John O’Sullivan:
Europe has gotten tired of being anguished about Donald Trump and has now moved on to being anguished about itself. The question being asked by all the Big Think editorials and news magazine programs runs: “Is Europe going populist too?” It’s especially unavoidable this weekend because of the coincidence of three events:
French president François Hollande, facing the prospect of a humiliating defeat, announced on Thursday that he would not contest next year’s presidential elections, in which, as everyone knew, he would have run a poor third to the populist Right’s Marine Le Pen and the conservative Right’s new favorite, former prime minister François Fillon.
As if this trifecta were not excitement enough, almost every news broadcast reminds us that next year we will have – in addition to the French presidential elections — a Dutch election in which the populist party of Geert Wilders (who is currently on trial for demanding fewer Moroccan immigrants in Holland) may end up as the largest single group in parliament, and a German election in which Angela Merkel will seek a fourth mandate in a contest in which, for the first time, a populist anti-migrant party, the AFD, may win a serious number of votes and seats and deprive the conservative Christian Democrats of office.
Something big is clearly going on. It fills the imaginations of the more excitable members of mainstream parties of Left and Right with dramatic fantasies of fighting neo-fascism alongside Paul Henreid and Ingrid Berman. Worse, it suggests that Donald Trump may inspire a new populist politics in Europe that will put them out of a job.
So a little ground-clearing is in order.
“Populism” is a scare word meant to delegitimize rebellions against political establishments and mainstream elites. It draws together under the same big, scary tent parties and causes that have a little in common otherwise. There is no “populist” ideology that unites these various dissidents the way Marxist ideology united international socialists for more than a century.
Brexit, for instance, was a campaign to recover Britain’s status as a self-governing democracy. Opinion polls showed that a clear majority of Leavers supported it for that reason. It was backed by members of all British parties — including UKIP, which, however, is not a protectionist party. For practical purposes, Nigel Farage is a Thatcherite in economics, and so were most of the Tories backing Leave. They don’t overlap ideologically with the Five Star movement (a fun-anarchist party of the Left whose main ideologist is the late Dario Fo, the author of Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay), nor with Hungary’s far-right Jobbik, nor with the welfare-protectionist Danish People’s party. Most of these parties have only the occasional issue in common with each other or with the Trump insurgents.
What unites them is not ideology or policies (which are usually responses to specific national situations) but a raw spirit of revolt. If they were to attain power, they would start to look very different as they put their ideas into effect. But few of them have actually gotten into government, none into single-party government, as yet. And it is quite likely that they never will.
Populism is therefore a portmanteau term for the many different political/ideological responses to the failure of the major parties to represent the interests and values of their traditional supporters. Parties of the Left have been quietly abandoning the blue-collar workers who supported them on economic or class grounds, while parties of the Right have gradually held themselves more and more aloof from those who voted conservative on religious, moral, patriotic, or prudent grounds. (Prudent? Do savers have any reason to vote for the engineers of monetary quantitative easing?) Both parties have then gravitated to different positions on a political spectrum that represents the interests and values of a highly educated, post-national, meritocratic, progressivist elite. For several decades the supporters, though doubtless disappointed or wondering, kept voting for those they had always voted for. Eventually, however, reality broke in. As a result the traditional parties are breaking up (even if sometimes they keep their old names), and the voters are joining together in new alliances.
What is most striking in almost all European countries is the decline of the Left – a Left that according to conventional thinking should have benefited enormously from the 2008 financial crash. Instead the Left has vanished almost entirely in parts of eastern and central Europe – notably Poland, which now has holds electoral contests between an urban liberal party and a rural conservative one.
