Neoliberal Reboot Crashes

Until June, 2017 looked to be the year that the zombie neoliberal consensus got its mojo working again. In the Netherlands, the bogeyman ultra-nationalist Geert Wilders was beaten back at the polls; then, a couple months later, neoliberal hosannas filled the pages of the Western prestige press as Emmanuel Macron and his upstart En Marche! party dominated French elections.

It looked as if the neoliberal ruling elite had put the dark days of 2016 -- Brexit and the Trumpocalypse -- in the rear-view mirror. Then in June the Brits once again deposited a turd in the neoliberal punch bowl in the form of a surprisingly virile showing by the Corbynist Labour Party. Tory prime minister Theresa May had called early elections with the intention of dealing a death blow to Labour, and the outcome turned out to be the opposite of what was anticipated.

Now, this past week, the legacy media once again has been processing a shock to its neoliberal sensibilities. Merkel, the beloved monarch of the zombie neoliberal world order, and her Christian Democrats performed, much like May's Conservatives in June, so poorly that they now are forced to attempt to govern in coalition with the Free Democratic Party.

This is important because the Free Democrats are opposed to the type of further European integration espoused by uber-neoliberals like Macron. In a speech on Tuesday -- obviously meant to dovetail with the Merkel landslide that failed to appear -- Macron called for a United States of  Europe, the long-held Sweet Beulah Land of neoliberals. As Steven Erlanger explains this morning in "Emmanuel Macron’s Lofty Vision for Europe Gets Mixed Reviews":

Rather than retrenchment, [Macron] sees a revived European Union as the best antidote to increasing nationalism, populism and Euroskepticism from the far right and far left, as evidenced even in core bloc countries like France and Germany.

The European Union, he said, should embrace a joint budget for those using the euro — “a real budget at the heart of Europe,” he said; construct a shared military force; and harmonize taxes and the minimum wage to stay globally relevant.

He wants a common European asylum agency and border police, a eurozone finance minister responsible to the European Parliament and a European Monetary Fund to aid member states in budget trouble.

The problem for the neoliberals is that they have been gulled by there own propaganda. True, Wilders didn't win the Dutch elections back in March, but neither did the established parties of the neoliberal center. They lost seats. Same thing in the French elections this past spring, and again this month in German.

The neoliberal mainstream organs are bleeding out. May is wobbly, ready to fall. Merkel is weakened. And Macron, as Pauline Bock reports in the New Statesman, "'The slackers have taken to the streets!': Macron’s labour reforms split France," has an approval rating below Trump:

The labour reforms are the first real test for Macron, whose approval ratings have collapsed from 66 per cent after his election in May to 30 per cent in early September. This followed Macron’s decision to reduce housing aid and to push through the new labour law via government rulings, without a vote, despite his party’s parliamentary majority.

Macron is governing from the hard right. Tax cuts for the wealthy; emergency police powers enshrined into law; anti-labor, etc. The neoliberal reboot has crashed after a scant four months.

And the Catalonia independence referendum is in 48 hours . . . .