Populism movement is ‘far from over’
Although Trump amplified global right-wing tendencies, election loss has had little effect
He was their anti-science standardbearer. He made it seem like blaming immigrants and minorities had no consequences. He emboldened falsehoods of a grand conspiracy targeting nationalists and championed the use of police and the judiciary to root it out.
For the past four years, populist and authoritarian leaders from Brazil to the Philippines have looked to President Donald Trump for inspiration and validation for their right-wing agendas. What happens now that their most prominent and outspoken backer has suffered defeat in the U.S. election to president-elect Joe Biden?
“It is a setback for the populist movement, but only a temporary one,” Nigel Farage, former leader of Britain’s antiEuropean Union Brexit Party, and a close Trump ally, insisted in a text message to USA Today. “Trumpism has reshaped American politics in a way that will not change, and the other global movements will continue.”
In Germany, Ronald Glaser, a local politician for the city of Berlin’s anti-immigration opposition party, Alternative fur Deutschland, said “our time is far from over” and predicted that “financial exploitation,” a “waive of migrant crime” and “high energy costs and taxes” would keep his party, and Trump, more relevant than ever.
“The love of freedom, independence and sovereignty is strong among normal people,” Glaser said. “As is disgust for political correctness, socialism and the like.”
Still, analysts say, Biden’s win is likely to at least complicate ties between Washington and foreign capitals where the Trump administration’s mix of strategic and ideological positions on the economy, social tensions, climate change and politics found favour.
“Some leaders are not going to be able to be as bold as they were before with their rhetoric, that’s for sure. They will need to show a bit more humility,” said Emilia Palonen, an expert on political populism at the University of Helsinki in Finland.
Palonen added that when the Biden White House starts “tweeting more constructively,” as she expects it to, it will have a positive “discursive effect globally.”
But overall, Palonen and other experts said, the influence of Trump’s departure on populism’s global trajectory may be limited, not least because while Trump has done much to amplify its global ascendancy over the past half a decade or more, right-wing populist tendencies in India, Turkey, France and elsewhere largely predate him.
“Never forget that all politics is local,” said Michael Ignatieff, a U.S.-educated, Canadian-born former politician, historian and president of Hungary’s Central European University, whose Budapest campus Prime Minister Viktor Orban shut down because of its links to George Soros, the college’s billionaire financier and liberal donor. Soros is a bogeyman for unfounded conspiracy theories and attacks by European and U.S. right-wing groups.
“If there’s deep disaffection and disaffiliation (with mainstream politics) in France or somewhere else that just keeps on going whether or not Trump is in office,” Ignatieff said.
“Geert Wilders was on the scene long before Trump, and he’ll be here long after,” he added, referring to the politician from the Netherlands who is sometimes credited with being the modern-day father of European xenophobic populism.
“America has to cure itself of the idea that when it sneezes the rest of the world catches a cold, or that when it smiles the whole world rolls over,” he said. “That’s not how it works, if it ever did. I don’t think Biden’s election changed the world in a way that a progressive Democrat would like to believe, or that a Republican conservative would fear.”
Still, as Trump has refused to concede the election, accusing — without evidence — Democrats of fraud and launching various long-shot legal battles, Trump-friendly leaders in Brazil (President Jair Bolsonaro) and Mexico (President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a left-leaning populist) have either remained fast and held off congratulating Biden or offered less-than-glowing endorsements.
Meanwhile, traditional American adversaries such as China and Russia have released statements saying they prefer to wait until all the “legal processes” play out before honouring Biden’s victory. There has been radio silence from Pyongyang, with whom Trump held two much-ballyhooed and glitzy yet ultimately fruitless summits with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un aimed at denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula.
Matthijs Rooduijn, a political scientist specialized in populism and radicalism at the University of Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, said “the breeding ground for populism remains very fertile. Conspiracy theories are widespread, polarization about coronavirus-related government measures is on the rise, and so are socioeconomic inequalities.”
Still, Donald Tusk, the former president of the European Council, the body that sets the European Union’s overall political direction and priorities, has noted with hopeful optimism that “Trump’s defeat can be the beginning of the end of the triumph of far-right populism,” that since 2015 has dominated countries such as his native Poland, where the government has tightened its grip on state institutions including the judiciary and imposed new taxes and fines in support of socially conservative issues.
“Thank you, Joe,” Tusk tweeted when the election was called for Biden.
And in Britain, Timothy Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London, said with Trump on the way out, and Biden coming in, “a signal has been sent to those around” Prime Minister Boris Johnson who have spent the past few years “urging a culture war and populist politics” that has seen Johnson regularly bend the truth if not outright lie about the impact of Britain’s EU departure — Brexit — and on other topics. The meaning of the signal? “It’s not the way to go,” said Bale.