Western countries have been witnessing a series of black swan events: Britain's referendum on its exit from the European Union (EU) in June 2016; the referendum on constitutional amendment in Italy last December and Donald Trump winning the 2016 presidential election in the United States. Behind these events are serious challenges faced by Western political parties, which are trapped in an endogenous crisis comprising three aspects.

Mainstream political parties are constrained in meeting the policy demands of their constituents. This is especially true in EU member nations.

After more than half a century of European integration, especially after the EU was established in 1993 to promote a "closer Europe," it has formed a unified market and governance framework for its 28 member states. People, capital and resources move freely within the EU, and the bloc's administration has become a centralized, supranational organ.

Under such circumstances, many EU members, including core member France, have struggled to make their own economic policies independently, even during the worst of the global financial and European debt crises. Most member states find it a impossible mission to come up with policies that promote their own national interests, cater to the needs of their political constituents, and do not betray EU fiscal and financial rules at the same time.

This led to similarity of politics and policies among mainstream parties and the failure of parties to offer a variety of policy choices.

The United States also suffers from the same dilemma. How can the government handle the disintegration of the middle class during the process of economic and social development? How can it solve the problem of the rapid increases in the number and types of impoverished communities? Neither former U.S. President Barack Obama's two consecutive terms in office and the Democratic Party nor the Donald Trump administration and the Republican Party could or can offer feasible solutions.

The second crisis is that radical small political parties' representation is being challenged. A party should be politically representative in political conflicts, which, in the modern Western world, are mainly between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The main contenders in the Western political contest are socialist parties on the left and bourgeois (conservative) parties on the right. The "left and right" rivalry fails to address other conflicts including urban vs. rural, center vs. marginal and materialism vs. post-materialism.

From the perspective of election politics and parliamentary politics, minor political parties usually have miniscule influence. However, their representation in specific political conflicts has a large influence compared with their electoral competitiveness.

In other words, it is imperative for minor parties to act as political representatives, not candidates for the government. Parties on the political fringe typically have more radical ideological orientations, and the less competitive they are in elections, the more extreme they tend to be, so as to grab attention. Take the Greens for example. They argue that they represent a neutral direction, neither left nor right, opposing the existing party system and even the concept of political parties itself. However, when developing into mainstream parties, minor parties tend to gradually adopt political stances not too far removed from broadly accepted norms.

The core issue is that radical minor parties cannot make political choices based on a region or a country's long-term benefit. The fact is that sometimes their choices are even contrary to those benefits. For instance, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, Nigel Farage, supported Brexit with his favorite argument that the 17.8 billion pounds ($23.32 billion) saved annually from EU membership fees and welfare paid to students and immigrants from EU member states could improve British people's living standards. However, he did not mention the huge amount of tariffs and other fees levied on goods and services trade with other EU members following the exit.

The third one is a crisis in representative democracy. Election politics is the essence of the Western democratic model. Elected parties and elite politicians constitute an administration to manage the whole country for a given term. The basic assumption is that responsible and capable politicians who are elected can manage the country and regional affairs fairly and efficiently.

Direct democracy and self-determination are two other forms of democracy, which seem to be proper supplements for representative democracy. It is both ideal and right to develop direct democracy and self-determination on the basis of an ever-improving representative democracy. However, if the ambition is to replace representative democracy with direct democracy and self-determination so as to cover up the inherent defects of representative democracy, it would only result in creating political drama which could lead to chaotic situations. However, such misplacement occurs frequently in today's Western world. Both the Brexit referendum and the Italian constitutional amendment have seriously weakened the role that democratic representatives play as decision makers and given rise to populism. The crisis is also widening the rift between the political establishment and occasional referendum and between the anxious ordinary citizen and the political elite.

Last but not least, Western countries are becoming comparatively weaker in their national comprehensive power due to the process of economic globalization, with rising competition from developing countries. Serious polarization of wealth has resulted from social and economic transformation dominated by neoliberalism. Meanwhile, the political views of the elite class and the masses have diverged as the previously stable social structure dissolves and reforms.

Together, all of this causes the political elite considerable loss of support and legitimacy.

The author is a professor at the School of Marxism at Peking University

The article was originally published in Chinese on the People's Daily

Copyedited by Chris Surtees

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