1/2020 Spotlight 15Foto: I. Alvarado/Reuters/picture-alliance
SOCIETYM
arc Stears is
congenial as he
lays out some
of the critical
threats to lib-
eral democracy
in the 21st century. “Normal people have
had enough,” he says, and our politicians,
in his opinion, seem not to be concerned
and are in no way making an adequate
contribution. “It’s a gigantic mistake, be-
cause the more distrust grows, the more
dangerous it becomes.”
Stears, the director of Sydney Univer-
sity’s Social Policy Lab, was taking time
out from a week-long meeting of activ-
ists, researchers and community leaders
from around the world to discuss how to
make change happen. The group was con-
vening in a week when yet another multi-
billion-dollar company had admitted to
large-scale underpayment of workers.
What’s more, many Australians, consider-
ing what could be a blisteringly hot sum-
mer, were unsure how they would man-
age to pay their energy bills. It was also a
week when people in places as far-flung
as Hong Kong and Latin America were
taking to the streets to protest against
their regimes, and all this was happening
against a backdrop of record-low trust —
not only in Australian politicians, but in
democracy itself.
“Liberal democratic states depend on
parties being responsive to the popula-
tion, and, largely speaking for the 20th
century, that was structured around class
lines,” Stears says. “Now all sorts of things
are fractured, and parties here [in Austral-
ia] no longer reflect those stable social
compositions. Nevertheless, they carry
on as if they did.”
From Madrid to Washington or to
Canberra, he says, people do not see theirbackdrop [(bÄkdrQp]
, Hintergrund, Kulisse
blisteringly [(blIstErINli]
, glühend
congenial [kEn(dZi:niEl]
, sympathisch, ange
nehm
convene [kEn(vi:n]
, sich versammelnfracture [(frÄktSE]
, aufbrechen
large-scale
[)lA:dZ (skeI&l]
, groß angelegt
multibillion-dollar
[)mVlti)bIljEn (dQlE]
, milliardenschwer
Political protests in
Santiago, ChileSOCIETY
The
alternative
to rage
Wie kann das Entdecken der eigenen
Stärke helfen, die Demokratie zu
retten? Nachdem der Politik zunehmend
misstraut wird, versuchen einzelne
Interessengruppen, trotz ihrer
Unterschiede einen gemeinsamen Nenner
zu finden, um andere Lösungen zu
ermöglichen. Von CELINA RIBEIROADVANCED