create even a modest version of a superstate is presently lacking. And if it were found, it would have to ride a storm – social, economic, and above all political: even violently so.

Politically, what must happen in a “superstate” of any version is that weak and little-trusted European Union institutions would have to take upon themselves more power. But all the indications are that Europeans want them to have less. These centralized bodies would be committed to guide a large part of a continent through very rocky economic times for the foreseeable future; at the same time, they would need to develop a cadre of politicians and officials who could speak and appeal, not just to their co-nationals but to the “Europeans” – a diverse set of peoples with many languages, with something of a cultural identity but a very weak political one.

Joe Nye, the Harvard professor who invented and constantly develops the concept of “soft power”, the ability of states to project values and culture, said during a talk at a dinner organized by the European Council on Foreign Relations in London last week that the euro crisis had “exposed the limited trust among member states.” He rejected the parallel made between the U.S. today and the declining Roman Empire (he said American decline was relative but not absolute) and asked a different, uncomfortable question: Is it possible that Europe, not America, is more like the Roman Empire in decline? Are Europeans, too, disintegrating from within?

Will our culture and an educated view of our ultimate self-interest see us through, and keep us from the fate of ancient Rome? Only if we heed the strictures of Lagarde, who implores that we observe the really poor, remember our luck and pay our taxes. “Europeans” need enough solidarity to forgive the mistake that was the careless creation of the euro, avert our minds from the undemocratic capture of centralized power that a concerted response to the crisis requires, and keep taking a medicine that politicians we hardly know would administer.

That is a very, very tall order, but it is the order of the day.

PHOTO: International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde speaks at a news conference at the Treasury in London, May 22, 2012. REUTERS/Oli Scarff/Pool

“Whosoever hath, to him shall be given”, said Matthew (13:12) – a text for our times, and if it were a Facebook status, I would like it to death.

Facebook’s IPO at the end of last week valued the company at $104 billion. It netted $16 billion, the biggest haul from an initial offering after General Motors and Visa. It added some more heft to founder Mark Zuckerberg’s bank balance, now weighing in at about $17 billion. Others who were in at the creation were propelled deep into multimillionaire land.

But us? Those of us, nearly a billion of us, who spend (if we’re American) some 20 percent of our online time on Facebook are more likely to get poorer than richer from the Facebook experience. “Whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away, even that which he hath,” continued Matthew, illogically, but correctly.

Facebook has proved, at least enough for a market looking desperately for star stocks that it’s an alchemy company. Even if the market turned a little tepid after the launch, the company has shown that it can turn socializing into gold. Its business – a business as light as the air, as insubstantial as a little gossip – is the monetizing of relationships. And this, as the company and many, many of its users will claim, is win-win. Look how much richer Facebook is making social life; look at the friendships you form, and how quickly; look what you give them – in news, gossip, pictures, thoughts, and look what it gives you: the ability to do all that, for free.

Yet here’s how Facebook can make us poor.

I have a friend – the real kind – who is an aspiring actor. In a recent conversation, he mentioned his fear that his Facebook activity might prove embarrassing if he becomes well-known.

Borrowing from Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello – one of Shakespeare’s towering monsters who gets even better lines than the hero – we reminded ourselves of the much quoted lines: “he that filches from me my good name/Robs me of that which not enriches him/And makes me poor indeed.” A “good name” is a fragile thing today: destroyed by a tabloid sting – or a Facebook entry.

I (not a Facebook user) recommended that my friend close his account if he was so worried. He looked at me with some irritation, dusted with pity for one who had only friends, not “friends.” How could he quit? The information for his social life was there, and increasingly, for his professional life. He who leaves Facebook leaves his world. He cannot get off, yet he fears impoverishment in later life if he stays on.

Facebook makes us attention-poorer, too. There are so many hours in the day, and into these hours we must fit our work, our affections, our enjoyments and that which engages our minds. Many of us have engaged our minds in reading: sinking into stories that transport us for hours, days, weeks.

But now these habits of deep reading are distracted. In a much-noticed piece in the Atlantic in August 2008, a brief version of his 2011 book, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr said that the Net and all the technologies associated with it – of which Facebook, with Google, is among the most powerful – change not just the way we read but the way we think. Readers become “bouncers” who jump between messages promiscuously, either because these are brought to our attention with a beep on the phone or a blip on the screen, or because we have become so scatterbrained that a few minutes of reading needs the relief of something completely different. Citing a piece of research from University College London, Carr quotes the UCL researchers’ claim that “it is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense: Indeed, there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging, as users “power-browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts, going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.” (Emphasis mine.)

Is it so bad that we don’t read War and Peace but garner a hundred bits of purposeful (and purposeless) information, and maybe 20 more friends, along the way? What did War and Peace ever do for anyone? It doesn’t, after all, help you to be strong, beautiful or even good. It just means you’ve read War and Peace.

Yet it also means you’ve given yourself over to a story that has the power to move, and to force reflection – not just on the Franco-Russian war of 1812 but also on relationships, especially those of men and women; and on the nature of the force Tolstoy sees as driving events – a force he came to call God. A smart evil person could gain as much from War and Peace as a smart good one; both would likely end up as good or evil as they were when they began. But in that time of reading, the good and the evil were transported. If we are losing that, we are losing much.

And last, more literally, it makes us poorer by jolting us into consumption. Facebook gets its money by offering advertisers access to nearly a billion people. It will grow now as a public company, and satisfy its new and old investors, by monetizing that mass more effectively. Notwithstanding many challenges on the ethics of its behavior, Facebook believes it has been rather protective of its users’ privacy and that it helps make the world a better place by doing things like urging them to be organ donors.

Its value lies in the information the masses put up on the site, in all innocence, on what they like to do and see and hear and wear. It could, in theory, be a gold mine for advertisers because they can zero in with business-to-person precision, offering stuff that is so suited to one’s desires that you just have to have it. But to be that gold mine, which its new investors will demand, it must give companies more information on its users’ habits, desires and lifestyles.

It is, of course, up to us what we buy. We don’t have to get obese eating yet another piece of pie. But just as the numbers of those who are obese rise steadily, so the targeted ads will clutter up our houses and our brains, and drain our accounts. Facebook will have to monetize our relationships more effectively and more invasively – and it may already be doing so, with predictable effects: It’s being sued, for $15 billion, over allegations that it has improperly tracked the Internet use of its members.

For Facebook, and the 28-year-old Zuckerberg, now comes the harder part. As with Google, the information remorselessly gathered by its sleepless computers and pored over by its employees will come under closer scrutiny, as we begin to realize what we give away when we let so much hang out, and spend so much time doing it.

PHOTO: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, his image televised from company headquarters in Menlo Park, California, moments after the IPO launch in New York, May 18, 2012. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

For some three decades, an Italian comedian named Beppe Grillo has satirized – viciously, at high volume, naming names – the corruption of Italian politics. Last week, in Italian elections, he won the honor of being a part of the very thing he mocks.

When Grillo started doing comedy, in the early eighties, the Socialist Party – led by Bettino Craxi, prime minister from 1983 to 1987 – was in coalition with the Christian Democrats, and was a byword for theft from the taxpayer. Italians would say: The Socialists haven’t been in power before, they know they won’t last, so they have to make money quickly – a kind of resignation to the inevitability of political larceny that the British mind (mine) found quite shocking. Grillo was also shocked: or at least, he made shock the basis of his act. More than any other public figure, he fashioned from the venality of Italian political life a dark, bitter and yet hilarious comedy.

The politicians were furious that their good name should be so besmirched, and got him banned from Italian TV – which, in the eighties, was monopolized by the channels of the state broadcaster RAI, in turn under the control of the politicians.

This didn’t stop Grillo performing and becoming rich – he had a taste for Ferraris and speedboats, of which he now claims he is cured – but it did stop his message from disturbing the tranquility of Italian homes. When he was unbanned for a show in 1993 (it achieved stellar ratings), he revealed himself as outrageous and outraged as ever, and was off the air again.

I went to see his show in Florence three years ago at a gaunt and echoing stadium suited to rock concerts where one would have thought a one-man show would be swallowed up in the immensity of the place. Grillo’s was not.

His style is a mix of the extravagant and the intimate: He scorns the stage, roaming among the audience. Apparently consumed with rage, he shouts into the microphone that the country is choking with the rottenness of its ruling class, whether political, religious or corporate – then grabs the head of someone in the audience and clasps it to his chest, stroking the hair, as if providing the spectator a moment’s refuge from a cruel world. His short, chubby figure is crowned with a tumbling white mop of hair, his energy belies his 63 years, his commentary shifts from the bitter to the witty and back again in seconds: “The churches are empty, signori, empty! No one is listening! No one! Our bishops go around with four bodyguards! If Jesus Christ had had four bodyguards, they would never have put him on the cross!” Berlusconi was known as the “psycho-nano” (“psycho-dwarf”).

For the past decade, Grillo has put his wit almost completely at the service of politics. In a flurry of activity, he founded a website – Beppegrillo.it, in Italian and English; organized a series of rallies, usually vast, called “Va fancullo” (“fuck off”) days at which he rails at and delights the crowd; and organized a political movement called Cinque Stelle (Five Stars), which seeks to encourage ordinary people in every locality to come forward and speak for the community’s distrust and dislike of mainstream politics.

In local elections last week, Cinque Stelle, which gets most of its boost from Beppegrillo.it and Grillo’s stage acts, achieved over 7 percent nationally, over 10 percent in the north, 15 percent in Genoa, Grillo’s home city, and 20 percent in the rich city of Parma, Italy’s food capital. “Nothing remains [of the mainstream parties],” Grillo commented after the vote, with typical understatement. “They are liquefying in this political diarrhea.”

To be sure, Italy’s party on the right crashed. Silvio Berlusconi’s creation, People of Freedom, campaigned without its founder and lost city after city. (Berlusconi had gone to Moscow to see his friend Vladimir Putin inaugurated again as President of Russia.) Berlusconi’s main partner, the Northern League, did worse: Its leadership is mired in serious corruption allegations, and its citadels of the north fell like skittles. The official left party was the victor – but an unconvincing one, as its share of the vote declined since the last local elections.

I’ve long thought that Italy has been the largely unacknowledged crucible of new political movements over the past century – perhaps because Niccolò Machiavelli, a Florentine, was the first in the world to conceive of the exercise of politics as a science that should be learned and practiced. Fascism sprang from the teeming brain of Benito Mussolini, a mix of socialist economics and nationalist expansionism, cooked into a theory by Giovanni Gentile and injected with the view that through war and struggle a man and a nation found their highest expression.

Christian Democracy found its first organized expression there, inspired by the urgency of the Vatican’s fear of rising socialism and communism: A priest, Luigi Sturzo, founded the People’s Party in 1919, and, proclaimed from most pulpits, it quickly reached a vote of over 20 percent. Banned by the fascists, it reappeared at the end of the war as the Christian Democratic Party, whose leader, Alcide De Gasperi, was prime minister for eight crucial years from 1945.

The powerful Italian Communist Party evolved, in the 1970s and ’80s, Eurocommunism, a profound influence on Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union and a passage out of the theory of proletarian dictatorship into an acceptance of representative democracy. And Silvio Berlusconi has been the progenitor of the overt marriage of media and politics, a mixture that he was uniquely able to achieve because of his money and political ambition but that provides models for politicians, democratic and otherwise.

Grillo is in this line. He has merged his talent, his energy, the Internet and his “outsider” status into a force and an image that has real resonance today, especially in a country where politics has so devalued itself that it has had to be replaced by a transitional, unelected technocratic government charged with ordering the economy (which Grillo vehemently opposes). He has presented himself as the honest man in a world of thieves and liars; as a tribune of the people who uses the power of the microphone to voice the discontent of a people; as a performer pronounced extreme whose targets have come to seem well chosen. Whether he can sustain a movement that now has some purchase on power is a large question. The exercise of politics is not a show, or a blog.

And he hasn’t been proved democratic, as it’s commonly understood. His scorn for the parties often slops over to an apparent scorn for representative politics; he seems to be groping for a kind of direct democracy – which, at least till now, has in his movements on the Net and in the piazzas, focused on himself. Italy’s politics tend to come together round the charismatic figure; and Grillo, like his enemy Berlusconi, is certainly that. Many, including many on the left, see him as a demagogue and a ruthless populist, from whose activities no good will come. For him, such views are simply more evidence of the “liquefying” of the political scene.

He’s shown, in a different register from that of Berlusconi, what show business can do with and for politics. He’s shown that those to whom people now turn in chaotic political times are, often, those who have become famous outside of politics. And for all his ranting populism, for all the potential demagoguery, in his quarter of a century of turning over the stones of Italian politics and showing the corruption beneath, he has been proved right.

PHOTO: Comic and political activist Beppe Grillo marches on his way to dump rotten mussel shells in front of the Parliament in Rome, September 10, 2011. REUTERS/Alessia Pierdomenico

The world into which the new president of France, François Hollande, stepped this week is a suicidal one. Searching for a vivid image of Euro-desolation, the news media have lit upon suicides. Two suicides last month have stood out.

A 55-year-old man on the Italian island of Sardinia, who ran a little construction business with his sons in a mountain town called Mamoiada in the interior, killed himself when the business went bust. He was known only by the initials GM, and the town’s mayor says he was an industrious man with a close-knit family. His death shocked everyone.

Earlier in April, an older, Greek man, 77-year-old Dimitris Chrystoulas, a retired pharmacist, staged a more dramatic end to his life. Like GM, he said he wished to die with dignity; also like the Sardinian, he shot himself. But he did so in the central Syntagma Square in Athens, near the parliament, leaving a note that prophesied that the “traitors” who have brought Greece to destitution and enslavement to the will of international finance would be hung upside down in the square where he met his end, much like the way Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini was executed in Milan.

This is the Europe that Hollande is now partly in charge of, a Europe in which it is sometimes preferable to die than to live. He presents himself as a reassuring figure. He says his central concerns will be greater equality, and the youth. He’s stressed that he’s “normal,” which has been widely recognized as code for not being Nicolas Sarkozy, not having a celebrity wife and not having an addiction to wealth. It is true that he is a relief from the hyper-opportunism of the retiring president, who seemed willing, in the past few weeks, to be anything to anyone in his desperation to claw back the lead from Hollande.

He’s also more substantially reassuring because he’s a mainstream, center-left politician who has, on his telling of the story, always eschewed extremism. Although his doctor-father voted National Front, he has spoken of the pain of disagreeing fundamentally with one whom he loved. Yes, he has tacked left (he’s no stranger to opportunism himself), but most commentators don’t take that too seriously.

In Greece there is none of that moderation. The two centrist parties, New Democracy on the right and Pasok on the left, saw their share of the vote plummet. New Democracy remained the largest, with nearly 19 percent, but Pasok, at just over 13 percent, was pushed into third place by Syriza, a radical leftist group with Marxist leanings, which received almost 17 percent. The Communists did well too, with some 8 percent; and most alarming, the (very) far-right Golden Dawn party, which for 20 years has ventured deep into neo-Nazism and relishes street fighting with leftists, entered parliament with 7 percent of the vote, on a program of cleansing Greece of foreigners.

New Democracy may be able to cobble together a non-extremist coalition once more. But its mandate for further cuts and reforms, demanded by a European Union led by Germany, is terribly damaged. For the hard-pressed moderates in Greece, the victory of Hollande in France is a rare shaft of light. He has pledged himself to argue for growth in Europe, insisting that austerity alone is self-defeating. Unlike little and broke Greece, Germany’s indispensable partner, France, may have the clout to obtain relief for the screaming economies of the south.

Germany has the money. And there have been signals – from Chancellor Angela Merkel, from European Central Bank President Mario Draghi and most recently from European Economics Commissioner Olli Rehn – that the corset might be loosened somewhat. “The stability and growth pact is not stupid,” Rhen said encouragingly in Brussels over the weekend.

But Germany is not likely to be generous. France had a €70 billion ($91 billion) trade deficit last year and has a debt of €1.7 trillion. It lost its triple-A rating earlier this year. It also has 10 percent unemployment and rising; and in the first round of the presidential elections, some 30 percent of the French votes were for the extreme right or left. France’s clout is limited. Hollande has won a famous victory, but he has inherited a vastly difficult state. It needs to grow – and it needs to shrink a government that spends 54 percent of GDP.

The only way France – and all the other European countries struggling to grow, hold down unemployment, pay off debts and return to “normality” – is going to right itself is through reform. It needs to reform the banking system, which most people don’t care about, and reform labor and welfare, which people do. Reforming labor has meant and will still mean working harder, more productively, more flexibly, and, in many cases, more cheaply. Reform of welfare means lower benefits, available later. On second thought, this is not quite “normality.” Europe has been accustomed, for decades, to believe that things can and do – in the main – only get better.

This is instead the new normal, the politics of things getting worse. Politicians, whom most of us despise, have to guide our societies through this. We should hope they are as normal – and stay as normal – as Hollande, and share his dislike of extremism. And we need them to do that while also being abnormally skillful managing rising extremism at the same time. That will be some act.

PHOTO: François Hollande (C), Socialist Party candidate in the 2012 French presidential elections, kisses a woman as he visits a street market with his companion, Valerie Trierweiler (R), in Tulle, May 5, 2012. REUTERS/Regis Duvignau