Since right-wing populist parties began gaining power in Europe and the United States, common wisdom has held that their success is owed to the economic hardships endured by their voters. Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is theoretically fueled by the comparatively poor economy in the country’s former East, UKIP’s voters are frustrated with the lack of development in England’s small post-industrial towns, and, across the Atlantic, Trump’s popularity stems from frustrated rural voters who have not felt the benefits of the economic recovery.

The problem is that none of those arguments gels with reality—neither with the economic realities of the regions concerned nor with the subjective realities that emerge from surveys. In fact, according to a survey carried out by the German Savings Bank Finance Group between May and July, Germans are just about as optimistic about their country’s economy as they’ve ever been: 63 percent described their financial situation as “good” or “very good,” better than in any year since 2001. This optimism includes Bavaria, where 68 percent were satisfied with their financial outlook—and where voters recently delivered the governing CSU party its greatest defeat since 1950, while the AfD won enough votes to become the fourth-largest party.

A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center from October to December 2017 may shed some light on the forces that are actually propelling populist parties higher. There is indeed some evidence that economics plays a role: right-wing populists in Germany were eight percentage points more likely to earn below the national median income than the center-right; right-wing populists in Italy were nine percentage points more likely.

But the starker difference was in political engagement. Right-wing populists in Germany were 15 percentage points less likely than center-right Germans to say they were at least somewhat interested in politics; right-wing populists in Italy were 10 percentage points less likely, right-wing populists in the UK 11 percentage points less likely, and those in France were 12 percentage points less likely.

Why are these voters tuning out? The answer may have as much to do with their trust in their political representatives as with economics. In Germany, 62 percent of people who held a favorable view of the Social Democrats, or SPD, said they trusted the country’s parliament “somewhat” or “a lot,” as did 66 percent of respondents with a favorable view of the CDU and 66 percent with a favorable view of the Greens. Among respondents with a favorable view of the AfD, however, only 35 percent said the same—and 37 percent said they didn’t trust parliament at all. Meanwhile, 51 percent of those who had a favorable view of the AfD said they didn’t trust the media “much” or “at all.”

These numbers varied from country to country—UKIP supporters, for example, had more faith in the British parliament than Labour voters, possibly due to the fact that the UK government is visibly (if badly) attempting to implement Brexit; and Italian and British respondents in general distrusted the news media, regardless of their political inclinations. The German example is particularly helpful in light of the political drama the country has experienced over the last year. Even as leaders in the political mainstream have struggled to contain the AfD, they’ve simultaneously been locked in a number of squabbles within and between parties, from the perennial will-he-stay-or-will-he-go act of Interior Minister Horst Seehofer to the recent back-and-forth over the president of Germany’s domestic intelligence service, Hans-Georg Maassen. If German voters with a favorable view of the AfD are predisposed to distrust the parliament, constant infighting within the body itself is unlikely to help.

It’s difficult to say what exactly engendered this mistrust, but it may well be tied to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s everything-to-everyone reshaping of the CDU. In order to grow her party’s base, Merkel has adopted and amalgamated policies that are generally popular, regardless of how well they fit in with traditional conservative CDU values. Doing so has allowed her to win four terms as chancellor—but at the same time led many voters to ask what exactly it is they’re voting for when they vote for Merkel’s party. A vote for the CDU is a vote for stability, rather than for or against any particular policy.

After the federal election in 2017, many German political observers predicted that another “GroKo” government—a “grand coalition” between Chancellor Merkel’s CDU and the Social Democrats—would be the death knell of the SPD, which has struggled to demonstrate to its working-class constituency that it’s still serving their interests while operating within a center-right government. The critics haven’t been disappointed: The SPD has, rather embarrassingly, dropped to third place behind the AfD in several recent national polls. But with the collapse of the CDU and CSU and the continued ascent of the AfD, it’s becoming clear that the coalition isn’t serving either party well—and that, difficult as it might be to believe, German voters might prefer clarity and credibility to stability.

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© REUTERS/Jason Reed

Former President Bill Clinton once said, “Follow the trend lines, not the headlines.” But as Donald Trump and a raft of more than ten Democratic presidential candidates think about US foreign policy with 2020 in mind, even trend lines don’t command the power they once held. The United States has fallen into the “arc of history” trap—following the trend line—at least four times in the past thirty years, each time exposing strategic weaknesses in US foreign policy.

The first miscalculation was that the fall of the Berlin Wall and Soviet communism would easily lead to the victory of liberal, free-market democracy over all competing ideologies.  A second was that “Europe”—and particularly the broadened core of Europe within an enlarging EU and NATO—would effectively cease to be a geo-strategic theater of international politics. The third—articulated in 2008 by Barack Obama in Berlin and his subsequent administration—was that the ugliness of the Bush administration with its unilateralism, norms-breaking, vengefulness, corruption, feckless management, jingoism, and penchant for violence, was a deviation from the true character of American moral leadership. The final—heralded particularly at the onset of the 2011 Arab Spring—was to see the spread of technology as an unqualified global good paving the way for democracy, freedom and dynamic civil society.

Addressing—and in some ways correcting for—these four interrelated traps will define the US foreign policy debate in 2020 and beyond. No candidate can ignore these four hubristic blind spots. The outcome of this reimagination could be a foreign policy that is more sober, reflective, and circumspect in its ambition. It could also be more imaginative.

No Status Quo Ante

The folly of 1990s triumphalism has been widely derided, but foreign policy in the United States is only now beginning to change. It has become difficult to lean on the platitudes of post-Cold War foreign policy. The Iraq War and 2008 financial crisis dealt twin blows to the unreflective global acceptance of US leadership and the power of American ideals. China’s rise, Russia’s aggression, and Trump’s election have hastened it. As Trump has shown through his withdrawal from the TPP, Paris Climate Accord, the JPCOA with Iran, and UNESCO, agreements with the US will from now on always have a built-in sunset clause lasting the term of an administration. That is a staggering limitation on the credibility of the country that had been the international system’s underwriter since Harry Truman.

In 2020 and beyond, US foreign policy will have to engage and prepare for a world without unquestioned US hegemony. The potential for conflict is rising as great powers and aspirants jockey to fill vacuums. The December 2017 National Security Strategy recognized as much: “After being dismissed as a phenomenon of an earlier century, great power competition returned.” The strategy frames US foreign policy in terms of great power rivalry with China and Russia wielding above-board and below-the-belt instruments to expand their spheres of influence.

US foreign policy has been at once jolted from its complacency and made aware of its limitations. At least in some areas, this could lead to the US becoming a more mature great power. Progressives and mainstream Republicans recognize the need to shore up alliances, institutions, and vehicles of US influence in the international system—albeit clipped by an awareness of the dent in credibility caused by the Trump administration.

This has also created space for creative thinking about policy areas that were once sacred tenants of the liberal order, like free trade and the unencumbered flow of capital. Having cast off slavish adherence to the divinity of open markets, Trump—and any progressives that follow—will feel freer to deploy geo-economic instruments to shape foreign policy. The Trump administration is making maximal usage of the $20 trillion US economy as a cudgel against US rivals—attempting to quarantine Iran through sanctions against the wishes of the other P5+1 JCPOA signatories; levying more than a quarter trillion dollars of tariffs on China; and hanging sanctions and visa bans on hundreds of Kremlin-linked Russians.

Both progressives and Trump adherents will continue to reach for these tools and emphasize their effectiveness against the backdrop of a continuing distaste for military intervention abroad. In fact, 2020 could well see consensus across the political spectrum about the reluctance to use force. Trump has attacked the Iraqi, Libyan, and Afghan wars, as have many leading potential Democratic challengers (with Joe Biden the major exception). Whatever the case, the US could end up in a position where the challenges are more acutely felt and the instruments at its disposal more limited.

No Happily Ever Afters

The grand illusion that Europe would cease to play a role in US foreign policy and domestic politics has also been blown apart. Russia’s Ukraine invasion and the flows of migrants from Syria have brought Europe back to the fore as an active theater for US foreign, security, and to some extent, domestic policy.

On the Republican side, positions on Russia are sticky. The Republican party has long been driven by Russia hawks, led principally by John McCain, who seethed as the early Obama-era reset brought pragmatic nodes of cooperation like New START, supply transport to Afghanistan, and Russian WTO accession. Trump’s own officials, aided by Republicans in Congress, have worked to fortify US power in Europe and elsewhere, strengthening the interior NATO frontline, considering permanent basing in Poland, providing lethal assistance to Ukraine, and naming a Special Envoy to Ukraine negotiations.

But that is slowly changing. More and more, the Trump-allied GOP is broaching the idea of a new openness to the model of Putin’s Russia. Kissinger-style realists are congregating around Trump along with Rand Paul-style isolationists and anti-gay evangelicals like Franklin Graham to form a powerful coalition of Putin admirers within the GOP.

On the other side, Democrats have become decidedly more hawkish. It began with Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and Syria, which hardened progressive foreign policy establishment somewhat, even though Obama still winced at the idea of supplying Georgia-war levels of assistance and lethal weapons to Kyiv. Russia’s 2016 assault on the US election then galvanized Democrats and made Russia a domestic issue to a level that makes rapprochement with Putin impossible.

Behind the rhetoric, there remains a great deal of consensus in US transatlantic policy. The building blocks will remain the same. Concerns about defense spending, trade imbalances, and energy dependence remain high in both parties in Congress and even with the Trump administration. These positions are unlikely to change. But the school of thought underpinning US grand strategy is in line for a massive electoral overhaul.

Who Is Doing the Rigging?

Even as American defenders of the liberal order woke up to the threats from the East and South, Trump has also unmasked threats from within. Obama’s promise that he could transcend the divisiveness both at home and abroad was built on the assumption that the Bush administration was a departure from a wide American liberal consensus of normative leadership, faith in alliances, institutions, and global trust. Of course, the presidency of George W. Bush was not an apparition. Neither is President Trump, who has reinforced several of the core elements of the first Bush administration while adding elements of unpredictability and ethno-nationalism.

By 2020, the wheel will have turned. There is no intellectual consensus on the ideals underpinning the US role in the world. Trump came into office promising to unshackle the country from a rigged system based on pluralism, nondiscrimination, immigration, open trade, an institution- and rules-based international community, and norms built on trust. At the heart of this is a searing critique of Enlightenment Europe with the EU and NATO at its core. As Trump stated in Warsaw in July 2017: “The danger is invisible to some but familiar to the Poles: the steady creep of government bureaucracy that drains the vitality and wealth of the people.” The Bannonist wing of Trump’s coalition will seek to validate this vision at the 2020 polls. If successful, a second Trump administration could revisit a broad range of multilateral arrangements the president considers constraining, including NATO, America’s partnership with the EU, and even membership in the WTO and UN.

Just as Trump is articulating his vision of technocratic globalism and its dangers, 2020 progressives have found a new organizing principle in the fight against kleptocratic authoritarianism. For progressives, US foreign policy will have to draw on new lines of political philosophy that are rooted domestically. These include the fight against corruption and concentration of power and wealth, particularly in big finance, big oil, and big tech. With Trump and Putin both squarely in the crosshairs, Bernie Sanders outlined his unified theory of the global plutocratic sucking sound in a Guardian article in September 2018. He believes there is an “international authoritarian axis” with connections between “unaccountable government power” and “unaccountable corporate power” that reaches across borders and sectors. Progressives increasingly see this clutch of corrupt oligarchs—aided by political clients—as the force that demolishes the rule of law in the pursuit of shameless extraction of wealth, destructive climate policies, monopolistic control of information flow, unfair trade, election manipulation, and a narrower space for democratic action.

In some ways, the narratives behind both paradigms—the fight against globalism and the fight against kleptocracy—have a similar ring. Both feature an unaccountable elite riding roughshod over the will of citizens. Both contain transnational overtones pointing to a world-wide phenomenon that must be confronted both at home and abroad. But only the latter is compatible with the liberal world order.

The Deep Digital Age

Finally, there is technology. The squabbling travails of today’s foreign policy might look quaint when compared to the challenges from artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum computing, and block chain ledgers. If algorithms are ideologies, as Lawrence Lessig and others have argued, then creating the structures in which they develop could be the most important challenge both for relations within states and between states. The understanding that the rise of technology is the driving political, ethical, economic and security factor of our day has been particularly slow to work its way into the American strategic discourse.

The lesson of the hacks against the Democratic National Committee  by FancyBear is that tech can be a wormhole for instability and subterfuge. Political progressives, mainstream conservatives, and US social media platforms are aware of this threat vector and have worked to patch vulnerabilities in the information space. The American left has painfully experienced how open elections are vulnerable to manipulation through hacking, fake news, deep fakes, and other hybrid tools. Both Democrats and non-Trumpist Republicans have attempted to build in consequences for future attempts to undermine the legitimacy of elections in the form of sanctions, asset freezes, and visa bans.

But the myopic focus on social media, fake news, and election meddling ignores other potential effects of technology on American foreign policy. Automation is a source of populist anger globally and potentially as destabilizing as immigration and trade. Cyber threats are increasingly defined not only by data theft and manipulation but by physical harm, as autonomous vehicles and connected homes, appliances, even clothing join critical infrastructure as a vector of attack.

And then there’s artificial intelligence. The AI race between the US and China is accelerating—and not solely for its commercial applications. In fact, AI technology has the potential to have the same effect on relations within states that nuclear weapons had on relations between states. Machine learning voice and visual recognition and omnipresent information analysis could perpetualize authoritarian governing systems like that in China. Neither Republicans or Democrats have begun to rethink a world order where AI-infused predictive policing, communication analysis and wall-to-wall surveillance would make a Tiananmen Square-style uprising almost unthinkable.

Nothing Is Inevitable

The intellectual energy of foreign policy thinkers on both right and left has delivered stinging rebukes to the pristine niceties of the post-Cold War era. Yale historian Timothy Snyder calls those who propagate those platitudes a class of “inevitability politicians” who allow a vague sense of righteousness to anesthetize their followers into inaction. Those day are over. But if the rise of populism, revisionist powers—including the United States—and technology are rendering the old order unfit, we must ask ourselves: are we present at the new creation? All indications point to yes, even if American progressives, stewards of the establishment, and Trump-style reactionaries have yet to fully grapple with the singularity of this moment.

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© REUTERS/Simon Dawson

March 29, 2019 is the date when the United Kingdom will, according to all expectations, become to first country to ever leave the European Union. That’s just eight weeks before citizens in the remaining 27 EU member-states will be called to the polls to elect the next European Parliament.

With Brexit negotiations hitting the wall and political paralysis reigning in London, it is still completely unclear how Brexit will unfold. Even an extension of negotiations beyond the envisaged exit date cannot be ruled out. However, whether it ends up being a “hard Brexit,” “soft Brexit,” or a “no deal,” the UK’s political representatives, including the 73 British members of the European Parliament, will have to leave the EU institutions as soon as Britain withdraws from the EU. This also applies for the transition period—should one be agreed—during which the UK, according to the draft withdrawal agreement, will continue to be bound by EU rules but will no longer be represented in the EU institutions. That won’t just mean the departure of Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP). It will also have a noticeable impact on the balance of power in the Strasbourg parliament.

The EPP as Winner

Among the major parties, the European People’s Party (EPP), home to the German Christian Democrats, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party, is set to benefit the most from Brexit. Since the British Conservatives left the EPP in 2009, Europe’s largest party has had no partner in the United Kingdom. As every other parliamentary group is set to lose MEPs, the EPP’s weight will increase in relative terms. In contrast, the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) will lose the British Labour Party. Labour has not only 20 MEPs, but also reached 40 percent of the votes in the last UK elections—while Social Democratic Parties slumped in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. The S&D are thus set to lose one of their biggest members. The expected losses for the liberal ALDE group, the European Greens, and the European left will be significantly smaller.

This matters for the balance of power in the European Parliament. Combined with the expected losses of the social democratic parties in most of continental Europe, Brexit is expected to further strengthen and secure the EPP’s prospects of remaining the largest group in Strasbourg. These shifts will also have an effect on the Spitzenkandidat or “lead candidate” system. In 2014, the battle for the position as the largest parliamentary group was still considered an open race. Then, Martin Schulz, S&D’s leading candidate, could see himself as having a chance of becoming President of the Commission. But after 2019, majority building in the European Parliament will probably only be possible with the EPP. The EPP’s Spitzenkandidat will have, therefore, the best chance of becoming the President of the European Commission.

A Bad Deal for EU-Skeptics

The impact on the EU-skeptic groups will be even more significant. Due to their gains in the 2014 elections, EU critical parties have, overall, picked up nearly 20 percent of the seats in the EP. Nevertheless, they are divided across three political groups, and British Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) play an important role in each of these. The (so-far) moderately EU-skeptic grouping of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) is supported by two main national groups, the British Conservative Party and the Polish Law and Justice Party (PiS), which together account for 37 of the 73 ECR MEPs. Given Britain’s departure, the EP will lose the EU-skeptic MEPs who have at times been the most constructive. Even after Brexit the ECR, which is comprised of parties from 17 member-states, will have enough members to continue as a political group. However, its identity will be much more Central/Eastern-European, as 31 of the 54 remaining ECR MEPs will come from this region.

On the other hand, the “Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy” (EFDD), a fundamentally EU-skeptical group, is on the brink of collapse. From the start, this group has been a partnership of convenience between UKIP and the Italian Five Star Movement. While Brexit will see UKIP leave the European Parliament, the Five Star Movement has (at least rhetorically) scaled back on its criticism of the EU. For example, it voted for the Article 7 sanction procedure against Viktor Orban’s Hungarian government. It is thus likely to leave the EFFD, which will find it difficult to survive Brexit. The EFDD’s smaller members will therefore have to reorient themselves, either to the ECR or the ENF. The Swedish Democrats, for example, already left the EFDD in July for the ECR. This also affects the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), whose sole remaining MEP (of an original seven) sits with the EFDD. After the next elections, however, the AfD hopes for a significant number of MEPs, who thus may have a strong influence on the shape of the EU-skeptic groups in the EP. The EFDD’s time is certainly coming to an end.

The also fundamentally EU-skeptical group “Europe of Nations and Freedom” (ENF) is not home to any British party, though it still relies on individual British members to maintain its status as a political group. However, given expected gains for example for the Italian Lega, the ENF is likely to be able to form again after the 2019 elections.

Put simply, the EU-skeptic spectrum will have to rearrange itself after Brexit and the 2019 European elections. There are two basic scenarios for this: The first is a continued division into a national conservative ECR group with a strong central and eastern European influence on the one hand and a deeply right-wing, populist, fundamentally EU-skeptic ENF on the other. In this scenario, both groups would continue to struggle for the allegiance of national parties and thereby the dominance of the EU-skeptic camp. The second scenario is a collective EU-skeptic group that could reach from Hungary’s Fidesz (currently EPP), to the ECR parties, the EFDD and the ENF. A collective parliamentary group such as the one envisaged by Lega leader Matteo Salvini and supported by Donald Trump’s former advisor Stephen Bannon would have the potential to become the second largest parliamentary group in the EP after the 2019 elections.

A Shift Toward the Eurozone

However, shifts take place not only between political parties but also between member states. Already in the summer of 2018, the EU institutions decided how to deal with the 73 soon-to-be-vacant seats after Brexit. 27 of them will be divided up among 14 underrepresented member states in order to address imbalances in parliamentary representation.

The European Parliament will still become noticeably smaller for the first time, shrinking from 751 to 705 MEPs. France, for example, will get five additional MEPs, and Ireland two. Germany, however, will receive no additional representatives, as it is already at the upper limit of 96 set by the EU treaties.

The redistribution is based on shifts in the population sizes of the member states, but will also have a political effect. As a result of the withdrawal of the largest non-euro country, 85 percent of the EU economy will be concentrated in eurozone member states.  At the same time, 22 of the 27 redistributed seats are going to eurozone members. As a result, the share of MEPs coming from the eurozone will increase from 65 to 72 percent. The “South” in particular will benefit, i.e. the eurozone countries France, Italy, and Spain.

The 46 remaining British seats will initially be removed,  according to the principle “a smaller EU, a smaller parliament”. They will not only serve as a reserve for future EU enlargements but could also be used to introduce transnational lists for the European Parliament. This idea, promoted in particular by French President Emmanuel Macron, foresees using those 46 seats for a Europe-wide constituency in which European parties would directly compete for votes. Its proponents were unable to implement it for the elections in 2019, mostly because of opposition by the EPP. It is possible that such lists will be introduced for the next elections in 2024, seeing as Macron and Angela Merkel among others are calling for it.

The Risk of Extension

With less than six months to go before Britain’s planned withdrawal, Brexit negotiations continue to be characterised by maximum uncertainty. As of late October 2018, departure without an agreement, a rejection of the negotiation result in the British House of Commons as well as new elections are all still in the realm of the conceivable. Notably, Article 50 allows the EU-27 and the UK to unanimously agree to extend negotiations. This is currently not the wish of either side, but cannot be ruled out in view of the political crisis in London.

Should such a scenario come to pass, it would have considerable consequences for the European elections. If the Article 50 negotiations were extended, the UK would continue to be a member of the EU until the next deadline, with all the rights and obligations. This includes the retention of the 73 seats in the EP and would therefore require the UK to partake in the elections in May 2019.  According to the relevant texts, the EU would have to temporarily suspend the redistribution of seats.

From Brussels’ perspective, holding European elections in a country as it departs would be quite uncomfortable. The consequences for Britain, however, would be even more serious. Given the tense domestic political situation, European elections would almost inevitably become a sort of second referendum on Brexit. They would breathe new life into parties such as UKIP. Brexit advocates would attack the extension itself as a betrayal of the 2016 referendum, and Brexit opponents would beat the drum  at the prospects for staying in the EU. This would be an explosive combination—though it is, at this moment in time, only a fringe scenario.

A Historic Rupture

Finally, it is important not to underestimate the psychologic effect Britain’s likely departure will have on the European elections. The current negotiations are mainly focused on the economic and technical aspects of Brexit. At the same time, the clock seems to have stopped for Britain to some extent, as the country has not yet left the Union. Shortly before the European elections, however, the reality of Brexit will become abundantly clear—British representatives will leave every EU institution, Brexiteers will celebrate the consummation of the withdrawal, and the EU will be without its second-largest member-state. All of a sudden, there will be a large western European country on the EU’s doorstep that has opted for an alternative to European integration.

Causing and winning the British referendum to leave the EU is so far the greatest political success of the EU-skeptic movements, and anti-EU parties often hold Britain up as an example. At the same time, however, the difficulties of the Brexit negotiations, the ongoing political crisis in London, and Britain’s painful struggle over its decision are acting as a deterrent to other member-states. Since the Brexit referendum, support for EU membership has grown  across all of Europe. Most EU-skeptic parties seem to have learned from Brexit and Marine Le Pen’s defeat in the French presidential election. They no longer want to question their country’s membership in the EU per se but rather seek to fundamentally transform the EU’s political orientation from liberal democracy to a union of states with authoritarian tendencies that build new and old borders.

Thus, both Brexit itself as well as the forced rearrangement of the EU-skeptic spectrum underlines the importance of the next European elections for the future direction of the EU. At stake here is nothing less than the fundamental orientation of European integration.

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Artwork © Dominik Herrmann

When Matteo Salvini headed to the beach this summer for his first swim of the season, he posed for a selfie that deliberately exposed his flabby belly. He wanted to remind his political supporters that he was one of them.

It wasn’t the first time. Italy’s brash interior minister, who thrives on upending political perceptions with his devil-may-care attitude, once made the cover of a weekly magazine wearing only a tie—even though he rarely wears one with a jacket.

Salvini may not be prime minister just yet, but most Italians agree it is only a question of time. There is no doubt he is the dominant force in Italian politics. Since his rejuvenated Lega party formed a coalition government with the populist Five Star Movement (M5S) in June, his popularity has surged and his right-wing party is now the most popular in the country.  He has even flirted with running for the presidency of the European Commission.

With his anti-immigrant stance and open hostility toward the European Union, Salvini is determined to reshape the political landscape in Italy and Europe, and according to the latest polls, one-third of the country is right behind him.

“Italians come from several decades where they completely mistrusted politicians,” says Lorenzo Marsili, director of European Alternatives, a citizen’s movement based in Berlin. “They think he is less likely to cheat them because he looks like them and speaks like them.”

An Unlikely Rise

Salvini does not fit the traditional mold of an Italian politician. Born in Milan in 1973, he studied political science and history at the University of Milan but dropped out before his final exams. He was involved in left-wing politics before joining the right-wing party then known as Lega Nord (“Northern League”) in 1990. He ran its radio station, Radio Padania, for several years.

In this traditional Catholic country, he married, but then got divorced. He has a son, Federico, from his marriage, as well as a daughter, Mirta, from a subsequent relationship that ended in 2012. He is currently engaged to a popular TV host.

Driven by acute political instincts and ruthless ambition, Salvini easily secured the leadership of the Lega in 2013. He drew on his experience as a local Milan city councilor and member of the European Parliament to reposition the party and give it a nation-wide identity.But it was his ability to tap into the concerns of average Italians and his clever exploitation of social media that secured his popularity.

Drawing inspiration from the success of US President Donald Trump, Salvini has adopted the slogan “Italians First.” In his campaign for the March election, he promised to deport 500,000 illegal immigrants, take a tougher stance on crime, introduce a flat tax, abolish the EU fiscal compact, and even legalize brothels.

The Lega’s share of the vote surged from a dismal four percent to nearly 18 percent, easily surpassing the party of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. It became the dominant right-wing player—but not quite dominant enough to seize power on its own. Salvini was forced to seek a marriage of convenience with the populist Five Star Movement.

Immigration was at the top of Salvini’s agenda. No sooner was he appointed interior minister than he made global headlines by refusing to allow a private vessel carrying 629 refugees and migrants rescued off the coast of Libya to dock in Italy. “Go wherever you want, but not to Italy,” Salvini tweeted after he closed the ports to migrants.

A majority of Italians endorsed Salvini’s hard line, and the ship ended up docking in Spain. “The closing of the ports in order to trigger EU solidarity drew a surprisingly positive response despite the extremism of kidnapping people on a boat,” said Marsili, author of Citizens of Nowhere. “People like this strongarm attitude because they don’t believe that democracy is changing Europe, and unfortunately they are right.”

Media Machine

Working with France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen, Hungary’s nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and others from the right, Salvini is aiming to overthrow the European Union’s liberal establishment, reinforce the borders, and restore power to nation states―an agenda many see as a threat to European unity.

Miraculously, he avoided major fallout after the Lega’s founder and former leader, Umberto Bossi, was convicted for illegally using public funds for family expenses. In September, a Genoa court ruled prosecutors could begin to sequester up to €48.9 million in funds from accounts and businesses belonging to the party until the money Bossi had swindled could be recouped. Salvini has lashed back, calling it a “political trial.”

Everything Salvini does is backed by a communications machine that has revolutionized Italy’s political landscape. He has 3.2 million followers on Facebook and 900,000 on Twitter. Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon told Reuters news agency that US politicians could learn a lot from Salvini’s methods. “The use of social media and Facebook Live … were state of the art,” said Bannon, who has met Salvini more than once. He also invited him to join the “Movement”, an organization Bannon set up in Brussels to promote economic nationalism and right-wing populism in Europe. “I was blown away by how sophisticated he was, and how he managed to do it on a shoestring.”

Salvini’s ten-member social media team, dubbed the “Beast,” pumps out messages across YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram, with tweets including xenophobic rants, promotion of his achievements, or upcoming radio and TV appearances—even photos of his favorite pesto sauce or pizza. Thus Salvini’s rate of social media engagement surpasses Trump. Now the Lega is polling as high as 34 percent and has overtaken its M5S coalition partner.

Trouble Ahead?

Well before this year’s election, Salvini had questioned the value of the euro and adopted a position that was very critical of the EU. Since then, he has stepped up his attacks. Most recently, the conflict over Rome’s 2019 budget is providing him with ammunition against Brussels. Despite a binding commitment by an earlier Italian government, Salvini’s coalition inists on increasing spending and running a 2.4 percent deficit next year.

With the stock market in decline and the bond spread rising to its highest level in five years, Salvini was asked what he thought of opposition from the EU and the Bank of Italy to the proposed budget. “This is really a demonstration that we are right,” Salvini told the Italian daily La Stampa on October 18. “The spread will fall. All the economic data is positive.”

Professor Francesco Giavazzi, a leading economist at Bocconi University in Milan, said Salvini flourished by creating an “external enemy,” whether it is the European Commission or the European Central Bank. Given the conflict over the budget and its effects on the financial markets, Giavazzi warned Italy was on the edge of an economic abyss unlike anything it had seen in the past 70 years.

“The fact that the government continues to enjoy widespread popularity is little consolation,” he said.  “Juan Peron, and more recently the Kirchners, were acclaimed by immense crowds, but this did not prevent Argentina which was one of the richest countries in the world just a century ago from becoming a place in which per capita income is now similar to that of Mexico.”

Salvini prefers to blame Brussels or Berlin when questions about the Italian budget or border controls arise. But he is not ready to walk away from the European Union just yet. In fact the Lega leader is staking his political future on the European elections in May 2019, in the hope that they will not only help him reshape the EU but reaffirm his political dominance at home as well.

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© REUTERS/Francois Lenoir

As the European election campaign approaches, Emmanuel Macron is going back to a familiar playbook: He is promising to use a progressive centrist movement to leave behind the classic right/left framework. He made this bet in 2017 for the French presidential election—and won. Macron continues to follow this logic today, describing himself and his party, La République en Marche, as the antithesis of Viktor Orbán’s right-wing nationalist vision of Europe, and seeking new partners all across Europe.

The French president argues that an alliance of pro-European “Democrats and Progressives” will be better placed to address new divisions between “open” and “closed” societies than the existing Europe-wide party groupings which are aligned along the traditional left-right-divide. Macrons new forces won’t be able to replace the European People’s Party (EPP) as the strongest grouping in the European Parliament, but he would be glad to assume the role of kingmaker, thereby increasing his influence on the European stage.

Many of the concepts from his 2017 campaign are being reused. Just as he told French voters that his “Flexicurity” model would bring both an economic upswing and greater social protection, he now vows to live up to Europe’s promise of prosperity by combining open markets with protective measures like a “Buy European Act” and common social standards.

France’s return to diplomatic heavyweight status is reflected in Macron’s demand for a “sovereign”—i.e. strong and unified—Europe as a response to the unstable relationships with the USA, Russia, and China. And Macron presents himself and his movement as the only effective answer to right-wing populism, to Marine Le Pen in France, and to Orbán and his partners in Europe.

Macron’s program is coherent, both on the national and international level. But as he tries to transfer his blueprint for success to Europe, it’s becoming obvious that this is a different challenge. Macron can no longer rely on being a fresh face. Instead, he has to count on his authority as the President of France, which has begun to diminish in recent months. And Macron has only had limited success on the EU stage so far.

For Macron’s strategy to work in the European campaign, it needs to fulfill three conditions: the movement must achieve a certain success in his own country; it must find reliable partners in as many EU member states as possible; and last but not least, it must be a convincingly pro-European force that positions itself beyond the traditional party-political divisions.

European Policy as Domestic Policy

It may sound paradoxical that national context is important for, of all things, the European elections. Yet Macron’s authority as Europe’s creative director heavily depends on his success within France’s border. This is all the truer since the French leader has declared the elections a top priority and will, unlike his predecessors, make himself the face of the campaign. “I will do my best to ensure that progressives, democrats, and those for whom I speak are heard”, Macron said on September 29 in an interview with Le Journal du dimanche.

There is no doubt Macron is credible. His ideas for EU reform have long been well known, even before the famous Sorbonne Speech of September 2017. They were a major topic of his presidential campaign, and he is taking the same approach in the EU context. What’s more, the attacks of Marine Le Pen, his main adversary from the Rassemblement National or RN (until recently Front National), have boosted Macron’s profile. It helps both sides to duel in public. Macron has denounced the nationalism that is “spreading like leprosy all over Europe,” while Le Pen has called on the right-wing nationalist parties of Europe to band together. To this end, she met on October 8th with the Italian interior minister and Lega leader, Matteo Salvini, who stands for a brutal anti-migrant policy, and announced from a press conference in Rome “the emergence of a Europe of nations and protection.”

Le Pen won’t give Macron any peace in the coming months. For her, this election is a one-off opportunity to avenge her defeat in the 2017 presidential election. Her goal is to shore up her party’s position in the European parliament.Macron must keep something else in mind: European policy credentials are one thing, electoral success another. The French president is a professed believer in European integration, but this was not the reason for his victory in 2017. In France, as in many other European countries, the EU continues to be a target of criticism. Even if radical steps like leaving the euro continue to be rejected by large majorities—Le Pen was calling for a euro-exit until her electoral defeat—the French left in particular often criticizes Brussels’s supposedly excessively liberal economic policy. And pro-Europeans are disappointed with the meager results of Macron’s EU reforms, regardless of whether intra-European blockades or German reluctance are responsible.

Moreover, Macron’s road to victory may become more difficult if domestic policy issues dominate the election. The fast pace at which the government is reforming the labor market, the education system, and social policy is unsettling many French; the promised positive effects have so far failed to materialize. In order to be successful, Macron’s movement urgently needs some tangible successes.

A lot can happen before May 2019, but the most recent polls give the president reason to worry. A large majority of respondents have negative views of Macron’s record. He is considered arrogant and, after the recent resignations of the environment and interior ministers, a weak leader. The fact that both ministers were symbols of Macron’s cross-party government (Nicolas Hulot as an environmental activist without any background as a career politician, and the interior minister Gérard Collomb as a former socialist) raises questions about the durability of any new alliances. The European elections could turn into a neck-and-neck race between Macron and Le Pen.

Liberal Temptation

An alliance of pro-European forces can, moreover, only have success when all or at least most EU member-states are represented. There is more to this than having representation from seven member-states, the minimum required to form a grouping in the European Parliament. For only a broad-based movement can reach the critical mass necessary to change the balance of power in the European Parliament and do justice to its claim of pan-Europeanism. Two options are conceivable: either an entirely new movement, like the one Macron successfully created in En Marche!, or a movement based on already existing forces. Of course, the first would have the advantage of embodying the renewal Macron is advocating. Yet because of the complex relations inside the EU and the growing time pressure, the second option is more likely.

The main liberal grouping in the European Parliament, ALDE, appears to be interested in joining forces. The acting leader, Guy Verhofstadt, is already planning to campaign side by side with Macron: “We share not only the same analysis of the problem but also have more or less the same proposals. [Macron’s] speech in the Sorbonne was well received by the ALDE parties,” Verhofstadt told Ouest France on September 9.

It’s not yet clear what the cooperation will look like, but the goal is certain: ideally, after the election, the two sides want to form a grouping. In Germany, too, some (liberal) FDP politicians have long called for cooperation with the French president. While some differences seem irreconcilable, such as the question of a budget for the Eurozone, what matters is that Macron and other liberals share a common market-liberal and reform-oriented approach. Negotiations are underway to make Margrethe Vestager, the liberal EU competition commissioner from Denmark, the future Commission president on the strength of this alliance.

As fleshed-out as this plan may sound, such cooperation could be tricky for Macron. For one thing, the liberal label can be a burden in parts of Europe, especially in France, where many take it to mean growing social inequality and the dismantling of the welfare state. This danger is clear to Macron, who advocated for a “Europe that protects” in the presidential campaign and today ostentatiously criticizes the EU’s “ultraliberal” course. For another, the pro-Europeans cannot allow themselves to be imprisoned by party-political logic. If anything, Macron’s strategy is based on overcoming the traditional dividing line of right and left. But if he only cooperates with the liberals in the European elections, he would no longer be able to credibly advocate this strategy.

A Wider Alliance?

Indeed, the pro-European alliance that Macron desires is meant to thrive on a diversity of party-political preferences. Just as there is in France, where for the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic socialists, conservatives, and civil society representatives are sitting at the same cabinet table, there should also be an amalgamation of various groupings, of party families, in Europe. The motto: for Europe, against nationalism. Names of possible allies are already circulating. According to the most optimistic predictions, the conservative president of the European Council, Donald Tusk, the liberal prime minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, the socialist Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, and the radical-left Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, are all supporters. But officially nothing has been determined yet.

What looks promising on paper will have to overcome a lot of obstacles in practice. It is far from certain that the bigwigs from the two main groupings, the EPP (Christian Democrats) and the Socialists & Democrats (Social Democrats), will be prepared to turn their backs on their political families: that was only possible in France because the established parties had lost their credibility and thus any chance of electoral success. For many of their representatives, working with En Marche! was a question of political survival.

It’s not only that the political relationships are more complex in a European context. Some of the established “people’s parties” are also in better shape than their French counterparts, which makes radical reorganization more difficult. It’s also unclear how exactly cooperation would work in an alliance based on the common goal of combating nationalism. One wonders what actually unites Tsipras and Tusk with regard to the future of Europe.

Macron propagates the idea of a dichotomy between democrats and populists in order to mobilize as many pro-Europeans as possible for the elections. But this also generates another effect: the urgently necessary debate about the conservatives’ and social democrats’ thoroughly different concepts of Europe, which go well beyond populism or anti-populism, is swept under the rug. This is not just dangerous for the parties, as they risk further blurring the lines between them; it also prevents a real European debate about reforming the eurozone, migration policy, or the design of a social Europe.

At the moment, it’s others who are showing that clear political positioning and transnational movements are possible. Other new formations are staking a claim to build a pan-European movement. They are in the process of forming transnational lists. This is a good thing for European democracy, though it could weaken Macron’s alliance. The strongest competition certainly comes from Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister and the founder of European Spring. With his pro-European, progressive vision, Varoufakis is doing more than simply challenging the En Marche! claim to be unique. He is, by virtue of his left-wing roots, reintroducing the divide between left and right that Macron’s allies reject, and forcing conservatives and liberals to keep things in perspective.

Macron and his party have picked the basic tone for their campaign before the others have. Yet now the detailed work of coming up with a coherent strategy begins. The results of the “Grande Marche pour L’Europe”, a “listening tour” where En Marche! activists talked about Europe with everyday citizens, have been analyzed and are meant to provide the basis of the campaign program. Candidates have been able to apply for the electoral lists of the République en Marche for a few weeks now; the final list will be released in January. In parallel, better communication of the positive effects of Macron’s reforms is supposed to help improve his low poll numbers.

Unfamiliar Competition

In Berlin, Macron has hardly been able to get anywhere. Angela Merkel opposes an approach that assumes the division of Europe. Outspoken criticism came from Norbert Röttgen, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Bundestag: “If Mr. Macron would like to be the leader of a certain camp in Europe, he cannot be at the same time the leader of Europe,” he told Le Monde on September 6.

Furthermore, it remains axiomatic that the CDU and CSU belong to the EPP. Macron might have tried to attract progressive parts of the EPP by pointing to the fact that the grouping is also home to Viktor Orbán’s party, Fidesz. Yet the CDU preempted any such attempt by making a decisive contribution in the European Parliament to the triggering of the Article 7 procedure against Hungary. Cooperation with Macron would be delicate for EPP politicians, because if they do in fact decide to kick Fidesz out of the grouping before the 2019 elections, they would risk losing their status as the strongest parliamentary force.

Another question about Germany will become urgent if Macron has success with his pan-European movement. How can the two countries continue to work on Franco-German compromises in European politics? So far, France has sent a clear signal: Without Germany—in other words without the governing CDU/CSU—progress in Brussels is not possible. And yet this progress has so far failed to materialize. By the time of the elections, Merkel and Macron will not just be partners as heads of government, but also competitors as party representatives. That makes it more difficult to put forward Franco-German initiatives for Europe.

After the election, there will certainly be a new window for progress. But even if it’s hard to imagine an open rupture in Franco-German coordination, this will take place under new conditions, whether across new front lines or in new alliances.

The post Macron’s Second Coup appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Max Rossi

In 2018, it’s a familiar scene: In a shock to the political system, a motley band of single-issue activists and anti-establishment radicals rises from the ideological fringes to enter the parliament of one of Europe’s biggest states. As politicians from traditional parties look on in horror, the movement makes a flamboyant impact on parliamentary debate with eye-catching stunts and wild rhetoric. While journalists wonder whether these new MPs might be soft on Moscow, their party challenges an entrenched consensus over the state’s economic system and military alliance with the United States. Later it will be remembered as a wild first step in their long march through Europe’s institutions.

Let’s go back to 1983. The early years of the German Green Party, which caused much scandal upon its entry into parliament in that year, were characterized by a deeply held conviction among its members that environmental degradation and a nuclear arms race were generating a fundamental clash between the interests of the people and supposedly corrupt elites. In fact, many of the social movements that emerged from the political turmoil of the late 1960s cultivated an attitude of total opposition to the established order that in 2018 would be considered a form of radical populism.

As the German political scientist Klaus von Beyme has pointed out, the Greens only began to distance themselves from their early populist style after entering a coalition government in the federal state of Hesse in 1985; in the subsequent years, their skepticism vis-à-vis European integration and their suspicion of all things military would gradually be tempered or abandoned, leading to the emergence of the pragmatic movement that many today see as the best hope of protecting the moral foundations of liberal democracy from a very different populist wave.

Unique Ideological Patterns

Comparing previous outsider parties to the right-wing protest parties that have gained ground in recent years holds an important lesson: the social composition of an emerging party’s base and its initial ideological foundations are crucial to shaping how it evolves when it comes into positions of power. All European populist parties have managed to take advantage of popular discontent surrounding the eurozone crisis after 2010 and the refugee surge of 2015. But each one of them has its own unique ideological pattern, and its own movement structure that shapes its approach toward European integration. And while US political entrepreneurs such as Steve Bannon, UK euroskeptics such as Nigel Farage, or Vladimir Putin’s regime may hope that these populist movements will trigger the collapse of the European Union, many well-established right-wing populist movements need no external help. They have a more complex relationship with the European integration process than one might assume.

As much as European populists are anchored in the nationalist politics of their own societies, they also draw on ideological themes focused on the defense of a collective European space against internal or external threats. Potential enemies of a collective “Christian Europe” are often a feature of the rhetoric of populist leaders in countries such as Hungary, Italy, or the Netherlands. Yet while interaction with EU institutions has helped deepen links between populist movements, it has at times also fueled tensions between them over responses to the moments of crisis that have transformed European politics since 2008.

A Threat to the EU?

A deeper look at the underlying origins and strategic goals of key populist parties provides a firmer understanding of the extent to which they represent a threat to the established order of the EU. As such parties and their members gradually adjust to the continued survival of European institutions they had so fiercely opposed, another possibility has come into focus: right-wing populists may well attempt to harness European integration processes in the service of their own specific personal and ideological ambitions.

From France’s Marine Le Pen to Austria’s Herbert Kickl, senior figures in right-wing populist movements have shifted from total rejection of European institutions toward a focus on redirecting them toward an authoritarian defense of a vaguely defined “Christian Europe.” To analyze the emergence of right-wing movements in Europe only through the lens of “populism” is therefore to miss other factors of equal importance in shaping their behavior. Other key dimensions of their identity—such as cultural value systems, class affiliations, ethno-linguistic loyalties, attitudes toward the projection of military power, or particular foreign policy stances—often draw them into their own distinct policy trajectories once they begin to wield power in parliaments and governments.

Each of the political movements that have come to be associated with the rise of right-wing populism has its own particular origin story. France’s Front National, recently renamed Rassemblement National, blended the anger of veterans and expellees alienated by the outcome of the Algerian War with the remnants of a 1950s Poujadiste movement suspicious of social change. It rallied its supporters around themes focused on fear of immigration and supposed threats to France’s sovereignty.

Italy’s Lega Nord has gone through several transformations, starting as an early 1990s independence movement for Italy’s North under the bombastic leadership of Umberto Bossi and later eveloping into a vehicle for the all-Italian nationalism of his equally voluble if rather more strategically deft successor Matteo Salvini, without ever abandoning its suspicion of non-Italian outsiders or commitment to low regulation and tax cuts.

Deutschtum on the Up

Emerging more recently, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) was initially founded as part of a backlash against the German government’s policies during the eurozone crisis. Yet after several leadership changes, the AfD’s identity has shifted from Deutschmark patriotism towards far more right-wing, anti-migration, and anti-Islam positions. With Austria’s Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ), a combination of neo-liberal economic policies coupled with an emphasis on German as the basis of Austria’s ethno-linguistic identity has proved a path to electoral success since the early 1980s. Yet this Deutschtum (German-ness) ideology has also fueled tensions with neighboring states. Slovenia is concerned by the willingness of FPÖ leaders to toy with hostility to Austria’s Slovenian minority communities: Italy is worried by irredentist claims on its South Tyrol region which has a German-speaking majority. By contrast, under the leadership of Geert Wilders, the Dutch Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV) has largely remained a single-issue party, whose identity is defined by a relentless hostility to Islam and Muslim immigrants in what it claims to be a defense of European liberal values.

Along with movements hostile to the established milieus that dominated the politics of the EU until the early 2000s, there are parties often identified with populism that are less hostile to the so-called establishment. One example is Hungary’s Fidesz party, which under the leadership of Viktor Orbán since 2010 has used right-wing populist themes such as hostility to migration and fascination with Russian authoritarianism to consolidate its hold on power. Yet it hasn’t broken with the network of Christian Democratic parties united within the European Peoples Party in the European Parliament.

So although it vehemently opposes further migration and what it calls the meddling of EU institutions, Fidesz regularly backs the Christian Democratic consensus in many policy areas. It also emphasizes the Christian dimension of Europe’s identity in a way that echoes the rhetoric of the founding generation of post-1945 Christian Democratic statesman such as Alcide de Gasperi and Konrad Adenauer. Similarly, Poland’s Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (“Law and Justice,” or PiS) often uses populism to mobilize support. Yet its close relationship with factions within the Catholic Church and the influence of pre-1939 national conservative traditions on its leadership have anchored it in a belief system that does not mesh well with the ideological flexibility of other European parties associated with populist politics.

Then there are loose voter coalitions such as Italy’s Movimiento 5 Stelle (M5S) for whom populism is the glue that holds disparate ideological factions together. M5S has updated a classic populist hostility toward vaguely defined elites by claiming that the internet can provide a new means of divining the will of the people. But it remains a fractious alliance with a small leadership group that represents various milieus drawn from both the left and right of the Italian political spectrum. With such an ideologically diverse voter base, frequent authoritarian tendencies, and a willingness to shift policy goals overnight, M5S sits in a category of its own—the party is so completely defined by its thin-centered populist ideology that it is difficult to place in any of the main ideological camps at the heart of European politics.

The best way to determine which right-wing populist movements could construct robust Europe-wide alliances, and which might struggle to find partners, is to look at how their ideologies affect policy. This is particularly the case when it comes to the three dominant themes that have helped to define the development of the EU in the past decade: the financial crisis and the shakeup of the eurozone structures that followed; the responses to Russian expansionism; and how to manage migration and the EU’s external borders. Only when looking at how right-wing populist parties interact with one another over these three key issues is it possible to establish whether there is enough ideological convergence between them to represent a unified force that could either undermine the EU or reconfigure European integration processes along authoritarian lines.

Fundamental Disagreements

The outlook for such populist cooperation is decidedly mixed. While populist parties might share anti-migration stances, a neo-liberal economic outlook, and hostility toward European institutions, there are still fundamental disagreements over eurozone policy. Certainly, the challenge posed by Italy’s governing coalition to the structures of the eurozone has elicited enthusiasm from AfD politicians hoping for the euro’s demise. But when Lega and M5S politicians demand further funding from the EU their supposed populist allies in Germany and the Netherlands are quick to express their outrage. And even though they share frustrations over the role of the European Court of Justice, the deep gulf between Lega and PiS over how to respond to Russian expansionism prevents any form of cooperation. Moreover, while prominent populist leaders like Matteo Salvini and Alice Weidel might agree in general about the need to harden the EU’s external borders, disagreements swiftly rise to the surface when the debate shifts to how refugees and migrants who land in Italy should be distributed across the EU.

For all the talk of how Orbán and Salvini might be developing a political relationship that could lead to the defection of Fidesz from the European People’s Party (EPP) to a European alliance of populists, such divergences over specific policies, as well as wider differences in social and ideological outlook, will likely continue to hamper the ability of right-wing populists to cooperate when it comes to concrete policy. Indeed, the need for right-wing populist movements to retain the loyalty of nationalist voters can drive them into conflict with each other. The angry exchanges between Lega and FPÖ over Austrian government proposals to make dual citizenship easier to achieve for German-speakers in the Italian region of South Tyrol is only one of many instances where irredentist tendencies have undermined the ability to build a Europe-wide populist alliance.

This is the paradox at the heart of national populist parties’ attempts to cooperate at the European level: in order to do so, they would need to find a common political language and shared ideological goals, and foster a sustained effort to reconfigure the European integration process. It is already evident how such coordination could work. For over a decade, far-right youth groups such as the Identitarian Movement that provide the recruiting grounds for populist parties have been developing the ideological basis for such Europe-wide political networks. By emphasizing a shared European identity based on deeply authoritarian concepts of racial supremacy, such movements foster a belief among their adherents that Europe needs to be defended from various external and internal threats, including migrants and the United States.

Men on the Inside

Prominent figures in the US, Russia, and the United Kingdom may well hope that right-wing populist movements will shatter European institutions. But the shared structural and ideological characteristics between parties such as the Lega, AfD, or Rassemblement National may well take them beyond a grudging acceptance of European integration towards an active embrace of those aspects they believe match their own goals.

The Austrian and Italian governing coalitions, both with a strong populist presence, are already throwing their weight behind collective European border control initiatives overseen by Frontex. This is true, too, for the expansion of military and policing operations across North Africa and the Sahel which are designed to choke off the main African migration routes to European territory. Rather than representing a mortal threat to European integration, there are signs that European right-wing populists could pull European institutions into a more militarized stance that reflects these parties’ willingness to project collective power into states along the EU’s borders in a profoundly illiberal fashion.

It’s not a coincidence that Green parties across Europe seem most attuned to how right-wing populist movements could subvert European integration. After all, they have gone through their own process of adaptation to and cooption of European institutions. The ferocious political debates that often pit Green parties—who advocate greater cooperation and openness when it comes to relations with the EU’s neighbors—against right-wing populists who embrace the militarization of the EU’s collective external borders have come to mark one of the key dividing lines of contemporary European politics. Yet it should be no surprise that a European integration process that has profoundly influenced every aspect of European life may well transform the ideology and strategic goals of some of its most vehement opponents. To prevent right-wing populists from turning Europe into the closed fortress of their fantasies is perhaps the next great challenge for those who believe in a Europe whole and free.

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© REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

Political journalists in Berlin often do a thing called a Hintergrundgespräch. This “background conversation,” as the English translation would be, involves gathering in an airless room of a ministry or a party HQ with a group of favored colleagues and some alpha politician, who then tells you what’s what. Or what’s really what. The mood is relaxed and pally, and the etiquette is: recording devices and photos are not allowed, and though notes may be taken, direct quotes can’t be used. Free drinks are provided. The first time I went to a Hintergrundgespräch, not very long ago, a heavy realization dawned on me: This is why people hate us. This is why people vote AfD. I’m not the only journalist who feels that the political class and the press in the capital have gotten used to their cozy arrangement. This exacerbates the impression that political journalists are being spoon-fed their stories by politicians.

For a country that guards stability so carefully, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is an electoral phenomenon. In its five-year life, this unashamedly populist and often ill-disciplined party has become the third biggest group in the German parliament, the Bundestag, and has put representatives into all state parliaments—the last one on October 28 in Hesse. And it’s not certain that they’ve plateaued. The AfD’s popularity has only ballooned since the national election breakthrough in 2017: more than 15 percent of German voters currently declare for the AfD, up from 12.6 percent in September 2017. The party’s stronghold is in eastern Germany, where it attracts nearly one in four voters.

The AfD is still fundamentally repugnant to all the other mainstream parties, who have ruled out joining coalitions with them (though the resolve of the Christian Democrats in Saxony, a bastion of right-wing politics, is beginning to crumble). This is mainly because it harbors open racists and flirts with revisionism about Germany’s remembrance for the Holocaust (a shrill dog-whistle to Germany’s big neo-Nazi scene).

A couple of obvious factors have helped the AfD get itself established in the German party system in the past year: weariness with Chancellor Angela Merkel after she formed yet another centrist government between her conservatives and the Social Democrats, coupled with exasperation that this new Merkel administration has done little more than lurch from one crisis to the next, tearing itself apart over the perennial problem of refugee policy. In fact, migration is almost never out of the news, even though the “refugee crisis” is now more than three years old, and Merkel has done all she can within legal limits to close Germany’s borders.

Florian Hartleb, political scientist and author of a book on European populism, thinks this last point is crucial. Ever since Merkel’s fateful decision in 2015, the media made things too easy for the AfD, first by relentlessly demonizing them, and then by keeping their most important issue on the front pages.

The media has done some soul-searching recently: a 2017 study by the Hamburg Media School and Leipzig University found that the majority of news outlets had taken on the government’s “slogans” on migration too uncritically. Merkel’s famous line “Wir schaffen das” (“We’ll manage that”) had simply been adopted, rather than scrutinized. “It was easy for the AfD to play the counterpart,” said Hartleb. “And the more we talk about migration, the more the chances are for the AfD.”

A Party of Pessimists

But the origins of the AfD pre-date 2015, and, if you believe the party’s strategists, the refugee crisis was simply the moment when 15 years of frustration with complacent German centrism finally crystallized around it.

“The refugee crisis broke the trust in established politics,” says Rainer Erkens, an AfD member who lives in Berlin. “For years politicians were doing things that they did not have a mandate for, which were not even remotely an issue in elections.” He goes on to list all the decisions made by successive German governments “over the people’s heads”: creating the euro, the Hartz IV social welfare reforms, abandoning nuclear power, abolishing military service, and bailing out Greece in the aftermath of the eurozone debt crisis.

This is what, Erkens believes, made Merkel’s decision to open borders in 2015 the last straw for many voters. “People realized that politicians were pursuing policies that had nothing to do with election campaigns. They were getting majorities in elections for policies they’re not even pursuing.”

But there’s another feeling that AfD voters share, according to Erkens: an all-pervading pessimism. “If you really want to understand why people like the AfD, then you have to see that people who vote for the AfD have a specific image of Germany. And this image is: Germany is going down the drain,” he says. Then comes another list: the images of Germany’s deterioration; the state of the Bundeswehr; the “energy transition” to renewable sources running out of steam; the debts of other EU countries; the alleged “Islamization” of German society; and, as Erkens puts it, “what does climate protection even mean, and how much will that cost us?” All these are the weeds creeping underfoot, destabilizing Germany’s economic power.

That’s why, as Erkens tells it, AfD voters are unaffected by the scandals that outrage everyone else. One of the more recent ones came in June, when party leader Alexander Gauland triggered a tsunami of outrage because of a speech describing the Third Reich as “a bird-shit in a thousand years of successful German history.”

The AfD voters’ pessimism supersedes all such scruples. “If you have the feeling that Germany is going down the drain, and if there is one party, the AfD, which is saying exactly that, then you couldn’t care less that Gauland uses the term ‘bird-shit’ when he talks about the Nazi chapter in German history,” says Erkens. “The AfD is much more important than one politician possibly talking nonsense. It’s in this context quite irrelevant.”

The Media Effect

More than this, the media’s fixation on such outbursts, and on dubious figures like Björn Höcke, who was almost thrown out of the AfD in 2017 for describing Berlin’s Holocaust monument as a “memorial of shame,” only pushes AfD voters into protecting their leaders.

That is at least what Ronald Gläser, AfD spokesman in Berlin, believes. “I think a lot of people in the AfD weren’t particularly crazy about that, but it’s not important enough—it’s forgotten about three days later,” he says. “Those outrage issues do accompany us, but they don’t harm us that much. And of course, when the media reports about us so hysterically, that is useful for us.”

And anyway, as Gläser acknowledges, the AfD needs Höcke to keep the party’s extremist elements on its side: “We can’t just throw a leading figure of our party out—or at least if we did, it would have a huge effect. Björn Höcke is an important figure for the AfD.”

Hartleb, the political analyst, says deliberately baiting the media is a calculated strategy. “There is this taboo-breaking logic: you make a bald provocation, then you say it was just a misunderstanding, then you go one step further,” he said. “It doesn’t help anymore to just blame the voters of the AfD. It doesn’t help to say that these are neo-Nazis. And it also doesn’t help to bring them into coalition—Germany can’t do this because of its past.”

So if you can’t beat them or join them, what strategies are left? October’s election in Bavaria showed that only the parties that are not divided over migration are winning—the AfD and the Greens. Either you’re for a diverse society or you’re against it. This, as Erkens says, is where the political debate in Germany is headed: “In the future there will be two big parties: the Greens and the AfD. Those will be the poles, and between them there will be three other parties crawling around, at 10 or 15 percent: the SPD, FDP, and the CDU … They will have a little more of one or the other side. It’s perfectly feasible that that will be our party system.” 

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© REUTERS/Ralph Orlowski

Germany’s partners in Europe have largely given up. French President Emmanuel Macron, who once pinned such high hopes on the renewal of the Franco-German engine, doesn’t even talk about large-scale EU reform any more. The president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, has also given up castigating the German government, as he no longer expects much from Berlin. That’s how low expectations of Angela Merkel in her fourth term as chancellor have fallen.

For the past two years, Merkel and her government have spent their time sitting on their hands. First, it was the German election campaign that supposedly made it impossible to take any kind of significant decision. Then it took another six months to form a government. But by the time the new grand coalition finally took office, the upcoming regional elections in Bavaria and Hesse precluded any kind of meaningful policy. There is always something on the German political calendar that one could use as a pretext to delay bold action.

All of that is finally over and done with, but Berlin is still not moving because the December party congress of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is monopolizing attention. That’s when a new party head will be elected—Merkel, after the enormous losses her conservative bloc incurred in Bavaria and Hesse, is not standing again, though she intends to remain chancellor. Though depending on who gets the job and which political wing of the party he or she stands for, Merkel may not even be able to last her full term.

Much of this is her own fault. In the first half of 2017, Merkel made a huge strategic error. Having decided to run for a fourth term as German chancellor, she went for an anodyne campaign message. It was centered around ideas of social cohesion, prosperity, and security, but offered very little in terms of the bigger picture or even concrete policy. Most importantly, Merkel failed to engage her voters on Europe.

2017, of course, was the year that Emmanuel Macron, with the promise to renew the European Union, defeated the right-wing populist Marine Le Pen in France’s presidential elections. It was also the year that tens of thousands of European took to the streets in the Pulse of Europe movement to show their support for European integration.

Discussions over the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome on which today’s EU is built revealed a willingness in many member states to consider serious reforms. Institutionally, the timing was right, too. After the Bundestag elections of September 2017, a unique window for reform opened: there were 20 precious months until the European Parliament elections in May of 2019 in which to agree on and adopt change.

Containing the AfD

Politically, nobody would have benefitted more from a European relaunch than Merkel. Only decisions at the EU level can deliver workable solutions on issues as diverse as trade policy, digital competitiveness, defense, and eurozone reform. Any of those would directly benefit Germany.

But where Merkel is most dependent on Europe is the refugee issue: she needs a policy that would allow her to keep the number of people coming to Germany under control without having to disown her own decision in 2015 to keep the country’s borders open to a million refugees from Syria and elsewhere. A European asylum agency with standardized procedures, new rules for distributing refugees among between EU countries or sharing the costs of sheltering them, or even the establishment of offshore camps—any of these reforms would have done much to strengthen Merkel’s domestic position.

And with those European achievements in hand, Merkel’s fourth term in the chancellery would have gone much smoother at home. She could have kept Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, who twice came close to toppling her government this year, far more closely under control. A pro-European narrative centered around more accountability and democracy in Brussels as well as workable EU policies on refugees and the euro would also have helped contain the German right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).

France showed that it was possible to galvanize voters around a new European project; in Germany, this would have been even easier. Europe, after all, still is very popular with Germans. A recent poll commissioned by the European Parliament showed 81 percent of Germans in favor and only five percent against their country’s EU membership. 76 percent of Germans also said that EU membership was bringing Germany tangible advantages.

A Catalyst for Domestic Policies

But Merkel passed up this chance—most significantly in 2017, when running a more EU-focused campaign could have given her a mandate to overcome the more Euroskeptic voices within her own coalition. Later, she could have come up with a proper response to Macron’s Sorbonne speech of September 2017, meeting the French president halfway. Or she could have put forward a European plan of her own once she was reinstalled as chancellor. Even today, she could attempt to craft a narrative that explains her own political goals and vision of Germany’s future within the wider European context.

But she hasn’t, and chances are she won’t. Merkel is always brilliant on detail, and she is very good in a crisis, but she doesn’t do the big picture. And in contrast to someone like Wolfgang Schäuble, now the president of the Bundestag, she is not an instinctive European. Rationally, Europe is a necessity for Merkel, but she doesn’t seem to have an emotional commitment. Nor, to be fair, do most of the politicians in her government.    

When her coalition partner, the SPD, was led by Martin Schulz, a former president of the European Parliament, it insisted on a very pro-European agenda for the government. But when Schulz was forced to step down, that part of the coalition agreement was orphaned.

Acting on Europe would have been a catalyst for a wide array of domestic issues. Merkel’s passivity means that her government gives the go-ahead to some individual policy projects but is unable to place them in a greater context. The costs are heavy—for Germany as a whole because it lacks a sense of direction, but also politically for Merkel and her coalition partners.

If national elections were to take place now, her conservative bloc would get just over 25 percent of the vote, according to the latest polls. That’s down from almost 33 percent at the Bundestag elections 13 months ago. Her junior partner, the SPD, would fare even worse with only 14 percent, down from 20.5 percent last year. This would relegate the SPD to fourth place behind the Greens and the right-wing AfD. And it’s a vicious circle: as despair is spreading, Germany’s governing parties are becoming ever more risk-averse. Early elections are to be avoided at almost any cost.

Bad Weather Warning

Europe, however, has suffered the most. In crisis situations—such as Brexit and US President Donald Trump’s attacks on free trade—Merkel and the EU still react well. But the chancellor’s prolonged silence on the future of the European project means that the EU has wasted two crucial years.

Given the rising tensions between eastern and western members states as well as the north and the south, institutional reform would always have been difficult. With Italy now governed by a strongly nationalist and openly anti-European coalition, it seems impossible.

Italy—and behind it, other euroskeptic governments emboldened by Rome’s stance—also prevents the establishment of a common asylum system or the tightening of rules for the common currency. With Italy insisting on a budget that the EU has rejected and the global economy deteriorating, the next euro crisis is on the cards.

In March 2019, there will be an EU summit in the Romanian city of Sibiu. It was supposed to be the meeting where the final agreement on renewing European integration would be delivered, but instead it will mark the closing of the window of opportunity. In May, the European Parliament election amounts to something like a reset button for Brussels. A new Commission will be appointed, which will need time to get on its feet and define its political program. At the same time, the dynamics within the Strasbourg parliament will fundamentally change. With the rise of right-wing populism, the main fault line will for the first time run between pro-Europeans and anti-Europeans.

Jean-Claude Juncker, in his speech on the state of the European Union in September 2017, called on leaders to “fix the roof while the sun is shining.” It’s a pity that Angela Merkel didn’t listen.

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© REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

It’s November 4, 2020. Across the United States—and across the globe—liberals and Trump-opposing conservatives alike drag themselves from fitful sleep, red-eyed and exhausted, filled with dread, incomprehension, and déjà vu. How did he do it again?

The night before, Donald Trump won reelection as president—despite a chaotic and frustrating first term, multiple investigations, and a historically low approval rating. Of course, Trump had won in 2016 despite many of the same weaknesses, but that win was thought to be a fluke, a product of a weak Democratic candidate, Russian interference, and Trump’s novelty. His critics never imagined lightning could strike a second time.

With a second term, Trump has the potential to be among the most influential presidents in American history. The reelection gives him a mandate to continue his goal of dismantling historic U.S. alliances and trade deals. It means Congress will likely finally acquiesce to building the border wall that the president continues to demand. Trump has already started roundups of millions of illegal immigrants and cut the number of refugees the nation accepts to barely anything, and he’s now expected to forge ahead with plans to curtail legal immigration as well. Having appointed three justices to the Supreme Court in his first term, Trump will likely notch at least another or two in his second term, solidifying the first truly conservative court in almost a century for decades to come. The federal government will be radically reoriented around his form of laissez-faire conservatism. Stung by the Mueller investigation and impeachment attempt of his first term, Trump is also poised to purge the Justice Department and give the president broad protection from scrutiny and investigation.

In the press and the academy, Trump is almost uniformly recognized as a catastrophe, the worst president in history. And even though the public holds little regard for either institution, a majority of voters agree with them, and voted for Trump’s Democratic opponent by a margin of several million. It’s no matter: through a mixture of shrewd strategy and massive spending—both radical departures from the 2016 campaign—Trump has managed to wring out a sizable margin in the electoral college. It’s not an unalloyed victory: once again, Trump failed to win the popular vote, though he continues to insist otherwise. He is now considering new maneuvers to curtail the press, which keeps peskily pointing out his lies and hyperbole. For now, the president is willing to take a moment to enjoy his triumph. They said it couldn’t be done, and he did it—twice.

It Really Could Happen

Is this a euphoric daydream of Trump fans? The dystopian nightmare of pessimistic progressives? Or simply a plausible prediction about 2020?

Perhaps it is all three. Despite the struggles of the Trump presidency, which are acknowledged at home, abroad, and even dramatically inside the administration, as an astonishing anonymous New York Times op-ed in September 2018 demonstrated, the president stands a decent chance at reelection in two years’ time. There are other possible scenarios, as we’ll discuss later, but the prospect of a Trump reelection is both so widely disregarded among his many critics and also so plausible that it deserves serious priority consideration. With the midterm elections over, Trump is expected to ramp up the pace of his campaigning, even though the presidential election is two years away.

The fact is Trump enjoys campaigning far more than he enjoys governing. He never stopped talking about the 2016 race, filed for reelection the day he entered office, and has held campaign-style rallies throughout his presidency. His aspiring rivals will be on the trail soon, too. For years, American political analysts have talked about the “permanent campaign,” which refers to the importation of election-style tactics into governance. Trump has literally created such a permanent campaign, keeping the election-style tactics while largely ignoring the work of governance, save for a few top priorities.

In his bid for a second term, Trump will benefit from systemic features of US politics as well as a few attributes particular to himself. Let’s start with the system. First, incumbency is a powerful force. Since the Second World War, only two elected presidents who sought a second term have failed to win it. One, Jimmy Carter, was hobbled by a poor economy. The second, George H.W. Bush, was also hurt by the economy and by the fact that Republicans had run the country for 12 years, enough for voters to be ready for a change. Even presidents whom voters have harshly punished during midterm elections by pounding their allies in Congress have won reelection (Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama). So have those overseeing failing wars (Richard Nixon, George W. Bush).

The incumbency advantage is particularly strong if the economy is good. With remarkable consistency, a president overseeing a growing economy wins at the polls, even if—as is usually the case—he had little to do with creating it. As of writing, the American economy is chugging forward. Employment and stocks are both up, and while wage growth remains frustratingly slow, it is positive. A lot could change between now and November 2020, and some economists believe the US is due for a recession, but as long as current trends hold, Trump has the wind at his back.

White vs. Non-White Voters

Trump also benefits from the peculiarities of the American electoral system. For years before his election, progressive demographers have pushed the “Emerging Democratic Majority” theory. It  holds that as white voters shrink as a portion of the population, the new makeup of the electorate, with greater shares of black, Hispanic, and Asian voters, as well as younger voters of all races, will slant heavily toward liberal candidates. Barack Obama’s two victories, carried by surging votes from African Americans, convinced the theory’s proponents they were right. A high-profile Republican Party “autopsy” of Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012 concurred, arguing that the party needed to open up to non-white voters or risk irrelevance. In the meantime, Democrats benefited from their legacy of strong support in the Rust Belt. There, the shrinking but still large number of blue-collar workers would provide Democratic candidates with a built-in electoral-college advantage. This “firewall” could protect the party until the minority youth movement arrived.

Then Trump came along and demolished both of these basic premises for electoral forecasting. The 2016 race proved that a candidate could still win by relying on white votes—in fact, he could win enough white votes to be elected while explicitly stoking racial grievances. Meanwhile, the return of minority votes to pre-Obama norms suggested that only a rare Democratic candidate can produce the high turnout required to win. At the same time, Trump demolished the Rust Belt firewall, winning Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and coming close in Minnesota.

On the remade electoral map, it is Republicans who have the built-in edge. If Trump can hold most of the states he won in 2016, he’s well on his way to victory. Meanwhile, the list of Republican states that Democrats can hope to flip is short. Liberals are hopeful about someday taking over Texas, as well as minority-heavy Southern states like Georgia, but that’s likely an election cycle or two away. The minority surge is coming, but it’s still on the horizon. In the medium to long term, relying on white votes and racially divisive rhetoric may well be suicidal for the Republican Party, but Trump will be long gone by the time it’s too late.

Trump’s Palace Media

Finally, Trump benefits from his media environment. First, he has the unstinting support of what effectively are palace media. Partisanship in the press is nothing new, but for decades, the United States had nothing resembling the party-aligned organs that exist in many other democracies. Instead, there was a center-left mainstream press that mostly aimed for objectivity, and a small, scrappy conservative media alternative. The right-wing press has grown in strength for the last three decades, but in the Trump era, it has reached its apotheosis, becoming a servant not so much of conservatism as of Trump himself.

The most prominent example is of course Fox News, where star anchor Sean Hannity reportedly speaks to the president daily, but there are dozens of other important outlets of all sizes. The network’s former head, ousted for covering up sexual harassment, is now Trump’s communications director. These conservative media outlets wield enormous influence over their audiences. John Dean, the Richard Nixon aide-turned-informant, has said his boss would have survived Watergate if Fox News had existed to spin alternative narratives.

At the same time, trust in the media as a whole is low—in part thanks to unrelenting attacks in the conservative press—though it has rebounded somewhat since the beginning of Trump’s term. A certain segment of the population will dismiss anything that CNN or The Washington Post reports simply because CNN or The Washington Post reported it, which has lessened the impact of the impressive investigative journalism focussd on the Trump administration.

None of this is to discount the specific characteristics of the 2020 race. Trump’s flaws have been so extensively rehearsed that it’s easy to lose sight of his strengths as a politician. One reason why so many observers didn’t take Trump seriously in 2016 was that for years, businessmen had announced their arrival in politics and expected it to be easy, only to flame out. But unlike his failed predecessors, Trump possesses an unequalled instinct for connecting with voters and exploiting their grievances. One of his great weaknesses is also a great strength: He is willing to do and say almost anything, and he shows no sense of shame.

A Prolifically Mendacious Figure

The most important skill Trump learned in business and cross-applied to politics is media manipulation. His reputation in business always far outstripped his success, because he was so adept at courting coverage, and he quickly applied that to campaigning, offering nonstop press conferences and interviews (he only later curtailed access.) As the 2016 campaign showed, the traditional media is ill-equipped to deal with a prolifically mendacious figure like Trump. As a candidate, he perfected the art of making an outrageous and often false statement and then quickly changing the focus by replacing it with another outrageous and often false statement. This means that no story ever got full scrutiny, but Trump was constantly the center of attention. According to one media tracking firm, Trump captured the equivalent of $5 billion in advertising in the 2016 election. There’s no indication the mainstream press has solved the problem of how to cover Trump without playing into this ploy. If anything, it’s harder than ever to avoid taking his bait now because he’s the president of the United States.

Although Trump is deservedly known for his dishonesty, he is surprisingly dogged in pursuing his core campaign promises, even over the noisy objections of his Republican allies and even when it’s clear that by keeping a vow to his base, he is undermining his popularity with the nation at large. Though he has been repeatedly stymied, he has shown no indication of letting go of his dream of a wall on the border with Mexico. He has pursued trade wars even when they have begun to hurt American consumers and producers. He withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal over the objections of his advisers. His Supreme Court picks have been the conservative Christian crusaders he promised—in contrast to previous Republican presidents who, despite more religious piety and commitment to conservative ideals, chose moderate justices.

Trump is also expected to enter the election with a huge campaign fund. While he ran his 2016 race on the cheap, he won’t do that again. By summer of 2018, he had already amassed close to $100 million. Trump also benefits from a Republican Party that not only isn’t ambivalent about him, as it was two years ago, but has largely been reshaped in his image.

Finally, Trump could once more be lucky in his choice of opponents. Hillary Clinton was a slow-moving and clumsy candidate who cleared the field in 2016. The 2020 field is crowded, with no obvious standard-bearer. The Democratic primary will likely be expensive and bruising. While there are many potential candidates, all have major possible flaws: Too old (Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders), too young (Cory Booker, Kamala Harris), too boring (Kirsten Gillibrand, Eric Garcetti), too exciting (Michael Avenatti), too liberal (Sanders, Warren), too moderate (Biden), and so on.

Backlash against Midterm Winners

While Democrats are expecting midterm victories this November, there’s a real danger of overreach that comes with renewed heft in Congress. The party has already planned extensive investigations into alleged corruption as well as other schemes to confound Trump. It is true that Trump, as an unusually divisive figure who is despised by his opponents, is susceptible to inquiries. But aggressive pressure from opposition parties following midterm victories has backfired in the past. Voters swept Republicans into power in 1994 but opted to keep Bill Clinton two years later. After making Barack Obama’s life miserable by electing Tea Party Republicans in 2010, voters resoundingly reelected him in 2012.

Without knowing how the economy will perform for the next two years or a clear vision of how Democrats might behave with control of Congress, and without knowing whether Trump is likely to face a true crisis not of his own creating, it’s too early to declare him the 2020 favorite. But it’s well within reason that he could be.

Who Can Beat Him?

Nonetheless, Trump’s weaknesses are real, and it’s easy to envision him joining Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush as one-term presidents—one of the few things that would unite the three men. The question is who would beat him, and how.

Trump might choose not to run again. He will be 76 on election day 2020, older than any nominee in history. His first term has been beset with frustrations and investigations, he often seems plainly unhappy, and by some reports, he never especially wanted or expected to win in 2016. Given Trump’s defiant demeanor, it’s hard to imagine him ever resigning from office, but retiring after one term could give him a comparatively graceful exit. It would probably be a relief to him and the country.

Grace, then again, has never been Trumps’ strong suit. What would his opposition look like? At this stage, Trump seems likely to face some sort of primary challenge by fellow Republicans, with John Kasich generally considered the most eager contender. It’s no surprise that a president as unpopular as Trump would face a rival, but the president is in a surprisingly strong position to withstand it. Despite poor approval ratings overall, Trump’s remains extremely popular with Republican voters.

Though there will surely be calls for a third-party challenger, the American system as constituted continues to make it all but impossible for any third-party candidate to do more than play spoiler. Besides, the two most obviously formidable independent prospects have both ruled themselves out: Kasich said he’ll only run as a Republican, while perennial potential independent candidate Michael Bloomberg is exploring running as a Democrat.

The Democratic field remains packed and up for grabs, but the party’s options fit into three basic groups. The party could opt to nominate a reliable, familiar face: former Vice President Joe Biden, 2016 runner-up Bernie Sanders, or former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. They could opt for a fresh face—Senators Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, or Kamala Harris; Governor John Hickenlooper of Colorado; or Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, to name a few. Or voters could choose a wild-card candidate. It’s a sign of the desolation of the Democratic Party’s ranks of leaders, following the down-ballot losses of the Obama years and Clinton’s defeat, that each of these paths is fraught with danger.

Take the old reliables. Biden has run for president before, and has never fared well. He has something of Trump’s touch with blue-collar voters, but otherwise is out of step with the Democratic Party of today. He would be 77 when inaugurated. Sanders, also at the end of his career, surprised most observers in 2016, but it’s still unclear whether his dyspeptic leftism has broad enough appeal in a general election. Patrick was a well-regarded governor, but he has little national profile.

Fresh faces have the advantage of novelty but the danger of being unproven. Warren might be the strongest (and oldest) of the bunch, though she’s only ever run in very liberal Massachusetts. The highly ambitious Booker is charismatic but a political cipher. Harris has captured the imagination of many Democrats, but she’s only just barely arrived in the Senate. Gillibrand has a longer track record and the advantage of representing wealthy and populous New York, but she isn’t the most exciting candidate. As for Garcetti, no mayor has been nominated for the presidency since 1812. Hickenlooper is a heartthrob for centrist pundits but his broader appeal is unproven.

Democratic voters could also decide to fight fire with fire and choose an outsider, celebrity candidate to mirror Trump. The appetite for such a plan became clear in January 2018 when a speech by Oprah Winfrey at an awards show sparked widespread calls for her to run for president. She demurred, but others may not be so restrained. Howard Schultz, the former CEO of Starbucks, is said to be considering a run. Michael Avenatti, the brash lawyer who represents Stormy Daniels, the porn actor and director who claims to have had an affair with Trump, has declared his interest in running and has even visited the key early state of Iowa.

Driving the Minority Turnout

The preceding analysis makes barely any mention of what is often portrayed as the central battle in the Democratic Party: between the center-left and the quasi-socialist left wing. If Sanders or Biden won the nomination, that dispute might become operative. Otherwise, it’s likely to be beside the point. For one thing, even the more cautious, moderate candidates like Booker have increasingly adopted Sanders-esque policy ideas like a guarantee of a job for all able adults. For another, the priority for Democratic voters as a whole in 2020 likely is to choose a candidate who can beat Trump, regardless of what particular platform he or she proposes.

Given the party’s increasing reliance on minority and women’s votes, it is however difficult to imagine Democrats nominating a white man to lead their ticket this year, and perhaps for several cycles to come. There are some members of the party who believe the best way to beat Trump is to win back the blue-collar white voters who once backed Democrats but flipped to Trump in 2016. But the prevailing view at the moment holds that in a party with a large crop of women and minority candidates, and given Trump’s divisive rhetoric about women and minorities, nominating a white man is politically untenable.

That may be true. If so, the result will be that the party leans hard on driving turnout among minority voters, just as Obama did. The Democrats will also be able to rely on heavy turnout in large, strongly liberal states like California, Illinois, and New York—which will inflate the vote for the party’s presidential nominee, but won’t affect the electoral college, since all three states are reliably Democratic. But they’ll still have to fight to win back the Rust Belt states Trump clawed away in 2016. The Democratic candidate in 2020 could win the popular vote by a landslide or by a small margin, but if they win the electoral college it’s likely be a very tight victory. Or they could find themselves stunned and defeated by Trump once more. 

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Artwork © Dominik Herrmann

When Europe’s heads of government staggered bleary-eyed out of a Council meeting on the morning of June 29th, it looked as if they had broken the migration policy deadlock. Angela Merkel had the result she needed to keep her government together and calm her sister party, the Bavarian CSU. The new Italian prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, was also pleased– he had gotten promises of support from the rest of Europe with the migrants landing on his country’s Mediterranean coastline, and Italy was now “no longer alone.” With the ostensible breakthrough emerged a new term: “regional disembarkation platforms.” But what exactly was Brussels’ new baby?

The objective of these platforms, later called regional disembarkation “arrangements,” is to “provide quick and safe disembarkation on both sides of the Mediterranean of rescued people in line with international law, including the principle of non-refoulement, and a responsible post-disembarkation process.” According to various official EU documents, key elements of the concept are: having “clear rules for all,” support from the UN Refugee Agency, “partnerships on equal footing,” “no pull factors,” and “no detention, no camps.”

Emphatically Not Camps

Got it? OK, there’s more detail to come. But it’s notable that the EU fact sheet does not contain a sentence that plainly states what the disembarkation platforms are. No subject and predicate linked by a copula, not even an “appear” or “will become.” But remember, they are emphatically not camps.

This, though, is not just an example of obfuscatory bureaucrat speak, of which the EU is a master in English, run as it is by highly educated officials who often speak excellent English as a second or third or fourth language, peppering their statements with words like “informations” and “feedbacks” that are foreign to a native. The problem is that it’s very difficult to be clear about a concept that must be all things to all people.

Some parts about disembarkation platforms are somewhat clear. The core idea is to set up safe centers for processing asylum claims outside of EU borders, probably in safe countries in North Africa. This would “eliminate the incentive to embark on perilous journeys” across the sea in order to have the right to file an asylum claim. It would also help stop people smugglers, a noble goal. If a migrant at sea is rescued by a third-country vessel or by an EU vessel in international waters, he or she could be brought to one of the platforms. Those people not entitled to international protection should “be returned,” while those in need of protection could be resettled, though not all of them would get to go to Europe. In order to entice African countries to sign up, the EU will offer money, training, administrative support, and legal resettlement places.   

Kurz’ Idea

This is not a new concept. European leaders have long floated similar plans. At the restrictive end of the spectrum, Sebastian Kurz of Austria has pushed for “safe zones” in refugees’ countries of origin, which the EU would support “militarily.” Indeed, the 2016 EU agreement with Turkey is based on the principle of a third country processing migrants and preventing so-called irregular migration in exchange for EU aid and concessions. All such ideas are part of the EU’s push to externalize the migration problem by getting other countries to take more responsibility for people crossing their borders, which also defuses the issue politically and minimizes the EU’s legal responsibility by reducing contact with migrants.

Europe’s partners, though, quickly made clear how difficult it would be to implement “disembarkation platforms.” The UN Refugee Agency reportedly wrote a confidential letter insisting that any centers in third countries be “safe and dignified,” a tall order in, for example, key transit country Libya given the deplorable conditions and slave markets there. African heads of state responded by agreeing to reject Europe’s “easy, counterproductive solution,” as Morocco described it. According to recent reports, there is still no African country prepared to operate a platform.  No government is eager to be fully responsible for the centers, or risk having rejected asylum-seekers disappear into its territory.

Migration experts agreed that the idea was fanciful. Catherine Woollard of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles accused the EU of living in “externalization fantasyland,” of relying on countries taking back their citizens when they are unwilling or unable to do so. To a developing country, remittances from citizens working in Europe are often more valuable than extra foreign aid; and sometimes these countries are wary of reaccepting emigrants for whom they couldn’t provide jobs or services in the first place.

Too Few Legal Ways

Europe also offers too few legal resettlement places to really discourage illegal migration, as Elizabeth Collett and Susan Fratzke of the Migration Policy Institute point out. In March 2018, the UN had to temporarily suspend a program whereby refugees were flown from Libya to Niger for processing because the EU had only resettled a fraction of the already small number promised. The EU’s first scheme to force member states to take in refugees from Italy and Greece already collapsed when the Visegrad countries revolted. And cooperation has hardly improved since the June summit: in August, the Italian government refused for six days to allow a boat of Eritrean migrants to disembark in Sicily until Ireland finally agreed to take some in.

It’s easy to snipe from the sidelines. Illegal migration to Europe is an intractable problem that is only likely to get bigger, at least from the perspective of Europe’s politicians. And the announcement from Brussels that the EU had agreed on a migration solution was certainly a boon to Merkel and Conte. Just don’t expect “disembarkation platforms” to be the breakthrough for European migration policy, or the next new name for refugee centers to be much more than window dressing. Unless North Africa has a change of heart, the only relevant platforms will be the piers where people get off boats.

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