Cracks appear in populism’s growth across Europe
‘‘There is nothing wrong to participate in a sex party of any kind,’’ said a source in the European Parliament. ‘‘However, such kinds of meetings with many people are illegal under the coronavirus laws.’’
To be specific, 25 nakedmen attending a loud party above a gay bar in central Brussels is clearly against Belgium’s coronavirus laws, which allow no more than four people to meet indoors, so somebody called the police. At least three of those arrested were Members of the European Parliament (MEPS).
It was particularly unfortunate for Jozsef Szajer. He’s a senior founding member of Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party, an ultra-nationalist, populist, authoritarian grouping that defends ‘‘family values’’ and condemns homosexuality, but hewas arrestedwhile fleeing that orgy— with ecstasy pills in his backpack. Yet it’s hard to feel much sympathy for him.
Szajer was a leading anti-gay agitator in Fidesz, and boasts that he personally drafted the changes to the Hungarian constitution that definedmarriage as being between aman and awoman. He has now resigned as the leader of the Hungarian delegation to the European Parliament and will doubtless have to quit Fidesz too. But there’s a bigger story here.
Therewas another scandal in Hungary lastweek, in which Szilard Demeter, a senior cultural official linked to Fidesz, wrote an opinion piece for a progovernment outlet comparing Budapestborn American billionaire George Soros, a Jew who fled the Holocaust, to Adolf Hitler.
Demeter also called the European Union ‘‘George Soros’s gas chamber’’ and claimed that Hungary and Poland, the two Eastern European EU members with extreme right populist governments, are ‘‘the new Jews’’ of Europe. It’s utterly unhinged – and yet it sounds vaguely familiar.
The unbridled arrogance, the self-pity, the shameless, hysterical exaggeration are all hallmarks of the new breed of illiberal populists – and when they think they are losing, they always up the ante. I’m thinking, of course, of United States President Donald Trump’s recent electoral defeat and his subsequent behaviour.
Could that extraordinary recklessness be a communicable disease? Could it somehow be spreading to Trump’s acolytes overseas as well? Well, consider Poland.
The Catholic, ultra-conservative Law and Justice Party has been in power in Poland since 2015, elected by the same older, lesswell educated, non-urban, deeply religious coalition that backs populist takeovers elsewhere. And as in other populist-ruled countries, there has been a steady erosion both in human rights and in respect for democratic norms.
The Law and Justice Party was reelected just last year and its leader, 71-yearold Jarosław Kaczyn´ski, was widely supposed to have his finger on Poland’s pulse. But it all fell apart when a partyappointed court declared in late October that abortions would not be permitted even in cases of severe foetal abnormality where the childwould die immediately after birth.
Poland already had tight restrictions on abortion rights, but this turned out to be the last straw. Millions of young people, and especially young women, filled the streets of Poland’s cities in the biggest antigovernment demonstrations since the fall of Communism in 1989. ‘‘I wish I could abort my government,’’ said one popular banner.
The demos continued every day until a new lockdown was declared and the Law and Justice Party has now backed down, postponing the publication of the court’s decision indefinitely. But something has definitely changed in Poland: support for Kaczyn´ski has now plunged to only 30 per cent.
Then there’s President Jair Bolsonaro, or Tropical Trump, whose favoured candidates were thrashed in all Brazil’s big cities in local elections last month, and the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, dubbed Britain Trump by The Donald, who is now trailing the opposition leader in the polls for the first time ever.
It’s just straws in the wind at this stage, but the defeat of Trump, the populist standard-bearer, is creating a sense in other populist-ruled countries that the juggernaut has stalled.
The effect hasn’t reached Asia yet – Primeminister Narendra Modi in India and President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines are still riding high in the polls – but the main thing the populists had going for them was momentum and in Western countries it seems to be dropping off.
Was there really a coat-tail effect? Hard to say. After all, both the Law and Justice Party in Poland and Fidesz in Hungary came to power before Trump was elected in late 2016. But populist leaders across the West seem to believe that somehow or other their fates are tied to Trump’s. It shows in the growing recklessness of their behaviour and in the frequency of their failures.
Does thismean they are all destined to vanish in his wake? Probably not, but that would be nice.
Could that (Trump’s) extraordinary recklessness be a communicable disease?