toni solo, May 30th 2014

Recent elections in Latin America have demonstrated growing regional popular support for policies contrary to the political and economic agenda of local right-wing elites and their North American and European allies. That is certainly true in El Salvador, Costa Rica and Panama. After May 25th's inconclusive Presidential elections in Colombia, it remains unclear whether incumbent President Juan Manuel Santos can successfully mobilize support to win the second round run-off based on the clear electoral majority against the extreme right wing candidate of the corrupt narco-paramilitary tainted clique around former President Alvaro Uribe.

Unlike voters in North America and Europe, people in Latin America and the Caribbean do indeed have a genuine choice. More often than not they choose against anti-democratic economic policies driven by elite corporate greed by electing governments with economically inclusive, redistributive democratic policies based on solidarity and cooperation That choice contrasts very much with the absence of similar fundamental choice for people in North America, Europe and elsewhere.

Last weekend's theatrical, virtually irrelevant elections to the European Parliament show that Europe has nothing to teach Latin America about democracy. Ever since the European Community was formed, the European Parliament has been a virtually powerless talking shop. Real power lies with the unelected European Commission and the European Council made up of elected leaders from the member countries of the European Union. The European Council appoints its President, currently Herman de Rompuy, and its High Representative (effectively the Council's Vice-President), currently Catherine Ashton.

Like all the members of the European Commission, Ashton's vestigial democratic mandate amounts to having been nominated and approved by the European Council and rubber-stamped by the European Parliament. This profoundly anti-democratic structure of the European Union is wide open to cronyism and abuse. That reality was made clear back in 1999 when the whole European Commission under Jacques Santer resigned following corruption allegations against fellow commissioner Edith Cresson. But the pernicious corporate cronyism continued as usual leading to the bailouts of Europe's corrupt financial elites following the insolvency crisis starting in 2007.

If anything, things have become systemically much worse since 1999. More clearly than ever since the 2008 and subsequent bailouts, the European Union undeniably favours corporate financial interests over the welfare and prosperity of the great majority. The massive bailouts of European banks, the humiliating collusion with the corrupt US financial system, the seemingly endless series of ineffectual prosecutions against leading US and European banks and submissive collaboration with terrorist US foreign policy, all bear witness to that fact.

The results of the European elections reflect widespread but impotent popular rejection of that reality. Diverse anti-European political groupings and independents gave the oligarchs a mild nervous frisson by winning dozens of new European deputies who despise the European Union and insist their countries would be better off without it. The only radical socialist political party to do well in the elections, the Syriza party in Greece with 26% of the vote wants to stay in Europe, but one radically reformed.

However, rather than being a turn of European political opinion to the right, the elections demonstrate  the sheer irrelevance of electoral processes against the European Union's anti-democratic quasi-oligarchic structure. The European Union has an appointed executive leadership at two removes from ordinary voters. Successive corporate elite power grabs have been rammed through by means of anti-democratic treaties presented to parliaments and, very occasionally, electorates on a yes-or-yes basis.

Only a completely shameless corporate oligarchy would appoint a bureaucrat from the UK's House of Lords to be, effectively, Vice President of the European Union. The fact that Catherine Ashton is described as a socialist only demonstrates the deep absurdity of EU oligarch politics, rejected by around 25% of voters last weekend. One comes back repeatedly to the question whether the elections had any meaning at all because the European Union's anti-democratic structure means elections to the European Parliament change nothing substantive in policy terms.

Corporate elites decide fundamental policy in Europe through the politicians whom they bankroll into office in national elections dominated by big spending electoral campaigns manipulated by elite-dominated corporate media coverage. Except for Syriza in Greece, not a single other European country has a radical socialist electoral alternative capable of mobilizing over 20% of their country's electorate. Reaction elsewhere to the EU's corporate-welfare austerity regime has generally not been vigorous political resistance but rather migration, apathy and resignation.

While electoral politics in the United States or the European Union are meaningless in terms of systemic change, in Latin America elections do involve real fundamental choices. In El Salvador and Costa Rica, regional oligarchies and their international allies among the North American and European elites have suffered serious political defeats. Panama's President elect, who takes office on July 1st, has already announced his decision to reverse his predecessor's hostile policy towards President Nicolas Maduro's government in Venezuela.

That means the balance of power has tipped strongly in favour of the region's socialist inspired governments. In Central America, El Salvador and Nicaragua will no longer be saddled with vehemently neoliberal, anti-integration neighbours in Costa Rica and Panama. That apparently marginal shift in regional terms in fact gives very important impetus to regional integration and wider regional rejection of destructive and oppressive faith-based neoliberal economic policies in favour of prioritizing the needs of the human person and the natural environment.

The dramatic democratic advances in Latin America over the last 15 years contrast sharply with the counterproductive lack of democracy in North America and Europe. Since the first years of this century, the United States and its allies face an accelerating relative decline in their power and influence. Their response to democratic change in Latin America has been to maintain sanctions against Cuba, foment the war in Colombia, support coups d'etat in Haiti, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras and Paraguay and also destabilization in Argentina.

Outside the West, no one takes seriously the absurd avowals of commitment to democracy made by the corrupt political elites of North America and Europe.