Moderate political parties winning in European elections?
AFTER Brexit’s triumph and Trump’s surprise win, the prevailing sentiment in the Euro countries appears to be one of gloom and doom. A series of national elections slated in the Continent in 2016 were predicted to be big wins for the populists.
In the Netherlands’ recent elections however, the militant right-wing Party for Freedom (PVV) led by Geert Wilders wasn’t able to clinch a victory, despite months of polls showing them in the lead. Topping the elections was the incumbent Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), gaining 33 out of 150 seats in the Dutch parliament — compared to only 20 for Wilders’ PVV.
Wilders’ chauvinistic, anti-immigration, and Islamophobic rhetoric may have earned headlines, but alienated Dutch voters and political independents in a country who has a long history of espousing an open and tolerant society.
Wilders advocated banning the Koran, closing mosques and Islamic schools and even pulling the Netherlands out of the European Union ostensibly to keep Brussels bureaucrats out of ordinary Dutch peoples’ lives. In contrast, Rutte and his centrist coalition government, while saying that Dutch society’s “Christian” values are being threatened by Islamic extremism, denounced Wilder’s politics as being “unserious” or “irresponsible.” Hence, two months before the March 15 elections, Rutte discounted his party would ever be in a coalition government with Wilders’ PVV. Rutte after his victory stated the Netherlands has put a halt to “the wrong kind of populism.”
The Dutch election results mirrored Austria’s December election outcome. The presidential polls gave Alexander Van Der Bellen — a former leader of the Green Party, running as an independent — a decisive 7-percent victory over Norbert Hofer of the farright, anti-immigration Freedom Party (FPOe). Van Der Bellen declared after his victory that he aims to be “an openminded, liberal-minded, and above all pro-European president.”
The Dutch and Austria’s elections provide a pause of sorts to what appears to be a populist wave of chauvinism, anti-immigration and antiestablishment movement spreading across Europe. Centrist or moderate politicians in representative democracies seem to have a good chance of putting a stop to the spread of hateful, xenophobic rhetoric.
This is not to discount, however, that there are some very troubling problems. The status quo has left many citizens disenfranchised. The Atlantic suggested that what is actually happening in the Industrialized West is not necessarily a wave of populism, but rather political fragmentation. Major political parties are losing their dominance over politics, as smaller socalled fringe parties are gaining prominence, allowing for anti-establishment rhetoric to surface. These new parties and their aggressive leaders are able to capture the imagination of constituents clamoring for change. They do not necessarily want to burn the entire house down. And that opening offers scope and space for moderation to still triumph at the succeeding polls.
And the big test for this proposition will come in May and September continental Europe’s two largest economies–France and Germany–will hold their elections. The world awaits these two events with great anxiety for they may portend whether democracy and interdependency will survive, or nativism and isolationism will become the new ideology.