Europe Doesn’t Trust Its Politicians. What’s the Alternative

LONDON â€" Is Europe’s long-running economic drama in danger of turning into a political crisis

This week’s admission by a former French budget minister that he lied about having secret foreign bank accounts highlighted a growing disconnect between a public suffering the effects of a chronic financial crisis and the politicians who claim they can fix it.

The revelations come amid a bout of Gallic depression that has prompted an examination of how far the country can trust its leaders, as the IHT’s executive editor, Alison Smale, reported from a forum held last weekend by the left-leaning newspaper Libération.

And it’s not just France. In other austerity-battered European countries, people appear to be losing faith in traditional political leaders perceived to be failing to practice what they preach in an era of belt-tightening.

A.F.P., the French news agency, suggested this week that a wave of political scandals at a time of economic woe was exacerbating the outrage of European citizens.

It quoted Eddy Fougier, a researcher at the Paris-based IRIS think tank: “Everything is coming together to reinforce populist theories â€" the theory that they’re all rotten.”

Politicians are used to being punished, usually at the ballot box, for failed policies. But in the current context of Europe’s economic gloom, it is their hypocrisy as much as their incompetence that is on trial in the court of public opinion.

As Rendezvous wrote this week, Britain’s Conservative-led government has been lampooned as a “cabinet of millionaires” as it moves to impose a welfare shake-up that its critics say will hit the poor hardest.

In Spain, where the government of Prime Minister Manuel Rajoy has been embroiled in a series of scandals, the issue of corruption is now the number 2 concern of Spaniards, right behind the country’s 26 percent unemployment rate, according to a recent poll.

“Since the beginning of the economic crisis, public confidence in the parliament, in local government, in all public administrations, has fallen,” Jose Pablo Ferrandiz of Spain’s Metroscopia polling company told Reuters.

Spanish protestors have also taken their discontent to the front doors of their politicians, staging demonstrations at the homes of government members against a wave of evictions prompted by the economic crisis.

Andre Wilkens, who heads the Mercator Center research foundation in Berlin, has suggested that the issue of trust is at the heart of Europe’s crisis.

In an article in Open Democracy last September, he wrote that European citizens “have lost confidence and trust in their politicians and started to make their own contingency plans.”

Public trust took a severe knock last month, when the Cyprus government proposed raiding the savings of every bank account holder to meet the terms of a European bailout. Although the proposal was later revised, it caused a tremor among depositors throughout the euro zone, who feared the same thing could happen to them.

Loss of faith in traditional political parties has already had an impact in Italy, still without a government more than a month after an anti-establishment party led by Beppe Grillo, a comedian, emerged as a new force in the country’s politics.

There is a similar trend in formerly communist-ruled Central Europe where trust in politicians is also reported to be in decline.

The V4 Revue, which monitors developments in the region, quoted Michal Vasecka, a Slovak professor, as saying: “It is not that people lost interest in politics, they simply seek an alternative. It is not only a Central European trend, it is a crisis of liberal democracy, present in all Europe.”