Here’s why populist movements are taking over Europe so fast
If you thought this year was crazy, try staying sane, geopolitically speaking, in 2017.
This year we’ve seen France hit with repeated terrorist attacks; Britons pulling the Brexit surprise; Europe’s ever-widening banking crisis; rising hostility to Muslim migrants; the re-emergence of anti-Semitism; and, perhaps most unsettling, the shock of the American election.
And the year isn’t over. Consider Sunday’s votes in Italy and Austria. Matteo Renzi, Italy’s Proeuropean Union prime minister, is resigning after voters rejected his proposals for constitutional change that he hoped would provide the country with muchneeded political stability. The defeat will likely trigger a general election, opening the door to the right-wing, anti-EU populist 5-Star Movement that is running neck-and-neck with Renzi’s Democratic Party in the polls.
Thus the EU faces more uncertainty over the possible exit of the eurozone’s third-largest economy. Such an exit would deliver a perhaps fatal blow to the liberal consensus that has provided peace and prosperity in Europe (and much of the world) since the Second World War.
To be sure, Europe’s ruling elites can take a modicum of comfort from the Austrians. Voters there rejected the leader of the populist right-wing Freedom Party, Norbert Hofer, as their head of state. Instead, they favoured the more liberal-minded, pro-EU Green Party candidate Alexander Van der Bellen for the presidency.
Nevertheless, there’s not too much comfort to be had. Nearly half the electorate — about 46 per cent, or 2.2 million — voted for Hofer, a Euroskeptic who wanted to curb Muslim immigration and reassert Austrian sovereignty against the EU bureaucracy. Such numbers will encourage populist movements elsewhere, making 2017 even more unsettling than 2016.
The Dutch, for example, go to to the polls in mid-March for a general election. Geert Wilders, leader of the Party for Freedom, leads the polls to become the next prime minister of the Netherlands. He has promised a referendum on EU membership and an end to Muslim immigration.
In France, the country’s unpopular socialist president, Francois Hollande, says he won’t seek reelection. Until the socialists find a new leader, this leaves National Front leader Marine Le Pen and Republican candidate Francois Fillon vying for public appeal. Le Pen, a staunch Eurosceptic, has promised to end Muslim immigrant and have a referendum on whether France should leave the EU if she wins.
The polls so far favour Fillon in the two-round spring election, but even if he wins it still means a turn to the right in French politics.
A similar rightward turn may happen in Germany, too. Chancellor Angela Merkel plans to run for a fourth term, but her popularity has tumbled with the failure of an open-door migrant policy that allowed more than one million migrants to flood the country since 2015. Merkel has admitted the policy failure and now wants to deport thousands. But that may be too little, too late, as Frauke Petry, the leader of Alternative for Germany, rises in the polls. She wants sanctions on Muslim immigration and a referendum on EU membership.
For all this political uncertainty, Europe’s left-lib elites have only themselves to blame. As political analyst John Judis explains in his book, The Populist Explosion, populist parties “function as warning signs of a political crisis.” They tend to emerge when the norms asserted by a country’s “leading segments” are at odds with the hopes and fears of a large part of the population. As Judis concludes, “populists express these neglected concerns and frame them in a politics that pits the people against an intransigent elite.”
Isn’t this what’s happening in Europe (and elsewhere)? In pursuing globalist economic policies that strip-mined countries of job-producing industries, in undermining citizens’ national identity in favour of multicultural abstractions, in allowing the influx of a population with no attachment to western liberal traditions, Europe’s deracinated elites fostered political movements that could bring down the liberal world order from which these elites have so greatly benefited.
Winter is coming. Robert Sibley, a veteran Ottawa journalist, holds a PhD in political science from Carleton University, where he occasionally lectures on political philosophy.