Some liberal commentators like to imagine that voters will rise up in protest of policies that the commentators label “austerity,” policies which usually include reductions in the number of public employees. Voters suddenly bereft of services, the thinking goes, will be furious at being deprived of them.
But voters around the world haven’t been behaving according to this theory. The latest example comes from Portugal, where Pedro Passos Coelho’s Portugal Forward party, whose policies have been labeled as “austerity,” lost seats but will still, evidently, form the next government. Raquel Vaz-Pinto, writing on Walter Russell Mead’s American Interest blog, has the story. As she writes, “a government can actually enact extremely unpopular decisions in Europe and still win elections,” which leads one to wonder how “extremely unpopular” those policies actually are.
Portugal is not the only example you might cite. In May Britain, contrary to public polling and widespread expectations, not only returned the Conservatives to power, but increased their House of Commons total from a plurality to a majority. In 2013 Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU coalition had no difficulty winning another term. You might cite Greece as a contrary example, except that the left-wing Syriza party’s success last month in winning a second term came only after it adopted “austerity” policies it had pledged to oppose. And one might note that in the United States, Republicans have the largest House majority and are just one seat short of the largest Senate majority they have had since the 1920s, while a majority of Americans live in states with Republican governors.
This is not to say that “austerity” always wins. It is to say that “austerity” is not political poison. And that the appetite for government spending and for maintaining government payrolls is more easily satisfied than many liberal commentators assume.
