FORMER CANADIAN LEADER HITS OUT AT MACRON’S ‘ELITIST’ TRUMP REBUKE
▶ Stephen Harper says western populism is being fuelled by a failure to grasp ordinary people’s concerns
French President Emmanuel Macron’s rebuke of Donald Trump’s America First policy at the 100-year commemoration of the end of the First World War was another example of the “disconnected elitism” fuelling western populism, according to former Canadian leader Stephen Harper.
In an interview with yesterday, Mr Harper traced what he believed were the origins of the surge in populist movements that have toppled or shaken governments from Budapest to Brasilia.
Out-of-touch elites were leaving the working and middle classes disillusioned, Canada’s conservative former prime minister said. He described Mr Macron’s speech as another moment that showed the French leader was out of touch with the dissatisfaction that catapulted Mr Trump and other nationalists to power.
Mr Macron has pushed a message of multilateralism after US attacks on the United Nations, Nato and the European Union.
He used the gathering of about 70 world leaders at the Arc de Triomphe in central Paris on Sunday to repeat this call for co-operation.
In a thinly veiled attack on Trumpism, he said “nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism”, the “ancient demons” that caused the First World War were again rearing their heads and countries that put themselves first would lose their “moral values” as a nation.
“That’s an example of disconnected elitism,” Mr Harper said. “Populations are naturally nationalistic and proud of their country, as they are in France, by the way. This is the big reason why Trump is president.”
“I don’t think you can fault Donald Trump. I don’t think it’s ever reasonable to fault the president of the United States for believing in the United States, any more than I would find fault with the president of France if he believed in France,” said Mr Harper, who is promoting his new book, Right Here, Right Now: Politics and Leadership in the Age of Disruption.
He called the French leader’s distinction between patriotism and nationalism “largely meaningless” and said the “less than fully fledged patriotism” shown by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign helped Mr Trump win in 2016.
Canada, which Mr Harper led from 2006 to 2015, has managed to avoid a populist surge, but he attributes the hard-right turns seen in countries such as Italy, Austria and Hungary to voters looking elsewhere for solutions they are unable to find in mainstream politics.
Helping this populist wave of discontent is ongoing anger against the EU, which he said was caused by “elites getting out in front of people and pulling them along” on a European project many do not want.
Although Mr Harper said he does not agree with every policy of Mr Trump, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban or Italy’s hard-right Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, he believes the underlying concerns they are trying to address are legitimate, from the economy to trade and immigration.
“I worry about our societies if we don’t respond to public concerns, if we try to dismiss every concern on the left as communist and every concern on the right as fascist and we have an unresponsive political system. That is how we will produce political extremes,” he said.
But what about the authoritarianism that creeps alongside these movements, the harsh rhetoric against migrants and rising hate crime that is seemingly stoked by the political atmosphere? Hate crimes in Britain increased 30 per cent in 2017, the year after the Brexit vote.
“Is there some anger, is there some demagoguery in some of the populist movements? Yes. But traditional movements are not immune from that,” Mr Harper said.
The former prime minister regards a new wave of leftists, spearheaded by socialist politicians such as Bernie Sanders in the US and British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, as a “much greater risk” than Mr Trump because they could try to upend the entire democratic capitalist system.
For many who witnessed the renewed assault on the outsider in Europe, from Germany to Italy to Britain, Mr Harper’s comments will be galling. But he says the only way to address the root cause of such toxicity is to formulate policies that align with the will of the masses.
“Can these movements take these countries in a more extreme and authoritarian direction? Sure. But I think that has to be evaluated on its merits. I hear this complaint about Mr Trump but it seems to me he operates entirely in the US system of government,” he said.
If politicians create problems in immigration or trade and the public makes clear their rejection of the results, ordinary people cannot be condemned. “You have to look in the mirror and fix the problems so you get better outcomes,” he said, appearing to refer to leftist and centrist movements in the West that are struggling to keep up with the new populism.
“The challenge is to fix the policy, not to try and find ways of excusing policymakers for ignoring the problems and not fixing them,” he said.
“I’m confident that if you address those real concerns with good policies that respond to their needs, they will respond positively.
“But, if you dismiss them, they will only get angrier.”
Canada, which Mr Harper led as prime minister from 2006 to 2015, has managed to avoid a populist surge