A rose by any name?
What’s Montague? It is not hand nor foot, nor arm nor face. O be some other name belonging to a man! What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet. So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called, retain that dear perfection which he owes without that title.
William Shakespeare (1599: act 2, scene 2), Romeo and Juliet
I have always been fascinated by The Alternative’s name, not only because of the somewhat paradoxical self-confidence embedded in the definite and singular form of the name (‘An Alternative’ or ‘Alternatives’ would probably have been more humble choices), but also because of the sheer emptiness of the word. As Parker et al. (2014a) note, what is considered alternative is fully dependent on what is considered mainstream. In other words, alternatives only exist in opposition to something. This begs the question: For how long can a political party be considered alternative? Is it possible to be alternative and represented in parliament? Is it possible to be alternative and part of the government – or would that require the party to be an alternative to itself? I recently posed these questions to members of The Alternative during a meeting at the party’s local office in central Copenhagen. One person laughed and said: ‘If that happens, we’ll change our name to The Establishment’.
In the previous chapter, I introduced The Alternative as part of a new wave of political parties. In this chapter, I will provide a more detailed account of The Alternative as a political organization. I begin by outlining the historical context in order to give the reader a sense of the political climate that The Alternative grew out of. I then proceed to a formal description of the organization, using the expansion of the political program as an illustrative example of the way in which The Alternative has developed. In conclusion, I turn to a more theoretical discussion about the relationship between naming and affect. Drawing on a combination of post-structuralist political theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis, I ask: What’s in a name?
27
The birth of a party
5In September 2011, the center-left coalition in Danish politics managed to break 10 years of right-wing dominance by winning the national elections by the smallest of margins. Only with the help of voters in Greenland and the Faroe Islands did the coalition secure enough support to form a minority government consisting of three parties: the Social Democrats, the Social Liberal Party, and the Socialist People’s Party. This was nevertheless an important win for the Danish left, who had witnessed a decade of severe welfare cuts and increasingly harsher immigration policies sponsored by the far-right Danish People’s Party. After weeks of intense negotiations, an elaborate coalition agreement was signed by the three parties, making Helle Thorning-Schmidt (leader of the Social Democrats) the first female prime minister in Denmark.
One of the most original characters to emerge from this agreement was Uffe Elbæk, an ex-communist turned socio-liberal, who had been appointed minister of culture based on his long-time involvement in cultural life home and abroad. Elbæk was an unusual figure in Danish politics.
Not only did he have a past unlike most other politicians, which included a career as founder and principal of an alternative management school called the ‘Chaos Pilots’, he also insisted on doing politics differently. For instance, during the election campaign in 2011, he opened his home to the general public and invited anyone interested to discuss his policies and help him improve his campaign strategy. He also established an association called ‘Club Courage’, based at a gay club in Copenhagen, with the aim of highlighting and applauding people who had shown political courage by challenging the common way of conducting politics. The common denominator in most of these initiatives was a focus on active deliberation and bottom-up decision-making.
Elbæk brought this way of thinking politics with him into the job as minister of culture. This led to a lot of alternative working procedures meant to stir-up the conventions of parliamentary politics.
One such initiative was a recurring debate event called ‘Culture on the Edge’, sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and held at a school for circus performers known as the ‘Academy for Untamed Creativity’. Initially, the events were successful, with lots of people actively participating in
5 Besides my own experiences and written material produced by The Alternative, the following description is loosely based on Hindkjær (2013), Nielsen and Bonke (2015), Andersen (2016), and Hansen and Stubager (2017).
28
discussions about the future of cultural politics, but soon news started circulating that Elbæk’s husband was employed at the academy and that Elbæk himself had been a board member at the academy. This sparked a media frenzy in which Elbæk was accused of favoritism and nepotism. It all culminated in a parliamentary consultation where Elbæk had to explain if he had been warned by civil servants about the risk of nepotism. With his back firmly against the wall, Elbæk admitted to being warned about placing future events at the academy, thus propelling criticism to even grander proportions.
Visibly affected by the accusations, Elbæk ultimately decided to step down as minister of culture in December 2012 and embarked on a hiatus from Danish politics. However, a few months later, all charges were dropped, Elbæk’s name was cleared, and he resurfaced as a common member of parliament. Upon returning, he quickly launched a new project called ‘Under the Radar’, which was an online platform meant to draw the public’s attention to all those progressive initiatives that exist outside the spotlight of mainstream media and conventional politics. Like so many of Elbæk’s other initiatives, ‘Under the Radar’ was a glowing success for those involved, but the impact on governmental affairs remained somewhat absent. This led some of the volunteers working for Elbæk to encourage him to embark on one last political project; one that would target parliamentary politics more directly. At first, Elbæk was reluctant, but he eventually decided that if he found it easy to write some kind of founding document, he would pursue the idea of launching one last project in the name of everything alternative.
There is always an alternative!
It did not take long for Elbæk to produce the founding document of what he eventually called:
‘The Alternative: an international party, a movement, and a cultural voice’ (The Alternative, 2013a). In the document, Elbæk starts by highlighting some of the challenges facing contemporary society, most importantly climate change and economic inequality, but also challenges that are usually overlooked in the public debate such as social marginalization and loneliness. Elbæk then proceeds to mention all those local initiatives that work to address these problems on a daily basis and the many new forms of organization that exist as a result of these efforts. This leads him to a central question: How is it possible to ‘diffuse the experiences of those local initiatives to the rest
29
of society’ and to ‘release the willingness to sustainable transition that exist so many places today?’. The solution for Elbæk was to unite all these initiatives in an organization focused on sustainability, everyday democracy, and entrepreneurial creativity and to establish a political party
‘that has the courage to imagine a radically different future’ (ibid: 1).
The document was well-received by Elbæk’s volunteers, though some initially questioned the need for a political party. Why not create an alternative movement instead? However, these disputes were quickly resolved, and the team sat out to prepare the launch of the project. In mid-September 2013, Elbæk resigned his membership of the Social Liberal Party, and two months later he and his co-founder, Josephine Fock, summoned the press to announce the birth of a new political party and social movement called The Alternative. At the press conference, Elbæk and Fock presented their vision of The Alternative: the vision of a party that represents and promotes alternative solutions to climate-related, social, and economic challenges. They also presented a short manifesto and six core values meant to guide them in relation to policies and organizational procedures: empathy, humor, courage, generosity, humility, and transparency. Save for these somewhat lofty ideals, Elbæk and Fock did not present any kind of policy proposals or reform initiatives. As they formulated it:
What is the political program? What are the solutions to x-number of tangible challenges? We don’t present that today. Some may be surprised that we currently don’t have the grand party bible on the shelf. But that’s a completely conscious decision.
(The Alternative, 2013b)
In the absence of concrete policies, the values and the manifesto quickly became a main source of attraction for supporters. The very first line in the manifesto reads, ‘There is always an alternative!’, and it proceeds by characterizing The Alternative as a ‘shout out’ against cynicism and a ‘countermeasure’ to the environmental crisis. The manifesto ends by stating that The Alternative is for anyone ‘who can feel that something new is starting to replace something old’
(The Alternative, 2013c). These broad appeals initially mobilized a wide variety of political identities, ranging from old-school socialists to free marketeers and from spiritualists to radical atheists. In fact, anyone attracted by the notion of sustainability and the prospect of something
30
‘alternative’ seemed capable of reading their own personal preferences into the project. As a member of The Alternative later told me during an interview session:
In the beginning, it was completely open for everyone. Anyone could set-up a flea market in their garage and claim to represent The Alternative. Anything could be The Alternative. There was no design manual. There was just a logo that people could use for whatever they pleased. That’s really how it was. (Respondent #18).
This type of transversal mobilization generated important momentum that allowed The Alternative’s name to travel across political and demographic boundaries. However, during the first months of 2014, The Alternative began crafting a political program. With inspiration from the open-source community, twenty public workshops called ‘Political Laboratories’ were organized.
At these workshops, both members and non-members discussed different topics of interest and co-produced a variety of very specific policy proposals. These proposals were then gathered by a steering committee, rewritten, and turned into a 63-page document that served as The Alternative’s political program (The Alternative, 2014). In May 2014, the program was accepted at a general assembly in Aarhus, after a marathon-debate involving more than 150 proposed amendments submitted by members wanting to push the program in different directions.
Throughout the rest of 2014, The Alternative continued to expand the political program while also selecting parliamentary candidates. Much energy was spent collecting enough signatures to become eligible to run for parliament. In fact, at that time, few things seemed to matter more than the 20.260 signatures that would get the party on the ballot list. In March 2015, more than a year’s hard work payed off, when the political leadership (as the candidates were now called) delivered 13 boxes of signatures at the Ministry of Interior Affairs. Only a few months later, the Danish prime minister announced the elections. Despite little preparation time, The Alternative was ready. A campaign strategy had been prepared, key campaign issues had been selected, and a host of volunteers had signed up to support the candidates.
During the campaign, I followed some of the local candidates from Copenhagen. These were all politically untried people who had little knowledge of parliamentary politics or how to electioneer
31
properly. What struck me the most was the candidates’ constant struggle to appear simultaneously alternative and established. For instance, they would often come up with spectacular and unusual ideas for attracting attention such as dressing up as superheroes or setting-up an alternative dancefloor at a central square in Copenhagen, but simultaneously worry not to come across as the ‘circus party’ (a nickname invented by political opponents and the tabloid press); and rightly so. In the end, none of those dressing up as superheroes or setting-up dancefloors would enter parliament.
On June 18, 2015, The Alternative earned 4.8 percent of the votes in the national elections, which translated into nine seats in parliament. This made The Alternative the sixth largest party in parliament, but also the third largest party in the opposition, ahead of the Socialist People’s Party and the Social Liberal Party (Elbæk’s former party). This was a thoroughly unexpected result, not only to media pundits, but also to members of The Alternative. Few had expected The Alternative to exceed the electoral threshold, but hardly anyone had expected them to earn more than handful of seats. Though the election results were gloomy for the left (the right-wing coalition regained power), The Alternative could not have hoped for a better result. By entering parliament as a small opposition party, The Alternative would not be forced into difficult compromises, which had previously broken other small parties on the left. Despite this, The Alternative had bigger dreams. ‘This is only the beginning’, Elbæk announced at The Alternative’s election celebrations.
Later, he would state that the ultimate goal is to win the keys to the Prime Minister’s Office.
In total, 168,788 Danes voted for The Alternative on June 18, 2015 (out of 3,518,987 valid votes).
Of these voters, 56 percent were women and 57 percent were below the age of 40. Only 1 percent of all Danes above 65 years of age voted for The Alternative. In terms of income level, The Alternative had the wealthiest voter base across the three parties that are usually considered left-wing (including the Socialist People’s Party and the Red-Green Alliance). Furthermore, The Alternative had the second most well-educated voter base across all nine parties, with almost 60 percent having a university degree and almost 70 percent having a high school degree (Andersen, 2017). Most of The Alternative’s voters previously voted for other center-left parties, primarily the Social Liberal Party and the Socialist People’s Party (Hansen & Stubager, 2017).
32
Figure 2: The result of the national elections on June 18, 2015. The parties are grouped according to a classical left-right scale. The designation ‘left-wing parties’ typically refer to the first three parties from the left, whereas the notion of ‘center-left’ often includes the Social Democrats and the Social Liberal Party as well (e.g., Andersen, 2016). The current government consists of Venstre, Liberal Alliance, and the Conservatives.
The Alternative’s role as part of the center-left opposition did not prevent the newly elected MPs from engaging actively in day-to-day politics and from passing bills sponsored by the right-wing government. For instance, shortly after entering parliament, The Alternative helped pass a tax-deduction bill that reduced taxation on sustainable renewal of private homes. Even though the national Energy Council, based on numbers from an older bill, estimated that the $126,000,000 solution would reduce carbon dioxide emission with less than 0.02 percent, The Alternative’s political leadership still considered it a good deal. As Josephine Fock, the party’s spokesperson on financial issues, explained in a newspaper article: ‘what we are interested in is to push all bills in a green direction’ (Kristensen, 2015). Such incidents spawned a debate in the media, as well as internally, about the alternativeness of The Alternative. While a few members withdrew their membership as a consequence, most stayed on board and voiced their criticism internally. In fact,
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50
Percentage of votes Seats in parliament
33
during the year following the elections, The Alternative expanded its membership base with more than 600 percent and peaked at 7.8 percent in the opinion polls.
Formal organization and recent development
The formal organization of The Alternative mirrors that of Elbæk’s former party, the Social Liberal Party. It is divided into two sections: a political section and an administrative section. Each section has its own secretariat with a dozen full-time employees. The political section, based in parliament, is headed by the political leadership (the MPs) and deals with matters pertaining to policies, campaigns, and strategic initiatives. The administrative section, based at the party’s local office in central Copenhagen, is headed by the board and deals with membership registration, internal communication, educational initiatives, and general organizational development. Though the two sections are formally distinct (they each have their own pillar in the organization chart), they are nonetheless thoroughly intertwined. An illustrative example of this is the policymaking process, which is naturally associated with the political section but coordinated by members of the administrative section (see chapter 7).
Today, The Alternative has been in parliament for more than two years. The parliamentary group has grown by one seat, due to an MP from the Social Democrats changing sides, and the opinion polls have stagnated around 6–7 percent. Approximately 11,000 people are currently registered members, which is a significant achievement, considering that only 4 percent of the Danish population are members of political parties (compared to 28 percent in 1955). In fact, The Alternative is now the fourth largest party in Denmark membership-wise, only surpassed by the Social Democrats, Venstre, and Danish People’s Party. The members are spread across the country and organized in one of the 80 local branches and lumped together in 10 constituencies. Even though The Alternative is strongest in larger cities such as Copenhagen and Aarhus more rural areas are likewise well-represented, particularly small islands such as Samsø and Ærø, where large parts of the population are committed to sustainable living.
Since the elections in 2015, the political program has been significantly expanded with a ‘nature package’ (containing 42 unique proposals), a ‘rural district package’ (containing 38 unique
34
proposals), an ‘entrepreneurial package’ (containing 26 unique proposals), a ‘school package’
(containing 22 unique proposals), a ‘democracy package’ (containing 12 unique proposals), and several other substantial initiatives being added to the official catalogue of policy proposals. In total, the party has advanced almost 200 proposals in only two years (The Alternative, 2017).
Across the nine parties in the Danish parliament, The Alternative now has one of the most elaborate and detailed political programs, including tangible suggestions for how to fund each proposal. Despite all this, media pundits and political opponents still refer to The Alternative as a
‘bluff’ and a ‘circus party’ devoid of political content. When I talk to friends and colleague, I often get a similar response: ‘Why don’t they present tangible suggestion for how to realize all their fluffy ideals?’ Perhaps some of this confusion has got something to do with the party’s name.
What’s in a name?
As suggested in the introduction, several political parties are currently going through what I call a process of particularization: Instead of expanding the scope of representation by universalizing the overall project, these parties particularize an already universalized identity by translating radical politics into realpolitik. Of course, this is not to say that political particularization is a new phenomenon. For instance, Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was also organized around a series of empty signifiers – ‘hope’ and ‘change’ – and translated into tangible policies during the course of two consecutive terms (Kumar, 2014). Another example is that of Die Grünen, who entered the West German parliament in 1983 with the slogan: ‘We are neither left nor right, but in front’ but ended up as a center-left party dominated by ‘Realos’ (realists) after the German reunification in 1990 (Roth & Murphy, 1998). In fact, if one had to identify a political party most similar to The Alternative, it would probably be Die Grünen.
Die Grünen was founded in 1980 on the back of the many ‘new social movements’ that emerged during the post-1968 era in Western Europe. Despite the ideological diversity of these movements, they all experienced what Mayer and Ely (1998: 6) call a ‘greening of their protest motives’. Movements that previously had little to do with environmental politics suddenly began seeing ecology as a unifying force in the struggle against capitalism, patriarchy, and other dominant discourses. Because proponents of ‘Green ideology’ managed to re-articulate already
35
existing elements such as grassroots democracy and decentralization into a new ideological formation that looked nothing like the classical ideologies, the notion of ‘Green’ became an empty signifier capable of unifying a wide range of anti-establishment groups with only little particular resemblance (Stavrakakis, 1997). The desire to provide these groups with parliamentary representation led to the establishment of Die Grünen.
From the outset, Die Grünen decided not to be a single-issue party exclusively focused on ecology but to become a mass party engaged in all aspects of society. The party thus embarked on the process of constructing its first political program. In order not to exclude any of the demands represented by the Green signifier, the party followed a ‘strategy of addition’, which culminated in a comprehensive and highly detailed political program – in some states comprising more than 500 pages of policy proposals (Mayer & Ely, 1998). Upon entering parliament, however, Die Grünen quickly realized that priorities had to be made, which led to the marginalization of the party’s conservative wing and other factions that could not be reconciled with the official line.
Furthermore, the ‘utopian’ nature of the political program proved difficult to translate into realpolitik, resulting in a situation where none of the party’s proposals where accepted in parliament. This led to increasing membership disillusionment and apathy, from which Die Grünen recovered only years later (Mewes, 1998).
In several respects, the story of Die Grünen’s formative years is similar to that of The Alternative:
both parties crystallized out of movement-like organizations; they were both organized around a type of Green ideology focused on sustainability and environmentalism; they both initially positioned themselves as neither left nor right; they both represented many heterogeneous factions with different and sometimes opposing agendas; they were both launched without a political program but employed an almost ‘encyclopedic approach’ to constructing it (Mayer & Ely, 1998: 7); they entered parliament with approximately 5 percent of the votes, and their supporters were predominantly young and well-educated (Mez, 1998).
Taking all of this into account, the most interesting similarity – at least for this dissertation – is the fact that both parties went through a process of particularization in which the scope of political