A politician is someone who has coalesced the opinions of a certain number of fellow citizens around ideas, plans, intentions and more generally around a certain vision of life and of society. Or more simply they are influential people who have obtained the support of people by promises of practical, immediate and direct gains. In the majority of cases they are both things.
There are occasions when an individual attracts a mass of votes regardless of what they have said or done but simply because they happen to be promoting a particular brand of politics which has attracted the protest vote of a certain number of undecided or disaffected voters.
In such cases the savvy politician has the humility to accept that he has been dealt a winning hand at his opponent's expense and will therefore review his political pledges and adapt it to the new wider and more complex electoral panorama facing him.
If on the other hand the politic...
_OMISSIS_ ...ot;graced" by the protest vote succumbs to the hysteria of omnipotence believing he is suddenly loved by the people and unswervingly and egoistically insists on implementing his original programme which most of the electorate will never have heard of, he will be sorely mistaken.
Politicians don't exist as autonomous entities, they are the material expression, the effigy of a certain and contingent convergence of differing values, interests, expectations and hopes. When this convergence happens around a politician he will have to strive to make the best of this convergence, if not the momentum will coalesce around another politician leaving his peer hamstrung like a puppet with no strings.
This coalescence is casual, fickle, fluid. Politicians must be equally casual, fickle, fluid.
Consistency of politicians doesn't exist, cannot exist.
He must be quick in adapting himself to the changing scenery, qui...
_OMISSIS_ ...e plots and to continuously hatch plots with friends and enemies in the opaque underbelly of the palace, in order to remain afloat in the daily struggle for power.
Politics is the art of pragmatism of the possible, of compromise, of dialogue - as long as it is possible to reach a result which is deemed useful - even if it is reached with a mortal enemy, even if it is reached with a known villain, in an eternal and complex chess game, with pawns, short term tactical moves and counter-moves, and a longer term vision.
The alternative is not to participate in the game to do nothing and to obtain no results but remain in a corner howling at the moon.
Inflexibility and coherence are impediments to compromise, to the game, to agreement, to alliances, and ultimately prevent the electorate from "bringing home" anything. Politicians are like hunters: after the hunt they cannot return to the electorate with folded arms or the ...
_OMISSIS_ ... start to abandon him and will quickly leave him to mumble on his own.
This is the very essence of democracy. One can only be self-sufficient having gained a clear majority of the votes, however since this is extremely rare if not impossible to achieve, at least in western democracies, one has to govern of necessity by reaching a consensus with the opposition, even if they have been demonised during the election campaign.