© REUTERS/Francois Lenoir

The EU faces a disintegration threat that is much more dangerous than Brexit. The attempts by the Hungarian and Polish governments to capture core state institutions and close civil society space threaten not only democracy in their own countries, but also the community of law that underpins European integration. The European Commission and the European Parliament have tackled the threat through legal action and political pressure. But member governments are still sitting on the fence. They need to take decisive action in the Council now that the German elections are over.

The sovereignty reflex is deeply ingrained: under the EU’s treaties, every country decides its own constitutional arrangements. As a result, EU governments’ default reaction to undemocratic moves in a fellow member is first to ignore the offensive behavior. If it continues, they outsource monitoring and criticism to the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the Council of Europe. The next move is to sit out the problematic government’s term in the hope that the party will be voted out by its own electorate. But those procrastination strategies are now running out as the Polish and Hungarian governments continue to push back.

Undermining the Entire EU

The EU’s role is not to get involved in domestic political fights. But it has to ensure that its members stick to the rules and commitments they agreed to, which allow citizens and businesses to operate across borders without discrimination. If two members get away with reneging on core commitments, the contagion effect is huge. More governments, both in the EU but also in the surrounding region, will be tempted to override constitutional checks and balances, to intimidate journalists, to stifle critical voices by controlling universities and NGOs, and to defy common rules and agreements that they don’t like.

The first problem is the corruption of the rule of law within member states. From the single market to justice and home affairs cooperation, European integration depends on well-functioning, independent public institutions at the national level. If Poland’s justice minister can control every level of the court system, as the government’s proposed laws would allow, judicial rulings would be politicized, but judges in other countries would still be bound to abide by them under the principle of mutual recognition. The single market would no longer be a level playing field, as businesses could not be sure of fair treatment in that country. Political influence over the judiciary also makes other members reluctant to send their citizens for trial in that country under the common arrest warrant, so it also affects police cooperation and the Schengen area of passport-free travel.

Now there is a second challenge to EU law: reneging on an EU-level agreement. Budapest is defying a decision by the Council – in which its own minister participated – to establish a scheme to relocate asylum-seekers to other member-states in order to relieve the burden on the countries of first entry, principally Italy and Greece. The European Court of Justice ruled in September that the Council agreement has the force of law, and that the effectiveness of the relocation scheme was undermined by the failure of Hungary, Slovakia and Poland to implement it. Now the Hungarian government has pledged to continue its defiance of the agreement despite the ruling, something that previous awkward partners never did. Although the United Kingdom often fought to block agreements in the Council on measures that its public did not like, London could be relied upon to implement them once they were agreed under the common rules.

What Can the EU Do?

The Commission has done well at setting out why the measures contravene EU laws and values. Its legal approach has been consistent. Now the legal procedures need political backup from the Council.

Governments should intensify their bilateral diplomacy at two levels: in private, they must leave no doubt as to their support for the Commission’s actions. Membership of the European People’s Party still matters to Fidesz, the ruling party in Hungary since 2010. This party group has long given the Hungarian government protection, so its members bear a special responsibility.

In public, European leaders should issue unequivocal statements. They should not let US President Donald Trump have the last word in Warsaw. Ministers need to speak out, especially when the Hungarian and Polish governments make misleading comparisons to claim that their proposed legislation is similar to practices in other countries. The member states’ embassies should more actively raise rule of law concerns bilaterally.

If PiS and Fidesz do not back down, the Commission and European Parliament will have to decide whether to go through with their threats to launch Article 7 of the Treaty of the European Union. This provision was designed to ensure all member states respect the EU’s common values and includes two measures: Article 7.1 allows the Council to issue a warning to any country in violation of those values; if the violation continues for a prolonged period, Article 7.2 introduces sanctions and strips the country of its voting rights in the Council.

In considering Article 7, the Commission and Parliament must put forward reasoned proposals. The attitudes of the other 26 member countries will be decisive. If the Commission puts forward a reasoned proposal and fails to gain the sufficient majority in the Council, the EU as a whole will lose face and probably any hope of using Article 7 in the future. But if the Commission holds off only because it is not confident of gaining the member-states’ backing, PiS could also claim victory.

However, if Article 7.1 is successfully launched, meaning that all of the EU institutions agree that there is a clear risk of a serious breach, that would send a powerful political signal. This would be true even if mutual protection between Warsaw and Budapest makes it impossible to gain unanimity in the European Council to activate any sanctions.

Money Matters

All EU-level action must be well framed and communicated to avoid fueling nationalism and deepening the sense of an East-West divide; this rift has widened also because of the debate over the future budget of the EU and the potential of “variable geometry,” or differentiated integration for member states when there are irreconcilable differences. The Polish and Hungarian governments are using every opportunity to claim they are being unfairly targeted by the members that joined before 2004. All EU actors must therefore communicate clearly that this is about protecting core standards, and that similar steps will be taken against any offending government. Strong statements from other Central European governments would be particularly helpful. The EU can also counter claims of double standards by getting tougher on bad behavior by member states across the board, particularly on corruption and misuse of public funds.

The year 2018 will see new initiatives for EU institutional and policy reform, as well as negotiations on the next financial framework, which will open opportunities to introduce new instruments to protect the rule of law. There are plenty of options to consider. Most pertinent to the cases of Hungary and Poland are greater possibilities for judicial review by the Court of Justice to capture the cumulative effect of a series of infringements that create a systemic challenge.

Money matters, too. Germany and other countries are debating whether to introduce new conditions that would tie access to EU funds to a country’s performance on governance and rule of law. Legally and politically, this will be complicated to introduce, but it would have a powerful deterrent effect. In the meantime, more rigorous enforcement of existing rules on misuse of funds would strengthen popular support for EU action against abuse of power in all its members.

The EU has to get more active in countering false claims. Two-thirds of Hungarians have a favorable view of the EU, as do three-quarters of Poles. To try to reduce this level of support, the Hungarian government this year funded a huge campaign of anti-EU slogans and false claims about the EU’s role in deciding energy prices, taxes, and migration, among other things. To counter this propaganda, the EU’s representatives need to better communicate the facts about EU laws and policies, as the Commission did for the first time this year in a rebuttal fact-sheet. This kind of engagement helps Hungarian and Polish civil society hold their own governments to account and uphold their own constitutions – and shows that criticism of governments does not mean rejection of the people.

Showdown Time

As unwelcome as divisions are in the EU while Brexit is underway, member governments cannot run away from a showdown now. More heads of state and government must speak up, privately and publicly, and explore new ways of ensuring high standards of political and legal governance to complement the ones on economic governance. They need to make it clear that they will exact a high price from any member – present or future, East or West, North or South – that undermines the EU’s foundations as a community of law and its soul as a community of values. They should back the warnings from Commission and Parliament to Poland and Hungary that there is a serious breach of values.

If 22 of the member governments (a four-fifths majority) agree that values are breached, that formal EU position under Article 7 of the Treaty would in itself be a strong political signal from the whole Union that it is prepared to defend its values – even if the eventual sanctions foreseen under the Treaty are out of reach because Hungary and Poland protect one another in the Council.

Even so, there is only so much that any external actor can do to rescue democracy and the rule of law in another country. The ultimate remedy lies with the tens of thousands of Hungarians and Poles who have been protesting against the attempts to capture their states. The vast majority of the people in these two countries want to stay part of the European mainstream, so they need to hear other Europeans expressing support for the rule of law that serves everyone.

The post An Existential Threat appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

(c) REUTERS/Eric Gaillard

The problem is that many mainstream politicians, rather than waking up and smelling the coffee, are pressing the snooze button. They close their eyes and mumble to themselves: “It’s just because of the crisis.” “When growth returns, voters will come to their senses.” “We can’t fight these demagogues – and we shouldn’t descend to their level.” “Better to ignore them. Don’t give them the oxygen of publicity.”

The snooze button is dangerous in politics, however, and while it is true that the economic crisis has fueled protest votes, many of the new trends in European politics predate the euro’s problems. Southern Europeans have long felt frustrated with elite-centric debates and corruption, while Northerners’ anxiety about the future of welfare states was growing before the euro started to wobble. The crisis has exacerbated and accelerated these trends, and the austerity policies that followed resulted in the EU getting much of the blame.

Gaining Ground

Deeper, longer-term trends are fueling the rise of populism. Protest voting is the result of anger and fear among the public as the decline in the power of individual governments becomes apparent. Voters still expect the politicians they elect to be able to protect them even as governments’ power to insulate their populations from the results of global economic trends and problems in other parts of Europe is reduced. The crisis has now shown European voters the dark side of global interdependence and a single currency that makes one country’s liabilities the problem of all.

Protest voting is not new, but it carries greater weight in government as populists begin to capture votes from both former social democrat and conservative supporters. In previous decades, xenophobic and anti-EU populist parties tended to gain the votes of only a small proportion of the population in only some of the EU member states. Now they are gaining electoral ground in most countries and overtaking mainstream parties in a few. In political discourse at both EU and national levels, the core logic of populist politics – mistrust of elites, cynicism about political institutions, and demands for the exclusion of newcomers – is spreading as mainstream parties take it up. Many parties of the center are leaning much further to the right on immigration and starting to lean to the left in their rhetoric on protecting the welfare state.

The rise of populism on the extremes is perhaps inevitable as the center has become more crowded. Since 1989 there has been a structural shift in party politics across Europe toward the center, which has left much more room on the fringes of the political spectrum for new parties to occupy. Neoliberal economics became widely accepted after the collapse of communism and the liberalization of European economies to global markets through the Single Market program. Mainstream parties of the left and right moved to the center of politics, largely agreeing on the fundamentals of macroeconomic policy. The political game has changed from a fundamental left/right contest over the role of the state in the economy to a question of how much and in what ways to protect the losers of globalization through the welfare state and limits on migration. This has left plenty of space for populists to blame all mainstream parties for being self-serving and deaf to the concerns of the people, ignoring the complexity of the problems and proposing simple, radical solutions. They seize the opportunity to play to public fears and appeal to identity arguments rather than arguing about policy options.

Much of what they propose is unfeasible unless their countries withdraw from the global economy, and their measures would damage liberal democracy. But they are still gaining ground, and their style of politics is affecting other parties too. Populists occupying the fringes are not a temporary exception but the new normal. Their way of organizing supporters through exploiting social media, blaming elites, and offering charismatic leaders rather than policy alternatives is here to stay, and mainstream parties need to adapt quickly.

Preferring the Original

But the centrist parties should not run after the populists and feed intolerance. As Marine Le Pen has observed, voters prefer the original to the copy. If they want to survive the populist onslaught, mainstream parties should look more deeply into why so many more voters than ever before are leaving them – and how liberal values can bring them back. Membership in mainstream parties is in freefall in many countries in Europe. Record numbers of voters have become what political scientist Catherine Fieschi terms “reluctant radicals” – people who previously voted for mainstream parties but have become disillusioned. They can be won back if centrist liberal parties address their real concerns, which lie below the anger, fear, and apathy.

After all, one person’s “populist” is another person’s “authentic democrat in touch with the common people,” and there are often legitimate grievances behind even the illegitimate expressions of political outrage. Long-standing public concerns are not being addressed by mainstream politicians, and that poses a problem for democracy if it results in falling public trust in political institutions. There is no replacement for political parties as the fundamental institution offering voters choice, but many old political parties with a long pedigree in the 20th century are in danger. Rather than calling the new parties untouchable, mainstream politicians and commentators need to look carefully at what exactly they espouse. It is vital to distinguish between legitimate protest and criticism of elites, and exclusionary politics that seek to blame the most vulnerable in society and to bring down the whole infrastructure of institutions and policies that protect them. The many parties that are called populist have different motivations, tactics, and rhetoric. The ones that threaten the openness of European societies are the politicians who call for the exclusion of marginalized groups, such as migrants, ethnic minorities (from Roma to Muslims), and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community, and criticize EU policies, laws, and funding protecting rights and personal freedoms.

Populism is by its nature illiberal in that it denies pluralism and refuses compromise. Moreover, it usually seeks to exclude at least one minority group in order to give itself legitimacy as the voice of the “authentic” people of the community. But most dangerous for open societies are the xenophobic populists, who make exclusion and denial of equality the main plank of their electoral platforms.

This xenophobic populism is starting to meet and merge with euroskepticism. Several parties that started as mainly anti-EU – for example, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) – are increasingly using xenophobic rhetoric, including demands for the exclusion of migrant newcomers as part of their discourse. Conversely, some of the parties that started as openly racist – for example, the French Front National (National Front) – have moved to blaming the EU and calling for an exit from the euro to broaden their appeal. These two discourses converge when populists blame the EU for immigration and attack its protection of fundamental rights.

In his fundamental defense of liberal democracy The Open Society and its Enemies, published in 1945, Karl Popper warned of the threat of totalitarian ideology to open societies. For Popper, the defining feature of liberal democracy is that it allows institutional change without violence. The EU has developed the capacity for change without violence on an unprecedented level. One of the main reasons why populists attack European integration is that it limits the excesses of governments: EU laws prevent the rollback of protection of rights and freedoms. Membership in the Union ties countries into a system of international commitments to liberal democracy that makes it harder for them to squash press freedom and dissent, or to treat immigrants and minorities harshly.

The Fidesz government in Hungary is testing the limits of the EU’s restraining power, and if it continues to receive little criticism from fellow member states, other countries’ leaders will be tempted to follow. Trying to outflank UKIP’s europhobia, the British Conservatives are threatening to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (which all EU members must implement). Both governments criticize the restrictions on sovereignty that EU membership imposes. What is surprising about their domestic debates is how few voices point out to the public that these restraints protect them from government excesses. The populist logic has gone mainstream.

How to Tell One from Another

There is much confusion about the definition of populist parties. Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde made a seminal classification of populist radical right parties in Europe that continues to distinguish well between these diverse groups. Mudde defines populism as an ideological feature – not merely a political style – that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups: the “pure people” and the “corrupt elite.” Populist ideology puts the “general will” of the people first, even when it clashes with human rights or constitutional safeguards.

If this dichotomy between the “pure people” and the “corrupt elite” is taken as the core of populism, the term covers parties across the political spectrum. In the European Parliament formed last year, populist parties under this definition would include a substantial number of the anti-austerity and anti-bailout parties on the left end of the hemicycle. The key difference determining whether they threaten the openness of societies is the extent to which they espouse the exclusion of minority groups and xenophobia toward people who are different from the “pure people” they claim to represent. While parties like the Greek Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left), the Italian Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement), and the Spanish Podemos (We Can) position themselves as representatives of the people in the struggle against corrupted political systems, they are essentially egalitarian parties that do not make xenophobic claims or espouse a nationalist ideology. On the contrary, these parties advocate forms of emancipation, in that their party programs and structures aim to offer ways for excluded citizens to achieve meaningful democratic political participation.

The parties that threaten openness in European societies are those that Mudde terms “populist radical right parties” (PRRPs). Central to the identity of such parties is the ideology of nativism, which “holds that states should be inhabited exclusively by members of the native group (‘the nation’) and that non-native elements (persons and ideas) are fundamentally threatening to the homogenous nation state.” Nativism combines xenophobic and nationalist ideas, although the grounds for defining non-nativeness may vary across parties. For some parties the criteria are ethnic, while for others they are national, racial, religious, linguistic, or even cultural. Based on this exclusionary vision of society, PRRPs oppose the fundamental values of a liberal democracy, most notably political pluralism and the constitutional protection of minorities.

Mudde excludes non-nativist right-wing populists from the PRRP umbrella, mostly because their core ideologies are not nativist (e.g. UKIP), even though they may include far-right factions or at times employ xenophobic or nationalist rhetoric (e.g. the Finns Party). But some of the parties that have gained support in recent elections are borderline cases under Mudde’s terminology. These parties are generally considered more legitimate political actors than their more radical counterparts because they are not so openly racist and exclusionary; nonetheless, their rhetoric can be very harmful to the open society when their leaders erode the social norms of inclusion and anti-racism in the broader political discourse, for example by blaming an entire ethnic group, such as the Roma, for crime. Moreover, PRRPs are influencing the policies proposed by mainstream parties, particularly on immigration.

The European Parliament now contains a fragmented group of xenophobic populists. While some PRRPs lost seats at the European level, including the Italian Lega Nord (Northern League) and the Dutch Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom Party), others lost all representation, such as the Bulgarian Ataka (Attack) and the British National Party. However, new parties like the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (German National Democratic Party) also entered and, taken together, PRRPs gained 15 seats. This resulted in 52 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from ten parties. To these must be added six borderline cases. Some have far-right factions like the Finnish Perussuomalaiset (Finns Party) and the Latvian Nacionālā apvienība Visu Latvijai! (National Alliance: All for Latvia!); others, like the Polish Prawo i Sprawiedliwość and Konfederacja Polski Niepodległej (Law and Justice and the Confederation of Independent Poland), advocate the limitation of rights for specific minority communities – notably in relation to LGBT and gender equality; still others use xenophobic discourse to advance other standpoints, including anti-EU claims like those advocated by the British UKIP and the Hungarian Fidesz (“Hungarian Civic Alliance”). The total number of MEPs in this category amounts to 62, from five countries. Overall, that makes 114 xenophobic populist MEPs (15.2 percent) out of a total of 751.

The outcome of the 2014 European Parliament elections will affect the success of populists in national elections as well – there is a general election in the UK on May 7, and in Portugal, Denmark, Poland, and Spain in the fall – because gaining MEPs has given these parties opportunities to build greater visibility through the media, gain legitimacy, and receive more public money.

Don’t Join the Blame Game

The most dangerous kinds of populism emerging in Europe are those that denigrate political institutions and attack the public policies that protect vulnerable minority groups in society. Mainstream parties must stand up and defend this vital infrastructure for societies to remain open. They also have a duty to defend one of the EU’s greatest achievements: the consolidation of much of this infrastructure in institutions and commitments at European level.

But the established parties cannot beat the populists by trying to outflank them in the blame game. If they dance to the populists’ tune on exclusion by blaming minorities and migrants for Europe’s woes, they will find it impossible to stop the music.
Instead, they need to appeal to the “better angels of our nature,” in Abraham Lincoln’s words. Liberal norms of tolerance and anti-racism are still strong in European societies, and parties can regain support again by defending them robustly rather than adopting the same language as the populists.

Anti-immigration rhetoric is used to make underlying racism socially acceptable – this cannot be allowed to stand. Mainstream politicians can reclaim the debate by talking about the real issues that need to be tackled: the violent conflicts that cause people to flee the Middle East and Africa, the poverty that impels people to risk their lives on the Mediterranean. These are issues that deserve a responsible political debate and solutions at the EU level.

Nationally there is a desperate need to tackle the exclusion and disillusion of second- and third-generation migrants, as illustrated by thousands of young Europeans fighting for the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Increasing inequality – a topic in many European public debates – must also be addressed by the existing elites. So far, populists have failed to offer anything here as they avoid campaigning on detailed policy solutions.

Karl Popper’s idea of the open society remains a very attractive one in Europe. Politicians of the center-left and -right need to defend it as central to the freedoms and rights that all Europeans enjoy. That is the best response to the new populism.

Read more articles from the April 2015 issue FOR FREE in the Berlin Policy Journal App.

The post Feeding on Discontent appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.