Forget xenophobia – these populist leaders are united by their hypocrisy

IN RECENT months, academics, columnists and analysts have spilled gallons of ink analysing so-called “populists” who are winning elections, or coming close to winning them, in many countries. Mea culpa: I, too, have sought to explain why so many people are suddenly using xenophobic language, attacking “elites” and heaping scorn on international institutions of all kinds. What do they all have in common? What are the traits they all share? After months of listening and reading, I am now beginning to think that we’re all wrong. All of our theories have missed the point. It isn’t racism, identity politics or even “nationalism” that links Donald Trump with his counterparts in Europe and beyond. It isn’t the data operations – or the online trolling operations – that matter most. What links Mr Trump, Viktor Orban, Andrej Babis, Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Marine Le Pen is one simple character trait: hypocrisy. How else to interpret the news that Mr Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, has employed illegal immigrants, not just once in a while, but for many years? These were no occasional or accidental hires. On the contrary, dozens of illegal immigrants regularly made their way from villages in Costa Rica to Bedminster, where they worked as cleaners and groundskeepers. Nor was this some low-level business mistake. Mr Trump’s club paid them a fraction of what their American counterparts would have earned. Mr Babis, the Czech prime minister, is another politician who likes to talk up his opposition to migration. Yet the factories controlled by his holding company, Agrofert, employ a wide range of underpaid foreigners. Again, these aren’t small slip-ups – these are long-standing policies going back many years. Hypocrisy is also the signature character trait of Mr Orban, the Hungarian leader who has styled himself as the enemy of “immigration” and the EU. Follow the money and the story is different. Even as Mr Orban’s anti-immigration rhetoric reached hysterical levels, his government’s “golden visa” scheme allowed more than 19,000 people, including well-connected Syrians, to buy residency in Hungary. Hypocrisy is not limited to those in power. Ms Le Pen’s anti-EU party long sustained itself using money from the European Parliament. Hypocrisy isn’t only about immigration, either. Mr Kaczynski, the Polish leader, has railed against supposed networks of former communists in Poland, claiming they have been making money out of former state property. Yet he has recently been accused of serving as the de facto controller of a company that did a deal to procure land from the state in the 1990s. The company has big plans to build skyscrapers on the land and employs a former secret police informer as its nominal chairman. Hypocrisy isn’t even limited to the right. Hugo Chávez’s crusade on behalf of Venezuela’s poor turned into a kleptocratic money grab that left those around him wealthy. But hypocrisy does help explain why all of these leaders, as soon as they get anywhere near power, seek to undermine the press, to remove judicial independence and to control prosecutors and police. It also explains why they are notorious liars. Their private agendas are very different from those they declare –and they don’t want us to know. (© The Washington Post)