Table of Contents
The global financial crisis has dominated inter-party political contests in almost all major democracies, presenting challenges and opportunities to executive government leaders and opposition party leaders alike. In their public responses to crises, opposition leaders complete many comparable framing tasks to those of executive leaders. Opposition leaders, however, typically have lesser resources, fewer political weapons and limited responsibility for the real crisis response. These differences create a distinct and difficult challenge for opposition leaders in crises. Despite these restricted opportunities, opposition leaders can exploit crises for political gain. This chapter demonstrates how opposition leaders in three different political systems utilised the public sphere to do this, and explains their consequent political successes and failures.
Political opposition is understudied in political science, while opposition leadership is almost entirely neglected. This is unfortunate, as oppositions and opposition leaders are crucial to maintaining the accountability and legitimacy of governments, and as such should be better understood than they are. Opposition leadership can be defined in many ways. Traditionally, the term ‘Leader of the Opposition’ has been used in Westminster systems to refer to the leader of the largest non-government party in parliament. Moving beyond Westminster systems, this conception becomes problematic.
In presidential systems such as the United States, it is very often unclear who is leading the non-government party. In situations of divided government, when the president’s party does not hold a majority in both houses of Congress, it can also be unclear which is the non-governing party. As Dahl (1966:34) notes of the United States, ‘[t]o say where the government “leaves off” and “the opposition” begins is an exercise in metaphysics’. Additionally, the definitional restriction to the largest non-government party cannot accurately represent different oppositional configurations displayed in multiparty coalition systems. For instance, after the 2005 German federal elections, the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) became the senior governing partner in a ‘grand coalition’ government with the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). The CDU/CSU’s preferred coalition partner, the Free Democratic Party (FDP), was the largest non-government party although it held only 61 of 614 Bundestag seats and was ideologically similar to the CDU/CSU. Moreover, it was clear from the post-election posturing of the SPD that the most significant opposition to the leadership of Chancellor, Angela Merkel, would come from within her own grand coalition government (Richter 2006).
This chapter does not investigate the roles of minor-party oppositional leadership or extra-parliamentary oppositional leadership in the financial crisis. The simplest term to describe the types of opposition leadership investigated here is ‘alternative executive leadership’. Each of the opposition leaders discussed has been engaged in a legitimate attempt to replace the incumbent head of government. With this as the common goal, and bearing in mind the nature of the global financial crisis, it is unsurprising that opposition leaders focused on the third and fourth framing contests described in Chapter 2. Apportioning blame (third contest) and providing alternative policies (fourth contest) are opposition leaders’ two strongest weapons.
They might find the first framing contest, which centres on defining the significance and severity of events, a more fruitful avenue of attack in other types of crisis than it was at the onset of this financial crisis. This is because oppositions typically rely on the same economic data as governments and have fewer economic experts at their disposal to interpret those data, making it difficult to contest government statements about the severity of negative economic events. Furthermore, offering a bleaker picture of the state of the economy than government leaders do leaves opposition leaders susceptible to claims that they are acting irresponsibly by diminishing consumer confidence and thereby damaging the economy. This difficulty was exemplified by Britain’s Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, who warned of the potential for a run on the pound, only to be pilloried by the government, media and even his own party (Helm et al. 2008). This was a rare example of an opposition attempting to make a mark in the first framing contest. Given the outcome, this rarity is hardly surprising. In the cases studied, the first framing contest is a relatively minor one and therefore it is excluded from the analysis.
The second framing contest—in which political actors attempt to define the cause of a crisis—is crucial to opposition leaders’ abilities to blame the government for the disaster. If a government leader effectively defines the crisis as caused by external events, it becomes virtually untenable for an opposition leader to claim that the government or its leader is culpable for the negative effects of the crisis. In the specific case of the financial crisis, it made little sense to define an opposition leader’s causal frame as distinct from their blaming frame. Alternative government leaders gain nothing by offering a causal frame that does not, either directly or indirectly, apportion blame to the government. As such, these two framing avenues—causality and blame—will be examined together in section three of this chapter.