Across Globe, ‘Democratic Dynasties’ Grapple With New World Order

In India, the Congress (I) Party, which led the world’s most populous democracy to independence half a century ago and had dominated its politics ever since, is unceremoniously thrashed in national elections.

Farther east, the Liberal Democrats, who ruled Japan for 38 uninterrupted years until 1993, garner a paltry 22% voter preference in a recent opinion poll before recovering to 36%. And in Italy, the Christian Democrats, whose ministers led or served in 52 consecutive post-World War II governments, simply disintegrate along with the political system they had shaped.

Within a few short years, three of the globe’s most enduring “democratic dynasties” have fallen, pulled down by an accumulation of factors ranging from massive corruption to an inability to adapt to the new realities and technologies of the post-Cold War order.

Their fall also is part of a broad search for fresh values and political identities underway nearly everywhere in a world no longer defined by the clash of grand ideologies.

“All democracies are in a stage of soul-searching,” said Takeshi Kondo, director of the office of political and economic research of Itochu Corp., a major trading firm in Tokyo. “Self-identification is a common problem in Japan, the U.S. and even Europe.”

Jean-Marie Guehenno, author of “The End of the Nation State” and former French ambassador to the European Union in Brussels, echoed this analysis, citing growing voter hesitancy to accept a single ideological “package” as one reason for the decline of once-dominant parties. “The idea that one political party has all the answers is passe,” he said in an interview. “We’re in for a long period of inventing new political ideas.”

The larger consequences of all this are unclear, but one fact is certain: In such a climate, other perennial giants are wobbling.

Top strategists in the world’s oldest ruling political party--Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI--claim that a major overhaul is needed to survive devastating losses in key state elections last year.

Speaking at a recent televised round-table discussion, party President Santiago Onate talked of “a catharsis that has been going on in the PRI for 19 months.”

“What is essential for the PRI now is internal reform,” he said.

In Western Europe, long-ruling parties also face hard times as they struggle to redefine themselves and grapple with an array of problems that suddenly seem beyond their grasp.

“Italy is an extreme case of what’s happening elsewhere in Europe,” Guehenno said. “New faces, new ideas--this will happen elsewhere too. In France, there is a simmering crisis, and in Germany it’s only the dominance of the chancellor [Helmut Kohl] that delays this change.”

In Germany, periodic opinion polls conducted over the last 30 years by the Allensbach polling institute show that the level of respect accorded politicians as a group has dropped more than 50% since the early 1970s. On a list of 18 vocations, theirs currently stands third from the bottom, just above book dealers and trade union leaders.

Voters in Japan, meanwhile, are casting blank ballots--so-called white votes--in larger numbers to demonstrate their belief that no political party can answer their needs. A municipal election in December in the city of Tsukuba saw the number of white votes exceeding those won by the lead candidate.

Politicians themselves list a variety of reasons for the disenchantment.

“On one hand, the problems we face are steadily more complex, but on the other, governments are expected to take care of everything,” said Annemie Neyts, who served in the Belgian government during the 1980s and is a member of the European Parliament. “And it’s not just the expectations of the public. It’s politicians pretending they have the answers. It becomes a vicious circle.”

Guehenno argues that today’s national politicians are consistently faced with a range of problems that are better dealt with either on a more local level, such as education, or at a level that extends beyond national borders, such as defense, nuclear safety, immigration and organized crime.

“Technology is moving faster than politics,” he said.

But for many, the forces unleashed by the end of the Cold War have been especially decisive in ending the rule of dynasties that once seemed unassailable and now threaten others.

Japan’s Liberal Democrats and Italy’s Christian Democrats, for example, stumbled in part because they lost their cherished role as their nation’s chief defender against communism. With communism conquered, voters suddenly free to explore alternatives have done exactly that.

“The reason the LDP stayed in power was that people were petrified at the idea that the Socialists would come in and screw up foreign policy,” said Gerald Curtis, a Columbia University political scientist, about the Japanese party. “People put up with a lot of [LDP] corruption . . . because they thought the political implications of change were too destabilizing.”

The end of the Cold War also left these long-dominant parties open for the first time to aggressive criminal investigation of corruption, a fact that has produced some stunning results. Giulio Andreotti, the seven-time Italian prime minister and Christian Democrat kingpin, is on trial, accused of collusion with the Sicilian Mafia and of being an accessory to the slaying of a political journalist.

In Japan, Liberal Democratic godfather Shin Kanemaru resigned his seat in 1992 after admitting he took $4.1 million in illegal donations from a scandal-tainted trucking firm.

In 1993, he was arrested on charges of evading $8.3 million in taxes. (He died this year, and the case with him.)

The Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun has led the way with unprecedented investigations into a stock-for-favors scandal and followed with hard-hitting coverage of corruption among politicians, bureaucrats and the construction industry.

The Japanese media have also highlighted links between former Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita and gangsters--stories that would have been unthinkable in earlier years.

While there is little dispute that events have seriously eroded the power of many of the world’s political dynasties, the consequences of this weakening remain largely a question mark. Some see the developments as part of a long-overdue cleansing of the political process that will bring fresh faces, new ideas and an injection of hope to stale political environments.

Others, however, point to a downside, arguing that whatever hope is generated by the collapse of the old order will be short-lived. The real end result of this upheaval, they maintain, is invariably heightened political uncertainty, increased instability and weak, inexperienced and ineffectual governments.

After the Congress electoral collapse in India, uncertainty is one of the few certainties. The first post-Congress government, which took power in mid-May, lasted two weeks, while its successor is a shaky 13-party minority coalition led by H. D. Deve Gowda, a figure with virtually no political base outside his home state of Karnataka.

The situation reflects how large a political vacuum has been left by the decline of Congress, a party that had governed India for 46 of its 49 independent years.

Much like Mexico’s PRI, Congress was so dominant, so all-encompassing and so lacking in ideology that it became an easy and natural home for all who sought a share of political power.

Leading Congress figures, such as the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and his daughter and successor, Indira Gandhi, are so revered nationally that they have effectively entered the pantheon of Hindu gods in many parts of rural India. Although nearly 12 years have passed since Gandhi was assassinated by Sikh separatists, in some backwaters, illiterate villagers remain convinced she is the one in charge.

But after the 1991 death of her son Rajiv, also at the hands of an assassin, Congress seemed to lose both its direction and its last nationally recognized political figure.

“Congress has a serious problem,” asserted K.R. Malkani, a respected lawmaker and longtime Congress opponent. “It has no philosophy, not after [Rajiv] Gandhi’s death.”

But other factors also played a role. The charisma and authority that Congress won as the motor of anti-colonial struggle and so consistently turned into votes have either worn off or become irrelevant with the passing of half a century.

Some analysts maintain that Congress too has suffered from the end of the Cold War, which brought an end to the high-profile Non-Aligned Movement that Nehru co-founded and that Congress leaders consistently used as a platform to project their international influence.

At the same time, internal factional bickering and colossal corruption seriously eroded the Congress image. One-third of the scandal-tainted Cabinet was forced to resign in the last Congress government, led by Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao.

But in the end, it was the rise of Hindu nationalism among the northern middle class and the government’s failure to deliver on the populist promises of a better life made to millions at the lower end of the country’s social scale that gave birth to an array of small caste-based parties that eventually brought Congress down.

In Mexico, the PRI’s crisis also stems from a failure to adjust to new realities--namely, a new level of democracy that is beginning to take root, driven by free-market economic reforms and the emergence of an aggressive, privately owned (and therefore more independent) media.

Today, privately owned national television networks and scores of private radio stations have radically altered the PRI’s playing field, forcing it to contend with public opinion.

“Radio and television . . . have transformed the relationship between government and the people and between political parties and the public in a transcendental way,” said Carlos Reta Martinez, a federal legislator and a highly influential ruling party member of the Chamber of Deputies. “It obliges politicians and their representatives to be better prepared . . . to be more aware of what’s going on.”

A recent round-table discussion conducted by one of Mexico’s powerful national cable television networks, Multivision, illustrated the extent of this change.

As Onate, the ruling party president, and other party leaders dismissed humiliating state election losses as part of a larger national crisis and confidently predicted that the PRI would win the next presidential election, Multivision was busy polling more than 3,000 viewers, whose responses spoke volumes about a ruling party in decline:

* Would you vote for the PRI today? 7.5% said yes, 92.1% said no.

* Should the PRI change? 84.4% said yes, 15.5% said no.

* Is the PRI changing? 12.5% said yes, 87.5% said no.

The impact of cable, satellite and now digital television signals has broken the monopoly influence of longtime ruling parties over the media in less developed nations. But here and elsewhere it also serves to intensify the impact of problems, often propelling them into instant crises with which government decision-makers are ill-prepared to deal.

British Prime Minister John Major felt the full brunt of modern media power in March after reversing the long-held position of Tory governments and admitting to the House of Commons in a brief statement that it might be possible, after all, for humans to contract “mad cow” disease by eating infected meat.

His comments ricocheted through Europe at such a velocity that within hours, beef sales from Portugal to Finland had plummeted, with farmers and consumers alike screaming for remedies--remedies that are still not in place.

Meanwhile, the crisis brought Britain’s ruling Conservatives one step closer to the brink after 17 consecutive years in office.

Power draining away from once-dominant parties has flowed so far mainly to new, smaller, sometimes regional or single-issue parties, to nongovernmental interest groups such as Greenpeace and, sometimes, out of politics completely.

Guehenno, for example, described the planned European monetary union as an agreement to end the political management of major currencies.

How far this development goes and where it all leads remains uncertain.

“We call periods that we don’t fully understand transitions,” Guehenno said.

“We are now in such an era. With the grand threat gone, the question of what binds us together is much more important. It is also more difficult to answer.”

Times staff writers John-Thor Dahlburg in New Delhi, Mark Fineman in Mexico City and Teresa Watanabe in Tokyo contributed to this report.