Don’t ignore the majority
10 November 2016The message by Donald Trump's seemingly surprising electoral victory at Tuesday's US presidential election is, don't ignore the voice of the majority. One of Trump's clarion calls in his now successful bid to the White House was his anti-immigration policy and protectionism.
As a commentator on CNN said yesterday, i.e. at Trump's victory speech at New York City, 'Trump has sought to build a wall, whereas 37 years to the day (9 November 1989), the Berlin Wall came down.' Trump in his election campaign has vowed to build a wall separating the USA from its southern neighbour Mexico, to prevent illegal migration.
On the aspect of the 'Berlin Wall, immigration and another surprising vote, namely Brexit', which took place five months earlier in June, it may be moot to quote what a German diplomat recently had to say about this subject: Germany's Deputy Chief of Mission in Colombo Dr. Michael Dohmen speaking at the Sri Lanka-Germany Business Council AGM on Tuesday said that according to reports, the reason behind the 'Brexit' vote was the fear of migrants.
It was, apparently this same fear among Americans, particularly white Americans, who comprise the bulk of USA's population, that may have had propelled Trump, a novice in politics, to be elected to the high seat of becoming USA's forty-fifth president on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, Dohmen in his speech in Colombo, also made on Tuesday, coinciding with the day that the US Presidential elections were held, said that East Europeans in particular were taking British jobs, which propelled 'Brexit'.
Most of these East European jobs in the UK, are blue collar jobs, such as drivers and even as housemaids (!), a noun which is quite common to Sri Lanka as housemaids play no mean a part in making remittances, Sri Lanka's largest foreign exchange earner.
Similarly, working class whites, previously ignored by former US presidential candidates (for fear of upsetting the minority vote), was nevertheless reached out to by Trump, who finally triumphed, by not being afraid of going against the norm.
Meanwhile, Dohmen, in his 'further' analysis of 'Brexit,' said that that was the outcome as a result of East Europeans stealing British jobs, notwithstanding the fact that the British Court recently ruled that the pro-Brexit referendum vote also needed to be sanctioned by Parliament.
And, on the dominant anti-immigrant voice not only in the UK, but now, also in the USA, and the possibility of such a voice gathering steam in Germany, the world's fourth largest economy (after the USA, China and Japan) and possibly impacting German investments in the island as a result (Sri Lanka also enjoys trade surpluses with the USA, UK and Germany).
Dohmen seemingly pooh-poohed such fears, indicating that the anti-immigrant voice in Germany was confined to a small right wing base emanating from the geographical area that earlier was the German Democratic Republic, a Soviet satellite State, which was coopted into Greater Germany (the then German Federal Republic), which was on the western side of the Berlin Wall, after the events of November 1989. Dohmen, however, referring to the Hitlerian past of Germany, inferred that Berlin was sensitive to the country's past, in respect of the rise of the German right.
Nonetheless, if there was any racism in Trump's campaign, he never repeated such utterances in his victory speech, when he said that he will be the President of all Americans, whilst thanking all, regardless of race or religion, for voting for him.
Nevertheless, the lesson for Colombo from the recent happenings in the West, beginning with 'Brexit' and seemingly continuing (not ending), whatever Dohmen may say, though he admitted to the rapid rise of the far right movement in France (which is anti-immigrant) in the last 10 years, is not to be insensitive to the voice of the majority.
It may have been this seeming insensitivity of the Ranil Wickremesinghe Government of 2004, which was then walking a tightrope, policing a fragile ceasefire with the Tamil terrorist leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, while at the same time seemingly ignoring the majoritarian Sinhala fears, a race that comprises 75% of the island's population, that led to his defeat at that parliamentary poll, despite getting economic indicators, like low inflation, a low interest rate regime, etc., right.
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