The Post: Schools crumble and the hard right rises while democracies dither

Read the original article in the Post

“Suite aux dégradations qui ont eu lieu...” The innocent-looking notice, pinned to a French school gate, turned out to be informing passers-by that, thanks to the damage (“dégradations”) incurred during nationwide student protests, the institution was closed until further notice.

I had seen the notice because I was in Paris for an OECD conference on restoring trust in democracy. But the protests suggested this might be an uphill battle.

Tens of thousands of high-school students had effectively gone on strike because their education system couldn’t furnish the basics. Some class sizes were well over 30, as much as one-fifth of the school year was missed because there weren’t enough teachers, and classrooms had become dangerously hot in the devastating summer heatwave.

One teacher I met talked of taking his students from classroom to classroom, trying to rotate them away from the sun’s unbearable rays. Better funding was being demanded.

And yet the French spend more than most countries on schooling, and have made many sensible-sounding educational reforms. Nobody I spoke to could explain how the situation, which had built up over many years, could be fixed.

The implications for trust couldn’t have been clearer. People may like democracies because they respect rights, create due process, and ensure (in theory) that citizens’ voices are heard.

But if they don’t also deliver basic goods– decent schools, safe streets, well-equipped hospitals– they start to lose their grasp on people’s affections.

The conference itself, held at OECD headquarters in Paris’ chic 16th arrondisement, was on the theme of “government unstuck”: a worthy ambition. Its attendees, many of them politicians and public servants from the richer nations, talked about making public services seamless, more focused on user needs, more AI-enabled.

No end of useful innovations were highlighted. The Estonians were automatically sharing birth data with their welfare department so that parents got their equivalent of Working for Families without even asking for it. The Portugese, meanwhile, had created a public services“digital wallet”, effectively an app that let your smartphone hold electronic copies of your birth certificate and other ID.

This was all well and good. But I couldn’t shake from my mind another image, more disturbing still than the school notice, that I’d seen some days before.

In a Sunday market, two young men had been leafleting for the Rassemblement National (National Rally). This is the modern incarnation of France’s old National Front, a neo-Nazi party founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen, an anti-semitic and Islamophobic former war criminal.

Having superficially cleaned up this vile party, Le Pen’s daughter and political successor, Marine, is now leading the polling for 2027’s presidential election, despite her recent conviction for embezzling European Union funds and the prison sentence that – pending appeal – hangs over her.

Her party’s leaders have been revealed as espousing anti-semitic conspiracy theories and seeking to expel legal migrants. The insouciance of their members leafleting Sunday shoppers was thus all the more troubling.

With this image front of mind, my contribution to the conference consisted largely of telling the assembled delegates that they needed to wake up and smell the bitter and pungent coffee of rising authoritarianism. Nothing at the event felt urgent; and yet those who seek to undermine democratic rights are acting with urgency.

Every day they are telling people that liberal democracy has failed, is weak and slow, needs replacing with a strong-man (or-woman) leader. And if those open to this authoritarian siren song feel their living standards slipping away, if they think that talk of “democracy” is just a ruse for educated elites to impose their “woke” views, how far will they be lured back into liberal democracy’s camp by... a digital wallet for public services?

On average, fewer than one-third of OECD citizens feel they’re heard by their government. (New Zealand’s figure is only fractionally higher.) I don’t know what that number has to be for democracies to survive long term, but it must be higher than one-third. So what’s the plan to raise it?

I know what I think the plan should be: a profound shift towards “everyday democracy”, in which people have so many opportunities to get involved in decision-making that it just becomes part of their day-to-day life.

This should be accompanied by an equally intense focus on making the economy work for everyone: lifting wages, rendering housing affordable once more, ensuring everyone can see a doctor when they need. It’s not a matter of improving processes or delivering better: it’s both. (Indeed the former leads directly to the latter.)

In sleepy New Zealand, where even our current discontent sparks no major strikes, such concerns can feel far-distant. In a Europe menaced by Russian aggression, rising authoritarianism and widespread state failure, they are all too real.

France’s school strikes didn’t just damage property; far worse, one student had his hand blown off by a police grenade. Here in New Zealand, we should act now, before it comes to this.