‘TAKE BACK CONTROL’ CALLS A SHAM, BUT THEY ARE EFFECTIVE
DRESDEN, Germany — About 2,000 Germans gathered in the market square in this elegant old town to denounce Chancellor Angela Merkel as a traitor — and to cheer Britain on for deciding to leave the European Union.
They were taking part in the regular Monday demonstrations of Pegida, the German acronym for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West. The Pegida crowd was waving the banners of Germany and the free state of Saxony along with signs saying “Thank you, Brexit.” I asked a group of middle-aged men in polo shirts, slacks, and sandals, all workers in a machinery plant, why they were there. One said firmly, “We are against globalization in the world.”
There you have it, the essence of the populist appeal to Brexit voters and members of nationalist parties across Europe, not to mention the Donald Trump wing of the GOP. Globalization, the technology-driven destruction of borders, has changed the Western world so dramatically and so fast that many ordinary people are desperate to halt or reverse it.
Lutz Bachmann, Pegida’s founder, he focused on the main enemy: the roughly one million migrants and refugees whom Merkel allowed to enter Germany last year. Integrating the genuine refugees (and sending back the rest) will indeed be a challenge.
From Bachmann’s rant, you’d never know the numbers entering Germany have dropped dramatically this year and that city officials and nongovernmental organizations are doing a good job of housing and helping about 5,000 who remain in Dresden.
Yet the fears of these demonstrators reflect similar emotions that I heard from voters in Britain — and have heard from Trump supporters in the United States. These same worries are being whipped up by populists in France, the Netherlands, and elsewhere in Europe.
In Germany, the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) party is trying to capitalize on these fears at the ballot box. The party has won seats in eight out of 16 state legislatures.
The AfD envisions a “Europe of nations,” not a united Europe, which basically means the breakup of the EU. It appeals to those who dream of the past. (Among other things, the AfD also encourages women to stay home and raise kids.)
Indeed, as Georg Pazderski, the leader of Berlin’s AfD chapter notes, the AfD appeals to those “who fear for the future of the country and their kids.” Yet its average voter, Pazderski says, is 40, is married, and has a good income and a good job.
In other words, those who endorse AfD and Pegida — the fearful voters — are not losing jobs because of migration. Similarly, the depressed economic regions in England that voted heavily for Brexit did not lose jobs to migrants. (Their industry and coal mines were no longer profitable and shut down.) On the contrary, those struggling British regions often received heavy economic subsidies from the EU that they will now lose.
So here we come to the nub. The appeal of populism is based on emotions more than facts, on fear of the future because the world seems out of control. “Take back control” was the motto of Britain’s Leave campaign.
But the populist and nationalist parties that are fanning those fears cannot roll back globalization. The Leave campaign leaders are already walking back their promises to stop immigration and provide more money for the British health system.
The populist pledge to “take back control” is a sham in Britain and elsewhere. But what makes it so scary is that, politically, it works.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
(NOTE: Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts is on vacation.)