People-powered local politics can save democracy from populism

In 2016, the UK sent shockwaves around the world by voting to leave the European Union. The narrow victory of the ‘leavers’ (52 per cent to 48) was largely thanks to a lie-based referendum campaign that scapegoated migrants and the EU for the worst impacts of austerity measures carried out by the ruling Conservative Party. The Leave campaign also peddled an anti-establishment message that centred around the slogan ‘Let’s Take Back Control’, a template successfully replicated by Matteo Salvini’s ‘Italy First’, Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ and Jair Bolsonaro’s ‘Brazil Above Everything, God Above Everyone’ – all of which borrowed from ‘For Us, Hungary is First’, which helped Hungary’s illiberal prime minister Viktor Orbán win a third term in 2018. Each one of these populists won by arguing that only strong nationalist politics can save ‘ordinary, working people’ from the clutches of globalisation.

The current COVID-19 pandemic has further exposed the existential threat posed to international cooperation, democracies and social fabrics the world over, as evidenced by the likes of Salvini and Trump fanning the flames of anti-Chinese racism by referring to the virus as the ‘Chinese disease’, by larger countries such as the US, Italy and Turkey facing accusations of seizing medical supplies destined for other countries, and by leaders across the world using the pretext of protecting the public to ram through repressive emergency laws.

As a result, the importance of people-focused local politics has never been more vital. Across the world, social solidarity in the shape of mutual aid networks, food banks, online support groups, and even acts of public support is providing a crucial lifeline to local communities. In many ways, this moment builds on a constellation of movements working to bring about transformative change at the local level, building participative, inclusive and democratic power all over the world. These movements broadly fit under the umbrella term ‘radical municipalism’, which ranges from citizen-led social movements winning city halls to self-run autonomous areas.

Radical municipalism connects remunicipalisation, where cities take control of public services such as water, to bottom-up participative democratic tools, such as participatory budgeting, where residents in thousands of councils worldwide make local spending decisions. Municipalist political platforms are connected to social movements and experiment with democratic tools such as neighbourhood assemblies, city-wide referenda and online participation in local decision-making.

Barcelona is one focal point. In 2014, social movements and left parties created a participative process to win control of the city. Their programme was open to collaboration, and much of the energy came from the city’s strong housing movement. In May 2015, Barcelona En Comú won the local elections, alongside many similar initiatives in smaller cities across Spain. Since that time, Barcelona city council has created a city-controlled energy company, has limited tourism in a bid to prevent soaring housing costs, and has prioritised investment in public transport over private cars. In reaction to the pandemic in Spain (which, at the time of publication, was one of the countries worst-hit by COVID-19), Barcelona city council will defer rents on council-owned properties and has frozen evictions, calling for similar measures nationwide.

In Scotland, hundreds of communities (where 62 per cent of voters wanted to remain in the EU) showed how to take back control even before the pandemic. Community-owned wind, water and solar power projects in the Western Isles of Scotland and beyond means that offshore islands like Gigha, Canna and the Orkney archipelago –places that once relied on diesel generators – can now make most of their electricity supply. Some sell power to the UK-wide grid, creating revenue to support everything from transport to social care, while at the same time, community-run renewables support local jobs, enterprises and services, while reducing energy costs. All this alleviates the high cost of living experienced in remote and rural areas the world over, therefore helping to reduce community decline and depopulation.

Challenging oppressions and taking on the far-right

Radical municipalism is also about challenging oppressions. The ongoing feminist struggle in Spain against sexism and gendered violence has been institutionalised by Barcelona city council: there are anti-sexist and anti-harassment signs across the city and support points against harassment at council-run events; nightclub security workers are trained to recognise and deal with harassment; and domestic violence services have been strengthened, increased even further during the coronavirus lockdown, with Mayor Ada Colau telling the survivors of domestic violence: “You are not alone”.

Likewise, the municipality enables thinking beyond the boundaries of nation-states, so that notions such as the ‘neighbour’ can replace the elevated status provided to ‘citizens’. Barcelona, in network with other cities, offered refugee sanctuary resisting draconian Spanish and European Union led anti-migrant policies. And in the United States, in Jackson, Mississippi, a project called Cooperation Jackson is creating a solidarity economy based on co-operatives, participative democracy and communal land. This provides a pathway for the city’s predominantly African-American community to escape the structural racism that was created during slavery, extended through violent segregation and lives on today in everything from the prison-industrial-complex to racial bias in the labour market.

The predominantly Kurdish people of Rojava, northern Syria declared autonomy in 2012 after Syria descended into war in 2011. Previously secret democratic local assemblies led by women began to organise everything from healthcare to education. This form of radical municipalism is called confederalism. Municipalist thinker Debbie Bookchin explained in ROAR magazine: “[Confederation is] a structure for organizing society that enables the non-sectarian co-existence of different races, ethnicities and religions, the confederation places itself in direct opposition to the nation-state’s project of ‘unity’ and homogeneity of the people.”

Rojava works hard to create ethnic cohesion, where different religions and peoples live together based on democratic co-operation, and it is a place where refugees from all over Syria are welcome.

This contrasts with the Turkey of President Recep Erdoğan, where opposition politicians, journalists and other critics are jailed, freedom of association and assembly is under constant threat, and where impunity is pervasive. Turkey invaded the autonomous homeland in October 2019 under the pretext of creating a ‘safe zone’ on the Syrian side of Turkish border by displacing the Kurdish population and instead settling Arab refugees in the area. This is something the EU is complicit in: until recently, the EU was paying Turkey to stop refugees from coming to Europe.

Vilifying migrants has gained significant support from Europe’s right-wing populists in recent years, particularly in Italy where the far-right party Lega was propelled into a national coalition government between 2018 and 2019. Despite a change in the government, the far-right threat continues, but the northern city of Bologna has a strong tradition of resisting fascism, continued by the ‘Sardine Movement’ – a new grassroots anti-populist movement widely credited with thwarting Salvini’s Lega in regional elections this January – and the municipalist party Coalizione Civica (CC, or Civic Coalition).

In 2016, CC won two seats and joined a governing city coalition, while in 2018, it introduced rules to explicitly prevent fascist marches as Italian-wide laws to this effect are frequently sidelined. In the city’s government, CC collaborates with social movements and works to tackle problems such as the housing crisis and ending precarious work. The work of CC demonstrates the way in which municipalism can both support anti-fascist movements on the streets, whilst tackling the social crises that cause the far-right to find support.

Alternatives to neoliberalism

Right-wing demagogues are on the rise on other continents, too. Since becoming Brazilian president in 2019, Bolsonaro has intensified state and societal violence against Afro-Brazilian, indigenous and LGBT communities, amongst others. Local politics again provides a key space for resistance and alternatives. Rio city councillor Marielle Franco became iconised for standing up for marginalised communities, after her murder in March 2018. Marielle was from Maré, one of Rio’s favelas, had Afro-Brazilian heritage and was openly bisexual. In the culture wars that would see Bolsonaro become president, Marielle stood up against these intersecting oppressions. She came from the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), through which she was part of a cohort of other political outsiders elected in 2016. They stand on human rights commissions, challenge attacks on marginalised communities and push back against the erosion of human rights. Working from the city up, PSOL councillors are imagining another Brazil beyond prejudice, based on social inclusion, supporting social movements and implementing programmes to support rights to housing, education and expanding public transport.

PSOL’s way of doing politics makes the party radical municipalist. Focusing on local politics as the key to creating sustainable change, PSOL members come from various grassroots social movements and crowdsource their programmes with financial support from the public. Across Brazil, PSOL also runs ’collective candidacies’ where groups of people from underrepresented communities stand together for one seat. And nationally, PSOL have led efforts for a petition (signed by over one million people) to get Bolsonaro impeached, for his dangerous dismissal of COVID-19 as a ‘little flu’ and a raft of inadequate domestic policies in response to the pandemic that reflect this derision.

During the late 1970s, when politics became dominated by neoliberalism, Chile became the test case for extreme free market capitalism. General Augusto Pinochet’s murderous regime (1973-1990) shows a continuity between today’s demagogues and what came before.

Chile’s dictatorship has ended, but the same elites and economic policies still hold sway. President Sebastián Piñera was seen as Pinochet’s ‘heir’, even before the deadly crackdown against mass protests that started in October 2019. These protests started due to hikes in transport fares, but they are about far broader issues. One key demand is for a citizen-led council to write a new constitution and break from the past.

The mobilisation in 2019 did not emerge out of nothing. The current protest movement traces back to the 2011-2013, 2006 and 2001 students protests and the mass protests for women’s rights last decade. To undermine neoliberalism, it is important to build society, challenge individualism and show alternatives. Since 2001, the student movement has been propelled through local public assemblies – a common part of radical municipalism.

In Valparaíso, Chile’s second city, the same new social movements formed Movimiento Valparaíso Ciudadano (Citizens’ Movement Valparaíso) and won the city hall elections in 2016. Mayor Jorge Sharp was prominent in the 2011 student protests. Even though the national government is still in charge of various competencies at a local level, the city does what it can to improve the lives of its residents, from reducing trolleybus fares to supporting people-run healthcare, to ending the subcontracting of council workers.

In Chile, the lockdown means that momentum on the street must shift online, or to balconies where protestors now bang pots and pans. The planned constitutional reform process is paused. But you cannot lock down ideas. It takes more than just one election to enable people to take back control; democracy is an ongoing process that is enlivened as new people and movements emerge. But radical municipalism not only enables social movements to anchor counter-power and use collective imagination to challenge the status quo, it also provides a critical space to resist right-wing racism and nationalism. Even before the COVID-19 crisis, there were clear pathways out of the grave political, social and ecological crises we face. Collectively, we must now find the resolve to walk them.