In the corridors of pink power

After women and ethnic minority leaders, a third group of political outsiders is now making inroads into the European political arena: politicians who no longer hide – and some even flaunt – their homosexuality.

After the long (and as yet uncertain) ascent of women to power in Western democracies, after the success of ethnic and regional minorities in gaining a hearing for their identity-based claims, now we are seeing the rise of a third and ever-glorious group of outsiders who have managed to establish themselves as political players on a par with (or even a couple rungs above) their straight fellow party members. So brace yourselves for the new season of Pink Power, of openly gay statesmen whose sexuality is no longer shut up in the closet or the “dark room”, but an open secret in the corridors of power with a capital “P”.

This is no longer the strident “gay power” of clamouring “single-issue” militants, whose political activism was defined by their sexuality and whose platform was confined to “aiding the cause” – like Peter Tatchell, the only Westerner who had the courage to attack Robert Mugabe by attempting a “citizen’s arrest” of the most homophobic African dictator of them all. These are top-ranking politicians whose sexual preferences are, to varying degrees, only one element of their political statement. In the past few days here in Europe we have witnessed the triumph of two men at the top of the “gay list” (which rhymes with “A list”), who have reached the “number two” positions in their respective governments.

Guido Westerwelle, nicknamed "Gay-Do"

There is the icy Peter Mandelson, who has always been very discreet about his sexuality (“my sex life is private, but no secret,” he told the BBC in 1999, after being “outed” in a live TV interview by Matthew Parris, journalist and one-time correspondence secretary to Margaret Thatcher). But Mandelson has loosened up in recent years and has finally gained love and recognition as a true hero of the Labour party. At the recent Labour conference in Brighton he gave a rousing speech – replete with allusions to his gayness.

Then there’s Guido Westerwelle, leader of the German free-market liberals, who, after years of top billing in the gossip columns on account of his silence on the subject (“We don’t talk openly about stuff like that in Germany”), finally confirmed the rumours in July 2004. For the 50th birthday of his friend and now partner-in-government Angela Merkel, he showed up at the party with his companion, businessman Michael Mronz, as is quite customary in the more serenely liberal societies like The Netherlands or Scandinavia, where gay MPs and town councillors have been out of the closet for 20 years now. Even more than Mandelson, Guido (whom some call “Gaydo”) really let himself go during the election campaign, even making jokes about his “schwer” tastes. Number two in Merkel’s future government, in which he will serve not only as vice-chancellor, but in all likelihood as foreign minister as well, Westerwelle will be making the rounds of the world, enchanting some and mortifying others.

Left comes out more often than right

The Gay List also features some important mayors, including Berlin’s Klaus Wowereit, who has now taken the pole position in the (long-distance hurdle) race for the leadership of the Social Democratic Party in the aftermath of their resounding defeat last Sunday. The imperturbable Bertrand Delanoë still reigns supreme in Paris city hall, and although he hasn’t got Wowereit’s prepossessing looks, he is an ace in the hole for the Socialist Party –founded, incidentally, by a (straight) libertine, viz. François Mitterrand – in case enthusiasm should flag for the frontrunning ladies, Martine Aubry and Ségolène Royal. If Delanoë were to take a stab at it, Westerwelle and Mandelson’s success would augur very well. And perhaps he would be encouraged by old François’ nephew, ex-TV show host Frédéric Mitterrand, now culture minister in Nicolas Sarkozy’s cabinet, in a gesture of bi-partisanship and, above all, homo-solidarity.

After Labour’s victory in 1997, in keeping with the agenda of Blair’s various cabinets, which removed all social bars to same-sex enthusiasts, the United Kingdom witnessed the rise of a whole host of gay government ministers and PMs, beginning with ex-minister of culture Chris Smith, the first queer to bring his partner to dinner at Buckingham Palace, where he was greeted with big smiles all round (and sneers from Prince Philip). His office is currently held by one-time BBC reporter Ben Bradshaw, the first prominent European minister to marry his partner. And Tory leader David Cameron, moving from strength to strength towards Downing Street as he follows in the footsteps of his idol Tony Blair, bids fair to leave plenty of room in his next cabinet for his many gay friends (Nick Herbert, Nick Boles, and Ivan Massow are among his closest advisers).

But one thing hasn’t changed much: being openly gay generally means allegiance to a left-wing – or at least free-market liberal – party. Those on the right wing (or Roman Catholics of any political persuasion) tend to stay in the closet. That isn’t always the case though: in a country where gay Lib-Labs have been represented in local government or parliament for ages already, we find a young minister of the economy in Balkenende’s third cabinet, Joop Wijn (b. 1969), who had an out-and-out Catholic upbringing. The Dutch precedent, brief but sensational, was set by Pim Fortuyn, the anti-immigrant right-wing leader who was assassinated in 2002. But what shall we say of the Austrian Jörg Haider, who died in a car crash in 2008, after having appointed his 26-year-old lover, Stefan Petzner, leader of the party?

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Lustration: in the shadow of the archives

In the countries of the former Soviet Bloc, information from communist era secret police archives continues to spark controversy. Should public figures be investigated? Or is it time to forget? Different attitudes in individual countries were determined during the transition to democracy.

People were shocked to find the names of dissidents and informers on the same list. Four years later, Andrzej Jagodzinski is still bitter about what happened: "That list was bullshit. When the communists were in control, I was involved in the Solidarity opposition movement — and then, from one day to the next, everyone in Poland was wondering if I had been an agent for the secret police." In 2005, the 160,000 names posted on the Internet prompted panic in Poland. Millions of people visited the website where they were published — but came away none the wiser, because the list, which had been copied from the communist secret police database, drew no distinction between collaborators and opponents of the regime. It did not even give dates of birth. Like thousands of other Polish people who had seen their names on the Internet, Jagodzinski wrote to the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), the source of the leaked document, to ask why his name had been included. Nine months later, he received an official letter to the effect that he had been placed under surveillance as a 'hostile individual.’

The snippet of bureaucratic jargon from the IPN was just one drop in a wave of the emotion that swept across Poland. The 'Wildstein list,’ named after the journalist who was the first to distribute it, Bronisław Wildstein, has remained controversial ever since. Wildstein, a former dissident and emigrant, is one of the most determined opponents of the view that Poland should draw ‘a thick line’ under its totalitarian past, and refrain from lustration - the vetting of public figures. In leaking the data from the IPN, he appears to have achieved his objective. The information from the archives was a 'blast from the past' that rocked Poland's fragile 'social peace' — and the spectre of the communist regime, whose reign of terror resulted in the moral destruction of millions lives, returned to haunt the country. To this day, no one knows the full extent of the horrors that may be lurking in the archives, or "who" might seek to use them, and "against whom" they might be used.

A fraught process in Hungary and Poland

Why do approaches to the past in Central Europe vary so much from one country to another? And in particular, why have Hungary and Poland (the first two countries to adopt democratic regimes) been so slow to confront the painful issue of state terror? In his remarkable master's thesis, Tomáš Bezák, a Slovak political science student, drew the following conclusion: in the countries where the communists played an active role in the transition to democracy, confrontation with the issue of past oppression came much later. It is a view that is also expressed by Czech born political analyst Jacques Rupnik in his latest book, "Une democratie trop vite fatiguée" (A democracy jaded all too soon): "In countries like the Czech Republic and East Germany, where communist power appeared to be unassailable, there were no discussions and the regimes fell within a few days. So there was no reason to make any promises to the communists." Circumstances were different in Poland and Hungary. It made sense to make a deal, but there was a price that had to be paid — a promise to put lustration operations on hold, and allow major figures from the communist regime access to senior positions in the subsequent democratic administration.

Today, the institution that has been delegated to investigate Hungary's communist past, the 'Kenedi Commission’, named after its director, sociologist and former dissident János Kenedi, is still struggling to achieve its main objectives: the publication of a list of former officers and agents of the communist secret police, and the opening of secret police archives to the public. As Kenedi explains, "The Ministry of the Interior has refused us access to part of the archives, on the basis that it would compromise the interests of the current secret service." Worse still, no one knows how many files have already been destroyed. Kenedi is convinced that vast numbers of documents were pulped in the period between 1989 and 1995. Twenty years after the end of the communist regime, it seems that in Hungary — unlike Poland — the political elite remains unwilling to open secret police archives to the public — and this is consistent with a significant level of political continuity, before and after 1989.

Czech Republic and Hungary doing better

In 2001, when the Slovak parliament voted to establish the Nation's Memory Institute (UPN) and appoint Ján Langoš - an MP who had worked on the bill to set up the institution - as its director, Slovakia's politicians were not aware of the full import of their decision. Over the next two years, the UPN revealed a vast quantity of information, including the registry of StB (Czechoslovakian secret police files) via its website, which was often unable to cope with the sheer volume of visits from Slovak Internet users. Compared to other countries in Central Europe, Slovakia's management of the issue of communist oppression has largely been successful. Ján Langoš' determination combined with a real will to come to terms with the past and undertake the painful process of lustration has led to the establishment of a political class that is no longer suspected of associations with communist spies and agencies, and questions about the period of oppression are no longer viewed as a threat to the stability of Slovak governments.

In comparison to its neighbours, the Czech Republic has also made significant progress. in recent years, public debate on the initiatives of the Czech Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (USTR) has become more relevant, in as much as the question of what should be revealed has largely been settled. The emergent consensus among historians, politicians and the media is that the disclosure of information from the secret police files of the old regime should be discussed in the context of our ability to interpret and explain such information.

Little by little, debate about the Czech Republic's history has moved from political arena towards the more appropriate context of historical research. In the research centre in Prague, anyone can access secret police files, and identify informers who collaborated with secret police and provided reports on specific individuals. The process of research can still be frustrating — and this is why critics of the UTSR often refer to it as "the George Orwell Institute" — however, the frustration is not caused by a denial of access to data, but by the fact that the information in charge sheets is often not enough for a true understanding of what happened in a given case. It appears that it will take some time for the institute's community of researchers, which is mainly focusing on events in 1968 and 1989, to establish a definitive history of the final years of communism. However, in the short time it has been in operation, the UTSR has made a number of important breakthroughs.

За матеріалами www.presseurope.eu