(Apologies for not getting around to part 3 of the realignment series on Friday; that will now appear tomorrow. Alert readers might notice that today’s post is not entirely unrelated.)
Beleaguered Victorian Liberal leader John Pesutto finally got some good news on Saturday. Federal vice-president Caroline Inge, who was very clearly the candidate of his party enemies, was defeated in her campaign to become the party’s state president. Instead, incumbent Greg Mirabella will be succeeded by Phil Davis, formerly the party’s leader in the Legislative Council.
Davis spent more than twenty years in the upper house, from 1992 to 2014, five of them as leader. (You can read about some of his exploits here and here.) Like some other presidents before him, he has been lured out of retirement not, one suspects, by any personal ambition but because the party needed him. He beat Inge at the weekend state council by an undisclosed margin, but a source reports that it was probably quite comfortable [see note below].
The Victorian Liberal Party has inspired many historical analogies over the years, but this episode made me think in particular of the German presidential election of 1932. At the risk of an immediate violation of Godwin’s Law, let me explain.
Germany’s incumbent president in 1932 was field marshal Paul von Hindenburg. He was – as military leaders tend to be – politically on the right, and had been elected in 1925 with the support of right-wing parties against the parties of the centre and centre-left. He had not attempted (as some of his backers had hoped) to overthrow the republican constitution, but by 1932 his prime minister, centrist Heinrich Brüning, had no parliamentary majority and governed largely by emergency presidential decrees.
Hindenburg by then was 84 and (understandably) set on retirement. If Germany had been a normal country, the mainstream political parties would have backed a moderate, consensus candidate to replace him. Instead, they persuaded him to run again, because his main opponent was not from the centre or left but was the Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler.
So Hindenburg became, incongruously, the candidate of the centre-left, and in the second round of the election he beat Hitler by about six million votes, 53.1% to 36.8% (Communist candidate Ernst Thälmann had 10.2%). But that failed to save the republic; in January 1933, as part of a conservative intrigue that went badly wrong, Hindenburg appointed Hitler as prime minister, with consequences that need no retelling. Hindenburg died the following year and Hitler took over his job as well.
It’s important to stress that this is just an analogy: whatever her faults, Inge is no Hitler, and Davis at 70 is not in Hindenburg’s league. But the Victorian Liberal Party in the last few years has conveyed something of the same sense of the old verities being upended. Someone who would once have been unmistakably the candidate of the right finds himself being put forward as, at least in relative terms, a progressive, because a new threat has emerged on the extreme flank.
I chatted briefly with Davis at a function back in 2016, not long before the United States presidential election, and he expressed to me his shock and distaste at the candidacy of Donald Trump. At the time that struck me as a sign of how much simple decency remained in the Liberal Party. I don’t know if (like many others) he later recanted those views, but I like to think that he did not, and that as president he will try to hold the line against the increasing Trumpification of the party.
Just as Hindenburg’s victory didn’t save the republic, Davis as president is unlikely to be able to save Pesutto. But what else could his supporters do? This is not the time for promoting a positive vision, partly because his support base is so diverse it would be unlikely to ever agree on one. It’s more a matter of last-ditch resistance, putting all available energy into warding off catastrophe.
Their German counterparts were unable to even manage that. Let’s hope Davis and Pesutto have better luck.
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Note added 5.40pm: My attention has now been drawn to a later report in the Age that says, on the strength of “Six party sources, speaking on condition of anonymity,” that the margin in Davis’s favor was 422-411. If that’s true, it’s a very close result, which only reinforces the point that I’m making (and is more in line with what I would have expected beforehand).
The World is Not Enough 