The governments of the Czech Republic and Hungary recently fell almost simultaneously. It was late March and in both cases something happened unusual. The main opposition parties, after having succeeded in undermining the governing coalitions, paradoxically have shown no interest in calling immediate early elections which they would be very likely to win – and thus be able to form their own governments. Instead, all the major parliamentary parties rediscovered common ground for collaboration and decided to form a so-called “government of technocrats” headed and formed by unknown bureaucrats or businessmen with no visible connection to any political party.

I’ve just been reading  a great analysis of recent events in Hungary where the economic crisis has produced a strikingly unified action amongst the political class. The political contest that supposedly characterises post-communist democracy in Eastern Europe has magically vanished and the real structures of power and control find themselves foregrounded as the brittle neoliberalism on the periphery of the European system threatens to implode in the face of massive capital flight, shrinking tax revenues and the austerity measures resulting from acceptance of the IMF’s loan. If you transplant the chain of events into the context of British party politics they become rather bizarre. As the New Statesman article puts it,

Bajnai [the New Hungarian Prime Minister] is not a member of any political party, but a friend and former business partner of both Gyurcsány and the SZDSZ leader, János Kóka. Imagine if in Britain the Lib Dems held the balance of power in the next parliament and Nick Clegg installed an old business buddy, who was not an MP, as PM.

However it’s in this apparent absurdity that the ideological logic of neoliberalism stands revealed. The austerity measures demanded – after all, there is no alternative - are claimed to be purely technical and the government is acting post-politically as it shits all over any substantive concept of a democratic politics. In effect you have the suspension of liberal democracy and, for all intents and purposes, a coup on behalf of the economic elite of Hungary. Yet within the symbolic universe of neoliberal parliamentary democracy it’s all perfectly coherent and proper.

Setting up of the “governments of technocrats” is a way of leaving the dirty work of destroying millions of lives of working people to individuals without a direct political allegiance to any parliamentary party and without any responsibility to answer to any of their voters. In reality it is a political coup against all the workers, a method aimed at confusing and disorientating people. It is a cunning move aimed at pushing through drastic austerity programmes, according to the script of world capital and its major institution IMF, euphemistically called “reforms”. How long all this will last is another matter.

A deeply cynical and political move to preempt social transformation through the seizure and consolidation of power can be presented as a formally sound and non-political response to changing circumstances: not only revealing the investment of the entirety of the political class in the maintenance of the status quo – and thus the profoundly hollow nature of substantive democracy – but also the immensely oppressive and quasi-fascist potentialities contained with neoliberal discourses of governance. You can’t help but wonder what similar events in the UK would look like?