Europe’s populist insurgents
Turning right / The Economist
Parties of the nationalist
right are changing the terms of European political debate. That does not
guarantee them lasting electoral success
Jan 4th 2014 | MONTELIMAR, PARIS AND THE HAGUE | From the
print edition / http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21592666-parties-nationalist-right-are-changing-terms-european-political-debate-does
IN A café on a tree-lined boulevard in Montelimar, a
southern French town best-known for its sticky nougat, Julien Rochedy is
working on his speech. Young, fashionably bearded and sporting both a well-cut
suit and a braided black bracelet, he might be finalising a business
presentation, or the launch of a fashion brand. In fact, Mr Rochedy is
preparing for a public meeting of the National Front, the right-wing party led
by Marine Le Pen.
The National Front (FN) has no local office in Montelimar,
nor any historical hold here. The town’s narrow streets carry no posters for
the evening’s meeting. But in France’s 2012 presidential election, Ms Le Pen
grabbed 21% of Montelimar’s first-round vote—more than she did nationwide. So
the FN is fielding Mr Rochedy as a candidate in the mayoral elections to be
held in March. “I’ve come here a bit like a missionary,” he says cheerfully.
That evening a few hundred people turn out, curious to hear Mr Rochedy and his
star guest, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, the 24-year-old niece of the party leader
and one of the FN’s two deputies in parliament.
The response of the political establishment to a tide of
anti-European populism which draws on anti-immigrant feeling and antipathy
towards Islam has mostly been to evoke the 1930s and hope for revulsion to take
its course. “We should not forget”, said José Manuel Barroso, head of the
European Commission, “that in Europe, not so many decades ago, we had very,
very worrying developments of xenophobia and racism and intolerance.”
It is true that some anti-EU parties are toxic. The most
sinister is Golden Dawn, which holds 18 seats in the Greek parliament. Despite
claiming to have moved beyond its neo-Nazi roots, the movement uses a
swastika-like logo, plays the “Horst Wessel Lied” at rallies, and puts its
members through military-style training. Its leader, Nikos Michaloliakos, is in
jail awaiting trial for association with a criminal gang after the murder of a
left-wing anti-fascist rapper.
Squatting on the borders of respectability is Jobbik, now
the third biggest party in Hungary’s parliament. Like many parties widely
regarded as belonging to the far-right, it rejects the label in favour of
“radical nationalist”. The party denies that it is racist or anti-Semitic; yet
Marton Gyongyosi, one of its deputies, declared a year ago that it was time to
draw up a list of Jews in parliament and government, on the ground that they
represent a “certain national security risk”. He later apologised, but the
damage was done.
To raise the spectre of a return to 1930s fascism, however,
is “not the right question,” argues Catherine Fieschi, director of
Counterpoint, a British think-tank. Most of Europe’s populist parties either
have no roots in the far right or have made a conscious and open effort to
distance themselves from such antecedents. A better question is how far these
parties can use popular dissatisfaction to reshape Europe’s political debate,
and whether they can use that influence to win real power.
That they are disparate there can be no doubt; they vary
hugely according to local tastes, traditions and taboos. Take the FN and the
PVV. Late last year their leaders, Ms Le Pen and Geert Wilders, began a
political courtship with an eye to creating a new parliamentary group after the
European elections. But the PVV is ardent in its support for Israel, while the
FN has an anti-Semitic past. The PVV is in favour of gay marriage; the FN
marches against it. The PVV sees Islam as a totalitarian danger around the
world; the FN frets not over the religion’s basic tenets but only about the
“Islamification” of France.
Elsewhere some on the populist right—Belgium’s Vlaams
Belang, Italy’s Northern League—want regional autonomy within the EU while
others—UKIP and the Finns Party—reject EU membership outright. Those not
stained by direct descent from a racist past distinguish themselves from those
that are. That is why the FN does not sit in the Eurosceptic group in the
European Parliament that UKIP and the Northern League belong to, and why a deal
between the PVV and the FN could herald quite an institutional shake-up.
What they all have in common is that they are populist and
nationalist, that they have strong views on the EU, immigration and national
sovereignty, and that as a result they are doing very well in the polls.
Swaggering about
The euro-zone crisis, and its aftermath, goes some way to
explaining why—but it is far from a complete answer. The populist right is
nowhere to be found in austerity-battered Spain and Portugal. But it thrives in
well-off Norway, Finland and Austria. Between 2005 and 2013, according to
calculations by Cas Mudde, at the University of Georgia, there are almost as
many examples of electoral loss for parties of the far and populist right (in
Belgium, Italy and Slovakia, among others) as there are of gain (in Austria,
Britain, France, Hungary, the Netherlands).
But if euro-zone economics are not a full explanation, the
crisis has been crucial to setting the scene for the potent new pairing of old
nationalist rhetoric with contemporary Euroscepticism. Across Europe
disillusion with the EU is at an all-time high: in 2007 52% of the public said
it has a positive image of the EU; by 2013 the share had collapsed to 30%. The
new identity politics is a way of linking the problems of Europe and those of
immigration. It also taps into concerns about the way globalisation, defended
by the mainstream political consensus, undermines countries’ ability to defend
their jobs, traditions and borders.
The parties play on a nostalgia for simpler times that
appeals to some older voters; but their pitch also works well with younger
voters for whom Europe’s dark past is the stuff of history textbooks, not their
or their parents’ experience. Some of them are more comfortable voicing ideas
that their elders either reject or pass over in silence; a study of Facebook
fans of populist parties by Demos, a British think-tank, found that those aged
16-20 years were twice as likely as the over-50s to cite immigration as the
reason for their support. Fully 55% of French 18- to 24-year-olds say that they
would not rule out voting for the FN, according to a recent poll by the Union
of Jewish Students in France.
Young or old, populist parties speak to an electorate which
Dominique Reynié, an academic at Sciences-Po in Paris, sees as “existentially
destabilised”: confused and anxious about what they belong to, where their
country is heading, and whether their leaders can do anything about it. Most of
these parties deny vigorously that in giving these anxieties voice they are
merely acting as outlets for protest votes. But protest is nevertheless their
theme. “We want our country back,” demands UKIP’s leader, Nigel Farage. “Less
Europe, more Holland,” says Mr Wilders.
The problem the populist parties face is that when this sort
of protest gains traction its themes can quite easily be grabbed by the
mainstream right. When those parties move towards the populists, the populists
risk getting swamped even as their messages become mainstream—or, if they
attempt to keep a radical edge, being forced back on to the fringes. The
tension between influence and power may make the parties’ growth self-limiting.
Populist parties that make it into national parliaments can
further their agendas by deft horse-trading. From 2001 to 2011 the Danish
People’s Party under Pia Kjaersgaard swapped parliamentary support for a
succession of centre-right minority coalitions for tighter legislation on
immigration. They can also hope to move beyond single issues and get into
government. To the consternation of liberal Scandinavians, Norway’s
nationalist-right Progress Party, which secured 16% of the vote at recent
parliamentary elections, has been welcomed into a minority coalition
government. Its leader, Siv Jensen—a sort of Norwegian Marine Le Pen, who talks
about the “rampant Islamification” of Norway—has become the finance minister.
But even where mainstream parties rule out alliances, as
France’s centre-right UMP does with the FN, the populist right can prompt
established politicians to sound a tougher note, thereby legitimising some of
the thoughts and vocabulary that once belonged only to the extremes.
The best example of how the new nationalism can pull the
political debate in its direction by getting others to ape it is offered by
UKIP. It has ten seats in the European Parliament (one of them Mr Farage’s) but
none in Westminster; it secured just 3% of votes in the 2010 general election.
Yet, as Heather Grabbe of the Open Society think-tank in Brussels points out,
good poll numbers and impressive showings in by-elections have been enough to
give its views potency, strengthening the hands of hardline Eurosceptics in the
Conservative Party. As a result David Cameron, the Conservative prime minister,
has promised a referendum on British membership of the EU. He also sounds an
increasingly hardline note on immigration from the EU, and on the need to clamp
down on “welfare tourism”. The opposition Labour Party, relaxed in the past
about open borders, now promises to be tougher, too.
This success is largely Mr Farage’s. His canny deployment of
saloon-bar blokeishness as common sense is the most potent tool of a party
which lacks any strength-in-depth and is prone to chaotic squabbling behind the
scenes. His importance is typical of the populist parties’ heavy reliance on
one-man brands.
Mr Wilders in the Netherlands is the best example. With his
distinctive thick silver mane, he is not just the face of the PVV: he is
(rather oddly) its only registered member. In the ten years since he founded
the party he has consistently courted controversy, calling Islam “a
totalitarian religion” and the Koran “a fascist book”. In 2011 he was acquitted
on a charge of incitement to racial hatred; he is himself undoubtedly hated by
some, to the extent that he has a permanent security detail and unusually
strict procedures for visitors. In the corridor outside his parliamentary office,
two bodyguards sit on a black-leather sofa next to a potted plant; a poster of
Margaret Thatcher hangs on the wall.
Mr Wilders exudes a focused self-confidence, sensing what he
calls an “historical moment”: “I really believe that our generation of politicians
can for the first time make a difference and get back what belongs to us, which
is national sovereignty.” Today, the PVV has 15 seats in the 150-seat lower
house of parliament, with a suite of offices there, and ten in the 75-seat
Senate. Mr Wilders successfully used his party’s votes to back, and then let
fall, a minority centre-right coalition government, and to secure a clampdown
on immigration and asylum-seeking. Now he hopes to go further. “I think we have
really the best chances of becoming the main party in the Netherlands,” he
breezily declares.
Mr Wilders keeps a tight grip on party ideology—his blog and
Twitter account are the party’s most direct way of communicating policy. And he
is in complete control of its strategy. Thus the decision to invite Ms Le Pen
to visit The Hague was his alone—and not, it seems, an easy one. A Zionist, Mr
Wilders says that in the past he had considered it too big a risk to reach out
to the FN, “and maybe it still is”. But having heard Ms Le Pen disown her father’s
views—Jean-Marie Le Pen once referred to the Holocaust as a “detail” of
history—he is taking her at her word.
Though this highly personalised form of politics has worked
well so far, it hardly looks sustainable in the long term. The PVV has suffered
several defections; two prominent ex-policemen who were among the PPV’s most
visible and charismatic members of parliament said that they had had enough of
Mr Wilders’s autocratic style. If popular parties are to survive their founders
they need more conventional structures.
Ms Le Pen—who, like Mr Wilders, oozes confidence—is setting
about doing just that. Like Mr Farage, she has little by way of an elected
power base; the FN has only two deputies in the French parliament, and controls
not a single town in France. Yet she has both the governing French Socialists
and the opposition centre-right on the run. She is building on strength in the
once-Communist industrial north, but also making a new push in southern towns
like Montelimar—in October the FN won a stunning by-election victory in
Brignoles, not that far away. Ms Le Pen’s ambition, she says with a wide grin,
is to be “at the Elysée in ten years’ time”.
To “de-demonise” the party, she has rid it of its jackbooted
types and denounced Nazism as an “abomination”. She rails not against Muslims
but “Islamification”, drawing on deep-seated secular French principles to
justify her condemnation of religious expression in public places. As a
45-year-old divorced mother of teenagers, Ms Le Pen gives the party a more
modern feel by her presence alone. And when she speaks, she is heard by the
public at large, not just followers at rallies. Whereas her father was treated
by the media as a pariah, she is a frequent guest on news shows. “The image, or
the caricature, of a movement of violent macho men has completely disappeared,”
she insists.
Perfect perishers
The quest for respectability has been uneven. Ms Le Pen
rejects outright the suggestion that there is anything racist about the party
today. Yet the FN recently had to suspend one of its municipal candidates for
posting a photomontage of Christiane Taubira, the black justice minister, next
to that of a monkey on Facebook. Ms Le Pen herself once compared Muslims
praying in the French street to the Nazi Occupation.
Her strategy also involves trying to deepen party expertise
in a bid to earn policy credibility—not a voters’ worry today, but possibly one
tomorrow. She has recruited three graduates of the elite Ecole Nationale
d’Administration to her team; the fact that she wants such énarques, and that
there are énarques happy to work with her, signals seriousness. And she has
lined up scores of young candidates, such as Mr Rochedy in Montelimar, to stand
at municipal polls. The idea is to secure them local experience to prepare for
bigger ambitions in the future.
Ms Le Pen seeks to resolve the tension between campaigning
as an outsider and aspiring to govern by insisting that she is “not against the
system”, only the cosy mainstream consensus: “The left and the right that says
the same” and is in favour of globalisation and the euro. Another way to deal
with the tension is not to move too fast. Sylvain Crépon, at Nanterre
University, argues that the FN would be quite happy with limited electoral
success this year: enough progress to look good, not so much as to end up mired
in the messy compromises the exercise of power would bring.
Ms Fieschi at Counterpoint argues that the tension between
the moderation needed for power and the outsider status that attracts a
dispirited public makes such parties “fundamentally unstable” in a way that
limits their growth. As Matthew Goodwin at Nottingham University points out,
Austria’s Freedom Party imploded after it joined government in 2000 because it
could not manage the conflict between protest and power. On this analysis,
Europe’s populists may be near the height of their influence. Were the economy
to recover and unemployment to drop, their message might fall on less receptive
ground. Within the European Parliament, rivalry between them may thwart their
high hopes for influence. Ms Le Pen sniffs that UKIP “is a bit too immature” to
see beyond the caricature of her party.
For the time being, however, a battered Europe is fertile
terrain. There is little sign yet of a sustained drop in joblessness, nor
decisive economic recovery. Back in the Montelimar café, the patron turns out
to be an FN supporter too. “We’re not a racist party,” he insists. His grudge,
rather, is against Europe, the euro and the complacent leaders who “got us into
this mess” in the first place.
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Le Pen pode ficar com
20 deputados no Parlamento Europeu, quando actualmente tem apenas três
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Marine Le Pen e Geert
Wilders aliaram-se para “destruir” a Europa por dentro. A Frente Nacional
poderá ser o partido mais votado em França, o UKIP o vencedor no Reino Unido.
As eleições de Maio para o Parlamento Europeu vão ver o fortalecimento da
direita populista e eurocéptica
“As contas do mundo,
neste início de ano, surgem ensombradas pelos fantasmas que há muito
gostaríamos de ver afastados. Mas não basta gostar, como se sabe. Nas eleições
europeias, num horizonte de escassos meses, prevê-se uma subida eleitoral da
direita e da extrema-direita xenófobas. Como já muita gente alertou, não vale a
pena levar as mãos à cabeça por isso. Mas é precioso estar alerta com o que tal
ascensão trará: perseguição aos imigrantes, intolerância, racismo, decerto
menos no hemiciclo europeu do que nas ruas, lá onde os bandos racistas e os
cultores do ódio vão tendo mais peso e mando livre. Haverá coisas mais relevantes
para a Europa do que esta incómoda mancha no seu ego (mancha que ela própria
alimenta, ao erguer novas barreiras anti-imigrantes), mas é bom não descurar os
efeitos desta “onda” que ruma em sentido contrário ao da humanidade.” (…)
Editorial / Público
O lobo mau da direita populista vem aí
Maria João Guimarães / 5 jan 2014 / Público
Este vai ser o Parlamento Europeu com maior número de
deputados eurocépticos, de direita populista e de extrema-direita. Mas os
efeitos práticos poderão não ser assim tantos
Marine Le Pen e Geert
Wilders aliaram-se para “destruir” a Europa por dentro. A Frente Nacional
poderá ser o partido mais votado em França, o UKIP o vencedor no Reino Unido.
As eleições de Maio para o Parlamento Europeu vão ver o fortalecimento da
direita populista e eurocéptica
O que é mais importante no Parlamento Europeu? Ter trabalho
legislativo, participar em relatórios, influenciar a política que é feita? Ou
discursar, ter um microfone e um canal aberto e tentar assim fazer passar
pontos de vista?
Se o mais importante for o trabalho, espera-se que os
deputados eurocépticos e de direita radical ou populista, que vão aumentar no
Parlamento Europeu após as eleições de Maio, sejam quase irrelevantes. Mas, se
falarmos da importância do palco, aí o aumento de deputados radicais poderá ter
efeitos.
Partidos eurocépticos, de direita populista, ou de
extrema-direita xenófoba estão a subir de popularidade em vários países (não em
todos, e excepções incluem países em crise, como Portugal ou Espanha), e a sua
influência tem posto a imigração no centro do debate europeu, com propostas de
medidas radicais, como limites à movimentação intraeuropeia.
Os alarmes estão a soar: alguns destes partidos, como a
Frente Nacional (FN) de Marine le Pen ou o Partido da Independência do Reino
Unido (UKIP), podem ficar em primeiro lugar. O caso francês é especialmente
importante, porque, como França tem 74 eurodeputados, Le Pen poderá arrecadar
20 cadeiras no hemiciclo europeu (actualmente tem apenas três).
Na sua estratégia de mostrar a FN como menos extremista, Le
Pen conseguiu uma vitória ao receber o “sim” a uma aliança de Geert Wilders, o
político holandês conhecido tanto pelo seu populismo e cabelo pintado de louro
como pela veia islamófoba — que agora está a dar lugar a uma retórica anti-UE.
É uma reviravolta digna de nota, já que em 2007 o holandês dizia que “pessoas
como Le Pen” eram “horríveis” (Wilders é pró-israelita e Le Pen pai foi
condenado por minimizar o Holocausto.)
Agora, a francesa e o holandês vão trabalhar juntos tentando
obter um grupo parlamentar eurocéptico (precisam de 25 deputados de sete países
diferentes), o que lhe dará várias vantagens, como acesso a mais financiamento.
Vão, anunciaram, destruir a Europa por dentro e “libertar” os seus eleitores
“da elite europeia, o monstro de Bruxelas”.
Tea Party europeu
Alguns comentadores evocaram um Tea Party europeu, o perigo
de um
da União Europeia, como a paralisação do Governo americano
provocado pelo Partido Republicano em Outubro.
Estes medos devem ser exagerados. Logo na formação de um
grupo há dificuldades, porque se trata de partidos muito diferentes. Muitos não
se querem ver ligados a outros, que dificultariam a sua estratégia de
normalização — ninguém quer estar no mesmo grupo de partidos xenófobos e
violentos como o húngaro Jobbik ou o grego Aurora Dourada (estes ficam
automaticamente excluídos do grupo de Le Pen e Wilders) e mesmo a Frente
Nacional é demasiado extremista para a maior parte dos membros do UKIP.
Depois, “o desafio de formar um grupo pode revelar-se bem
mais fácil do que mantê-lo”, disse o comentador Daniel Hamilton. As posições
destes partidos em termos de economia são muito variadas, desde a defesa do
Estado social à menor intervenção estatal possível. E o nacionalismo de uns
pode chocar com os outros (como o criado por Wilders sugerindo aos holandeses
que se queixassem de “problemas causados por europeus do centro e de leste”).
Em termos da política decidida com influência directa destes
deputados, não deverá acontecer nada. “Para nós, a influência dos eurodeputados
eurocépticos espalhados pelo Parlamento Europeu será mais ou menos a mesma da
actual colheita: praticamente irrelevante”, diz um estudo da consultora MHP de
Olivier Gergely (do centro de estu-shutdown
site dos European Ideas, patrocinado pelo grupo dos
Populares) e Stephanie Gautier (da MHP).
Actualmente, a extrema-direita e a direita populista no PE
estão divididas entre um grupo organizado (o grupo Europa da Liberdade e
Democracia — ELD —, dominado pela Liga Norte de Itália e pelo UKIP) e deputados
sem grupo (como o Jobbik ou o Partido Nacional Britânico).
Pouca participação
O grupo ELD é o menos participativo, quanto à elaboração de
relatórios e emissão de opiniões, nota o estudo Conflicted Politicians — the populist radical right in the
European Parliament,
de Marley Morris, especialista do britânico Counterpoint
Institute. E nem em propostas de alterações de legislação o grupo teve grande
sucesso: em 65 propostas, apenas duas foram aprovadas.
Um outro estudo, este do instituto Notre Europe sobre o
equilíbrio de poder no próximo Parlamento Europeu, diz que, ainda que os
deputados eurocépticos (de direita e de esquerda) cheguem aos 200 (num total de
751, mais do que os actuais 140 entre os actuais 766 — e destes menos de 60 são
de extrema-direita), os outros 550 deputados vão ter de se esforçar mais para
chegar a um consenso nas questões importantes.
Este consenso forçado poderá ser, para os autores do estudo,
Yves Bertoncini (director do instituto Notre Europe) e Valentin Kreilinger
(investigador), um ponto negativo. Os partidos do centro podem acabar por soar todos
ao mesmo, sem tomarem posições diferentes, que representem os seus eleitorados.
Consenso mínimo
Outro perigo é o da contaminação do político pelas ideias
populistas. Aconteceu no Reino Unido por causa do UKIP, na Grécia por causa do
Aurora Dourada. Esta não seria directa a nível europeu.
Marley
mainstream
Morris admitiu ao PÚBLICO antes a hipótese de haver uma
influência em duas fases, em que os partidos populistas influenciam os governos
nacionais, que por seu turno influenciam as decisões a nível europeu.
Mas como já é esperado que as eleições europeias tenham uma
forte componente de protesto, aumentada pela fraca participação, e como o
Parlamento Europeu não é um local onde a cobertura seja exaustiva, esta
influência poderá ficar reduzida
O problema é que assim fica também diminuída a sensação de
relevância democrática do PE. E isso, junto com a potencial convergência dos
partidos do centro, pode dar a sensação de que o Parlamento Europeu não conta
afinal para nada, e que não há um verdadeiro debate, apenas um consenso de
mínimo denominador comum. Essa seria a vitória dos eurocépticos.
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