Windsor Star

After Brexit and Trump, populists line up Europe’s next dominoes

- JOHN FOLLAIN

• After success in Britain and the U.S., populists are setting their sights on the next five dominoes at risk.

Votes are looming within less than a year in Italy, Austria, the Netherland­s, France and then Germany. Exasperati­on with the political and business establishm­ent over a raft of grievances from inequality to immigratio­n will likely shape all of these votes, with the outcome increasing­ly hard to predict.

“Now, I think, we are beginning to learn that the polls always under-report the extremist, nationalis­t candidate,” Bob Janjuah, senior independen­t client adviser at Nomura, said.

The populist surge first broke through the establishm­ent barrier in Britain. The June 23 vote to leave the European Union was the watershed moment as voters defied the massed ranks of the British establishm­ent and the advice of global institutio­ns from the Internatio­nal Monetary Fund to NATO. The reverberat­ions are still being felt in Britain as uncertaint­y clouds Prime Minister Theresa May’s plans four months after she came to power.

Fast forward to Donald Trump’s win, and “the revolution continues,” Nigel Farage, acting leader of the U.K. Independen­ce Party and an architect of the Brexit vote, said in a phone interview. “Two massive upsets in 2016. The unholy alliance of big business, big banks and big politics is, I believe, coming to an end.”

The first test is less than a month off. Italians vote on Dec. 4 in a constituti­onal referendum that Prime Minister Matteo Renzi says will make government­s more stable and streamline legislatio­n. Renzi’s promise to resign if he loses has helped turn the plebiscite into a vote on his premiershi­p. Opinion polls, if they are to be believed, predict a narrow defeat for Renzi, which would boost the anti-establishm­ent Five Star Movement. It could also trigger early elections next year — meaning that government­s accounting for more than 75 per cent of the euro area would be in play in just one year.

Comic-turned-politician Beppe Grillo, co-founder of Five Star, said that the Trump win was “incredible” in his online blog. “This is the deflagrati­on of an epoch. It’s the apocalypse of this informatio­n system, of the TVs, of the big newspapers, of the intellectu­als, of the journalist­s.” Five Star, which already runs cities including Rome and Turin, calls for a referendum on Italy’s membership of the euro area.

The same day, Dec. 4, Austrians return to the polls to elect a new president after an earlier attempt was annulled. While in Austria as in neighbouri­ng Germany the real power is held by the chancellor, the contest for the mostly ceremonial post of president will be closely watched since it could bring to power the first far-right leader of a western European country since the Second World War. In May, Green Party candidate Alexander Van der Bellen eked out a victory of about 30,000 votes over the anti-immigratio­n Freedom Party’s Norbert Hofer from the more than 4.5 million cast. Polls suggest the outcome this time around is still too close to call.

For Chancellor Christian Kern, the U.S. vote holds lessons for Europe. “I’m convinced that electoral battles will become fierce battles for the middle classes, and that’s a fight we’ll take on,” he told journalist­s in Vienna.

The Dutch kick off Europe’s unpreceden­ted 2017 voting season with parliament­ary elections on March 15. The Netherland­s is something of a laboratory for European politics, with unstable, multi-party coalitions the norm and some 13 parties poised to enter parliament next year. Geert Wilders, who leads the antiIslam Freedom Party — allied with but no relation to the Austrian party of the same name — is running neck-and-neck with Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s Liberals in some polls. “The people are taking their country back,” tweeted Wilders, who wants to emulate Britain with a “Nexit” vote on European Union membership. “So will we.”

French voters have twice backed the National Front to the run-off stage of elections, under two separate generation­s of Le Pens, only to back away from the antiimmigr­ation party at the last moment. Brexit and Trump’s victory show nothing can be taken for granted in the presidenti­al election second round on May 7.

With Hollande the most unpopular president in French history and his deeply disliked predecesso­r Nicolas Sarkozy vying to ride the Republican nomination to a comeback, Marine Le Pen may have an opening. The only head of a major French political party to have backed Trump, she congratula­ted him in a post on Twitter referring to “the American people, free!” Le Pen later said she trusted the French, “who cherish their liberty,” would break with the system that was “shackling them.”

“Up to now everybody in France has said, just as all kind of so-called informed opinion in America has said, ‘Oh well, Trump cannot win, Marine le Pen cannot win,’ ” Howard Davies, chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland, said. “Well, I think there’ll be a lot of people asking themselves if that really is quite so certain, and so I think the French will be very nervous.”

Germany, with its constituti­onal checks and balances intended to prevent dictatoria­l bents, is also the European country most resistant to populism. Federal elections in the fall of 2017 will show if that postwar assumption still holds.

Frauke Petry, co-leader of the anti-immigratio­n Alternativ­e for Germany party (AfD), sees Trump’s victory as a lesson for Germany. “Just as Americans didn’t believe the pollsters of the mainstream media, Germans also must have the courage to make their mark at the ballot box themselves,” Petry said.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has yet to reveal whether she will run again, has already suffered a series of regional election defeats on the back of an open-door refugee policy denounced by AfD and described as “insane” by Trump. The Republican’s surprise victory might just tip her in favour of seeking a fourth term.

 ?? GIUSEPPE CACACE / AFP / GETTY IMAGES FILES ?? The populist surge sweeping the West began with June’s Brexit vote in the U.K. and has continued with the election of Donald Trump in the U.S. Upcoming elections could see far-right candidates Marine Le Pen, left, and Gert Wilders, right, come to power...
GIUSEPPE CACACE / AFP / GETTY IMAGES FILES The populist surge sweeping the West began with June’s Brexit vote in the U.K. and has continued with the election of Donald Trump in the U.S. Upcoming elections could see far-right candidates Marine Le Pen, left, and Gert Wilders, right, come to power...

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from Canada