Iran’s new President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is one. So are Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. These men, we are told by CNN, the Wall Street Journal and the London Financial Times, are “hardliners”. But what exactly is a hardliner — and why are some world leaders hardliners and others not?
In a dictionary, hardline is defined as “definite and unyielding”. But if so, why is hardliner used so selectively to describe world leaders?
As Ahmadinejad celebrated his landslide victory, another election was taking place in Bulgaria. For the past four years the Prime Minister, Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, has presided over a privatisation programme the Iron Lady would have drooled over. His neoliberal agenda has left half of Bulgaria’s eight million people surviving on less than â,¬2 a day. Yet unlike Ahmadinejad, Lukashenko or Chavez, the Bulgarian premier has not been labelled a hardliner — for his “definite and unyielding” policies — but is referred to as a reformer.
It’s a similar story across Eastern and Central Europe. Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany, whose government is following aggressive neoliberal policies in the European Union, recently announced plans to privatise health care. Hungary has no more money for hospitals — but found £7,7-million to buy American missiles and £34,5–million to “adapt” its armed forces to the demands of Nato and EU membership. To many, a policy of putting guns before health would be considered hardline. But not the Western media, who laud Gyurcsany as a “centrist reformer”.
Look further and it is clear: if you run your country for the benefit of international capital and orientate your foreign policy towards the US, you will be a “reformer”, “moderate” or “moderniser” — regardless of how extreme your polices are.
If, on the other hand, you run your country for the benefit of your people and refuse to pay Danegeld to the most powerful empire the world has seen, you will be called a hardliner.
Ahmadinejad is “hardline”, not for the social and religious conservatism he shares with the non-“hardline” leaders of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, but for his policy of empowering Iranian working-class people and defending his country’s right to develop nuclear power. Lukashenko is “hardline”, not for his authoritarianism, but because he wishes to maintain the last planned, socially owned economy in Europe — an alternative economic agenda that has seen his country climb from 68th to 49th in the UN human development index. And Chavez is “hardline”, not because he once led a failed military coup, but because he wishes to use his nation’s vast oil wealth to benefit Venezuela and not US oil corporations.
It is for standing up for the interests of their own people that these men are labelled “hardliners”. For those genuinely concerned with social justice, derailing the US behemoth and creating a world in which people come before profits, the more “hardliners” — and the less “moderates” and “reformers” — that are elected to power, the better. — Â