OPINION
The next epidemic: Resurgent populism
Anger and fear over governments’ handling of the
coronavirus may end up stoking the populist fire.
By JOHN
LICHFIELD 4/6/20, 4:00 AM CET Updated 4/6/20, 5:41 AM CET
The well-meaning but sometimes muddled responses of
French President Emmanuel Macron and his government to the coronavirus crisis
are under populist assault
John
Lichfield is a former foreign editor of the Independent and was the newspaper’s
Paris correspondent for 20 years.
The
politics of COVID-19 are more variable than the virus. In the long run, they
could also be more dangerous.
In France,
the well-meaning but sometimes muddled responses of President Emmanuel Macron
and his government are under populist assault. Misinformation and conspiracy
theories are running rampant on social media. In a recent survey, over 70
percent of French people said they think the government had botched its
handling of the crisis.
With
similar surges in alarm and disapproval in Spain and Italy, it seems that
widespread hope the outbreak would spell the end of populism and destroy the
reputation of anti-elite, anti-facts politics is premature.
U.S.
President Donald Trump’s contradictory, self-satisfied pronouncements haven’t
kept his approval ratings from soaring. And in the U.K., Prime Minister Boris
Johnson’s ruling Conservatives have also seen a spike in the polls, suggesting
that tribalist politics are immune to the most destructive pandemic in over 100
years.
The longer
the lockdown, the more social jealousies will be exposed — and exploited.
If
anything, with people confined to their homes, more reliant on the internet and
feeling more vulnerable than ever, there’s a real risk growing anger and fear
will end up stoking the populist fire.
In France,
activist groups on the far right and far left have unleashed a torrent of
misinformation on social media. Attacks are largely unrestricted by facts and
mutate wildly into conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.
Briefly,
the allegations include: that the government/the political class/the
powerful/the elites are abandoning ordinary people and/or profiting from the
outbreak; that COVID-19 is a hoax or was invented in a French laboratory; that
the virus is easily treated by cheap, well-tested medicines and has only been
“allowed” to spread to generate profits for “Big Pharma.”
Others
claim the epidemic is the fault of foreigners/open borders/globalism/the
European Union, and that France is suffering because its state health service (one
of the best-funded in the world) has been “dismantled” through liberal dogma.
Some of
these claims are spread by sites associated with the anti-establishment Yellow
Jacket movement, especially the popular site “Ils Savaient” (“They Knew”), or
have been picked up and spread by extremist politicians, including National
Front leader Marine Le Pen.
The
far-right leader clearly smells blood. The slow and inadequate response of the
French government is proof of Macron’s incompetence and the “collapse of the
French state,” she insists. No matter that she, Trump-like, has said everything
and its opposite since the crisis began.
To be sure,
some criticism is justified. The French government was culpably passive in
February and early March. It moved slowly to acquire supplies of protective
equipment and it opted, through lack of resources, not to impose systematic
testing, as Germany did.
But the
French government has also displayed great ingenuity and energy in trying to
catch up. It has rolled out medically equipped high-speed trains to take
gravely ill patients to areas with spare intensive care beds. It has started a
massive procurement program for masks and ventilators. It has rolled out the
world’s most generous and comprehensive state-funded support for the economy.
None of
this suggests a “collapse of the French state.” None of it suggests that the
“elites” are looking after themselves. Quite the opposite.
In the
theology of the populist hard right and far left, the “ultra-liberal elite” put
profit before everything. And yet France, like many other countries, has placed
large parts of its economy into an artificial coma to save lives. Macron, the
alleged enemy of state action, has mobilized unprecedented state resources to
keep ordinary people and businesses from penury.
Alain
Finkielkraut, the French philosopher who is usually a scourge of contemporary
materialistic values, put it well: “If economic logic trumped all, we would
have chosen to do nothing … Only the oldest and most vulnerable — the useless
mouths — would have died (we are told) … That was not acceptable, which proves
that in our present torment … we remain a civilization.”
That’s
precisely why some have argued the epidemic will mark a high-water for the
global tide of populism that has been gathering speed since 2015.
Marine Le Pen's poll ratings remain dire, with one
recent poll finding that over 70 percent of people have a negative opinion of
her
“Solidarity,
fraternity, rationalism, competence, confidence, civic values and willingness
to lend a hand — these are the values which emerged at the start of the
coronavirus crisis in Italy and make populism look, all at once, like a dark
farce,” Laurence Morel, a political scientist at Sciences Po in Paris, wrote.
It’s a
hopeful thought. But it’s also one that is unlikely to stand the test of time.
Much will depend on how long the crisis lasts and how devastating the epidemic
turns out to be.
The longer
the lockdown, the more social jealousies will be exposed — and exploited.
Living confined to a large apartment in the “beaux quartiers” is not the same
as being confined with a large family in 40 square meters in the banlieues.
Working
from home (something that's possible for about 60 percent of skilled workers in
France but only 1 percent of people working low-skilled or manual jobs,
according to a recent survey) is not the same as risking your health by going
to work without proper safety equipment.
Frustration
and anger will grow. Certainly, Le Pen is counting on it. So far, her own poll
ratings remain dire, with one recent poll finding that over 70 percent of
people have a negative opinion of her. For how long?
Alain
Chouraqui, of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), one of
France's leading students of extremist politics, says he fear that the
coronavirus crisis could destabilize France for many years to come.
“We are
entering in a phase of great national solidarity but also of fear and anxiety,
of conspiracy theories and blaming ‘the other,’” he said.
A senior
member of Macron’s La République en Marche (LREM) party told me the president
is also anxious — but hopeful.
“Macron
believes that nothing will be quite the same again,” he said. “When it ends,
there will be a great opening for populist voices, on both the far right and
the left — the anti-foreign, the anti-European, the anti-global. But he also
believes there will be a desire for proven leaders, and an aversion to further
disruption.”
It is clear
that the French president is thinking about the longer-term politics of the
coronavirus (read: the presidential election in exactly two years’ time). On
Wednesday, during a visit to a mask-making factory in Anjou, he blasted the
“irresponsible” voices who criticize the government “while the war has still to
be won.”
He also
promised that post-crisis France would “rebuild our national and European
sovereignty” by repatriating medical and other manufacturing capacity from
China and elsewhere. For Macron, the reference to a rebuilt “European
sovereignty” is old; the mention of rebuilt “national sovereignty” is entirely
new.
The
president knows his French history, and in waging “war” against the virus he
has drawn much of his crisis rhetoric from the speeches of Georges “Le Tigre”
Clémenceau, France’s leader in World War I.
It’s an
example he would do well to study closely. By the war’s end, Clémenceau was a
great national hero. He was also forced out of office within 18 months.
US far right seeks ways to exploit coronavirus
and cause social collapse
‘Accelerationist’ groups aim to sow chaos to hasten
the collapse of society and build a white supremacist one in its place
Jason
Wilson
@jason_a_w
Sun 5 Apr
2020 11.00 BSTLast modified on Sun 5 Apr 2020 11.38 BST
Some on the far right see the pandemic as heralding
social breakdown. According to one researcher, ‘They’re saying, “Modern society
is unsustainable. It is eventually headed towards collapse.”
Neo-Nazi
groups in the US are looking for ways to exploit the coronavirus outbreak and
commit acts of violence, according to observers of far-right groups, law
enforcement, and propaganda materials reviewed by the Guardian.
The
watchdog group the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) raised the alarm last
week about opportunism from far-right so-called “accelerationist” groups who
believe sowing chaos and violence will hasten the collapse of society, allowing
them to build a white supremacist one in its place.
Late last
month, the FBI warned such extremist groups were encouraging members to
deliberately spread the virus to Jewish people and police officers. Similarly,
British hate monitors Hope Not Hate warned these groups are expressing “gleeful
expectation of social turmoil”.
With few
public-facing social media services allowing white supremacists to have a
reliable platform for their views, the propaganda effort to use the coronavirus
crisis as a recruiting tool is mainly visible on laissez-faire social media
platforms like Telegram.
There
neo-Nazi groups have been affirming and welcoming the pandemic as a threat to
liberal democracy and seeing it as an opportunity to grow their movement and
realize their goals with acts of violence.
“All we’ve
been saying is this pandemic is real, it is global, and this will get pretty
bad so prepare and enjoy the show,” read one post to a coronavirus-themed
neo-Nazi channel in recent days, between posts baselessly speculating that
white people were less prone to contracting it and racist conspiracy theories
about its origins.
Beyond
accepting the pandemic is real, activists are encouraging like-minded neo-Nazis
to take advantage of the social chaos it creates in order to further
destabilize the liberal democratic systems they despise.
One channel
issued an eight-point plan for “the boog” – a term used on the far right to
denote what they believe to be a looming civil war. Their advice included acts
of terrorism and sabotage and asks people to “encourage locals to join your
cause, if have to do it by force”, and “attack key locations for federal
entities, NATO outposts, and military presence”.
At the same
time, such groups are using the pandemic to sharpen their condemnations of “the
system”, and encouraging people to lose all hope in normal political processes.
A representative post in one channel made in recent days read, “I have said it
before and I will say it again, America is Dead.”
Such
posturing – which often combines nihilism, exhortations to violence and
conspiracy-addled racism – is shared by groups like the ostensibly disbanded
Atomwaffen Division, The Base and Fueuerkrieg Division.
This
subculture, whose members openly advocate terrorism, has been subject to
multiple arrests and prosecutions in recent months, on charges ranging from
synagogue vandalism to conspiracy to murder.
An SPLC
researcher, Cassie Miller, said these groups have always talked about ways that
western democracies might be destabilized, but “this time the political
opportunity has come to them. They haven’t had to do anything to sow chaos at
this point.
“They’re
saying, ‘see, this is what we told you. Modern society is unsustainable. It is
eventually headed towards collapse’,” Miller added. “And they think that
they’re going to be the revolutionary vanguard that is going to be in place to
handle the situation when it eventually breaks down.”
Similar
sentiments appear to have motivated a Missouri man who planned a car bomb
attack on a hospital which was treating coronavirus patients. He was shot dead
by FBI agents who were seeking to arrest him late last month.
The man,
who had been under FBI investigation for months, was active in Telegram chats
associated with two neo-Nazi groups: the longstanding National Socialist
Movement and the accelerationist group Vorherrschaft Division.
Miller said
these groups remain potentially dangerous but a wave of recent arrests has
weakened them, and it’s not clear what capacity they have to carry out actions
beyond attacks by radicalized individuals.
“I think
that the FBI has clearly reprioritized white supremacist violence, and we’ve
seen the effects of that in the last several months,” she said.
“That’s
caused this huge disruption in these networks. And I hope that the attention
continues, especially as people who are part of this movement are trying to
exploit the current political atmosphere.”
The FBI
declined to confirm or deny the existence of any active investigation into
individuals or groups embracing neo-Nazi accelerationism.
“However,
we continue steadfast in our mission to protect the American people and uphold
the Constitution throughout this period of national emergency,” an FBI
spokesperson wrote in an email.
“Our
operations remain directed toward national security and violations of federal
law, and will continue unabated”, the spokesperson added.
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