BRUSSELS SKETCH
EU
political parties could get Trumped
The
Union as the embodiment of top-down, insider politics is an obvious
target for parties keen to burnish their anti-establishment
credentials.
By TIM
KING 11/15/16, 5:33 AM CET
Donald Trump’s
election as U.S. president has given populist movements across Europe
a massive dose of self-belief and shows that the unthinkable can
become reality. But their ability to storm the citadels of power will
depend on how political parties respond to voters’ discontent.
His election came
about because of a systemic failure by the two parties that have
dominated American politics since the Civil War, and an important
lesson from the U.S. presidential contest is that political parties
matter. Trump first became the Republican candidate against the will
of party leaders, which set him on the path to the White House. The
world may wonder how it is possible that a man who has never held
public office comes to be U.S. president: A large part of the answer
is that the Republican Party, which would traditionally determine
that its candidate has experience as a governor or senator or
general, dispensed with such filters.
Almost as
importantly, the Democratic Party failed, putting up a candidate
whose experience could not outweigh her known flaws. After eight
years with a Democrat in the White House, the party struggled to
defend itself against an anti-establishment insurgency. But that does
not mean Trump’s victory was inevitable: A different Democratic
candidate, or a different campaign with the same candidate, might
have produced a different president.
Even before the
Trump victory, the referendum vote in June 2016 for Britain to leave
the EU was cited by insurgent movements elsewhere in Europe as an
example of what might be possible. In reality, it’s hard to see the
circumstances being reproduced elsewhere. Brexit was an extraordinary
act of self-immolation by the ruling Conservatives. Their leader,
David Cameron, promised a referendum to diminish the threat from the
U.K. Independence Party at the 2015 general election and to resolve
the warring within Tory ranks.
In the short term it
worked, in that UKIP won only one seat in parliament. Yet Cameron
unleashed a civil war within his own party, which ultimately brought
him down. Although he campaigned for Remain, Cameron had allowed
anti-EU forces to neutralize his advantages as the incumbent head of
government. Tory insurgents allied themselves with UKIP and some
members of the Labour Party, which was distracted by its own civil
war.
In theory, the
constitutional arrangements of British politics — a
constituency-based, first-past-the-post electoral system that
normally gives rise to single-party governments — are a high
barrier to political insurgency. In practice, the obstacles were
circumvented by a strange form of entryism: The anti-EU movement was
helped by the government party.
* * *
Elsewhere in Western
Europe, no anti-EU movement can count on such government assistance.
It is more likely that establishment parties and coalition
governments might be outmaneuvered by insurgents. And, as in Britain,
establishment parties will struggle to respond to issues that cut
across the traditional lines of partisanship. In Western Europe,
parties were shaped by divisions dating back to the 19th century:
working class-bourgeoisie; religious-secular; free
trade-protectionist; internationalist-nationalist. Those party
identities froze in the 1920s and ’30s. New challenges arose and
the parties defined themselves by their responses, but the parties
themselves — mostly Christian Democrat, liberal and socialist —
were pretty well fixed.
The story of recent
decades, however, is of political parties struggling to adapt to
changed circumstances that have erased earlier battle lines.
Industrial decline and the end of Fordism, a drop-off in religious
observance, a tendency to delegate economic and trade decisions to
international organizations — these were all trends that eroded
traditional party identity. So too, in some countries, did the end of
the Cold War. Social democracy, in the wake of economic crises, took
a lurch towards neoliberalism. Christian Democracy, stripped of its
religious element, split left and right. Liberalism found its space
contested and its policies appropriated. In turn, this has opened the
way for challenges from non-traditional movements, particularly those
based on environmentalism or the politics of identity — whether
race, region or nation.
Opposition to the
European Union is already a feature of some of those movements, and
many people in Brussels fear Trump’s election is a shot in the arm
to those wanting to dismantle the EU. However, while it is true that
Euroskepticism can give superficial respectability to movements that
might otherwise be crudely nationalist or even racist, a domino
effect is not inevitable.
What matters is the
configuration of the party system in individual states. The
challenges faced by the likes of Marine Le Pen’s National Front in
France, Beppe Grillo’s 5Star Movement in Italy, Geert Wilders’
Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands, or Vlaams Belang in
Belgium are all very different from each other.
In France, the
system of voting for the presidency is constructed in a way that
favors entryism: two rounds of voting in which the second round is a
run-off between two candidates. If next spring Le Pen makes it to the
second round, as her father did in 2002 (with only 16.9 percent of
the vote), then she will be just one victory away from the
presidency.
Bordeaux mayor Alain
Juppe and Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy | Martin Bureau/AFP
via Getty Images
Bordeaux mayor Alain
Juppe and Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy | Martin Bureau/AFP
via Getty Images
As with Trump, the
question is whether the establishment parties will unite behind
candidates that stand a chance of defeating Le Pen. The test for the
center-right Les Républicains is imminent. The first round of voting
in its contest for the nomination will be held on November 20, with
seven candidates on the ballot paper, including former President
Nicolas Sarkozy and former Prime Minister Alain Juppé. The second
round will be held a week later. As with their American counterparts,
Les Républicains have been riven with factional disputes in pursuit
of the presidential nomination. Le Pen will be hoping that those
divisions do not heal.
Meanwhile, the
Socialists are in disarray, principally because of President François
Hollande’s abysmal ratings. Emmanuel Macron, the former economy
minister, resigned to put distance between his aspirations for the
presidency and Manuel Valls’ government. But many doubt whether the
party can be put back together in time to mount a credible bid for
the Elysée. Far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon ranks ahead of
Hollande in opinion polls.
Spain provides a
fascinating example of a country whose party configurations are in
the midst of realignment. The post-Franco certainties of power
alternating between conservatives and Socialists have been swept
away. The rise of Podemos and the United Left now account for more
than 20 percent of votes; the new Citizens party (opposed to Catalan
independence) another 13 percent. On the face of it, Mariano Rajoy’s
center-right Popular Party has emerged victorious from the electoral
struggle of the last few months, but its hold on power is fragile.
In Germany, the
populist right-wing Alternative for Germany party has this year won
seats in regional elections, coming second in Saxony-Anhalt and third
in Baden-Württemberg, at the expense of the Christian Democrats
(CDU) and Social Democrats (SPD). Yet the constitutional arrangements
in Germany, which set high barriers to entry, and the readiness of
the CDU and SPD to form alliances, suggests the AfD is still a long
way from power.
In Brussels the rise
of insurgent parties poses some uncomfortable questions for the
European Parliament.
In Central and
Eastern Europe, the picture is different, chiefly because the
cleavages that defined the identity of political parties were not
those of the 19th and early 20th century, but of the communist era
and its aftermath. Typically, the fortunes of parties tend to
fluctuate more; and the support they command from voters is more
fickle. Identity politics — national, regional and religious
affiliations — often feature.
* * *
In Brussels, the
rise of insurgent parties poses some uncomfortable questions for the
European Parliament. Typically, small parties have gained a toehold
on power through elections which, precisely because they do not
determine the fate of national governments, are often used by voters
to express protests. The insurgent parties get an international
platform to help their further growth and because the European
Parliament funds political groups, they get their hands on money. The
insurgents have proved adept at surmounting the obstacles that the
established parties tried to put in their way: In order to qualify
for funding as a group, a cross-border alliance of national
delegations must comprise at least 35 MEPs from at least seven
countries.
In some cases, the
money is improperly used. Le Pen’s party has been accused of using
EU money to pay staff working on national campaigns. This year MEP
Morten Messerschmidt was ordered to repay EU money used in national
campaigns for his far-right Danish People’s Party. But for the most
part, the insurgents are quite legally exploiting the generous
provisions that the established parties had put in place for their
own benefit.
Because money and
positions of power inside the Parliament are dependent on the
relative size of the political groups, the established parties have
an inbuilt incentive to maximize their membership without too many
scruples about admission. The EU’s expansion in 2004 to 25 member
states from 15 saw an unseemly scramble by center-right, Social
Democrats and liberals to sign up Central and Eastern European
parties, some of whom qualified only very loosely. The defenders of
transnational parties argue that their alliances have spread their
party values and improved democratic standards. But behind the
embarrassments caused to the EPP by Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party in
Hungary, or before that by Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, or to the
Social Democrats by Romania’s Viktor Ponta, or to the liberals by
Andrej Babis who founded the Czech party ANO 2011, there lurk
questions as to whether those political families were afraid to take
a principled stand that might cost them influence within the European
Parliament.
If one of the
lessons from Trump’s victory is that political parties matter, a
second lesson is that an anti-establishment campaign can gain
traction where voters are resentful and distrust the establishment.
The EU is quintessentially an establishment creation and has come to
embody a kind of top-down, insider politics, so it is an obvious
target for parties that wish to portray themselves as
anti-establishment. Trump’s victory guarantees the EU will face
more criticism in the months to come. But the EU cannot do much to
determine its own fate: Its duty is to maintain respect for
democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights. Its future
rests, more than ever, on electoral battles between individual
parties within each member state.
Tim King writes
POLITICO‘s Brussels Sketch.
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