© REUTERS/Kacper Pempel

Eastern Europe is a region more internally divided than any other part of the continent. It is homogeneous only in ethnic terms—its population is almost entirely white (apart from some Roma populations in some countries), which makes it rather exceptional and ill-suited to the realities of a globalized world.

When modern national identities were emerging, most of today’s Eastern European countries were not even on the map. Their most prominent nationals were citizens of other countries, and their broader populations were generally poorly educated and politically disenfranchised. The common experience that ultimately united Czechs, Poles, Romanians, and Hungarians was communism.

The 19th-century experience of struggles for independence has made Eastern European countries more nationalistic and more sensitive to issues of sovereignty, while the experience of communism (which was often more nationalist than leftist) has discredited the political left. The legacy of communism is that the region is poorer, more backward, more corrupt, and cut off from immigration.

Eastern European countries also differ from their Western neighbors in terms of their economic model. They lack the experience of the postwar welfare state. Meanwhile, the fall of communism came at the height of faith in neoliberalism, which is why the capitalism that was introduced in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary (as well as Russia) is far more neoliberal that its equivalent in Germany, France, or Italy.

The Narcissism of Small Differences

All of these factors serve to differentiate Eastern Europe from the West and underlie its classification as one cultural-political region. But this is a region dominated by the narcissism of small differences, where no country wants to be compared to the others because they all aspire to join the West. Every country in the region suffers from the complexes of backward and aspiring countries, meaning that they are all constantly competing with each other in an attempt to prove they are better than their neighbors.

For example, the Poles look down on the Czechs for not having fought hard enough for their country, while the Czechs disdain the Poles for constantly engaging in battles that cannot be won. The Poles see their country as the region’s natural leader because it is larger and more populous. But no one else sees Poland in that role. The Czechs see themselves as the most modern and most Western nation in the region. Slovakia, Slovenia, and the Baltics are in the eurozone. The Hungarians, meanwhile, are the only ones in the region who have international ambitions: Viktor Orbán wants to be the leader of Europe’s populist right. Jarosław Kaczyński wants Europe to leave him alone, but he joins Orbán in his campaigns from time to time.

Eastern European societies know much less about each other than they do about Germany or Austria. Language, religion, culture—there is much more that divides us than unites us. This is true even for the historic incorporation into empires. The territories of today’s Poland belonged to three empires at various times, which is still evident in railway and road infrastructure, and even in voting patterns.

Monastery, Mob, or Madhouse

The common experiences of 19th-century nationalism and 20th-century communism make the region far more populist than Western Europe. But the region’s internal differences also mean that it is home to entirely different brands of populism.

Poland’s populism is ideological, while the Czech Republic’s resembles the iconic Czech literary character Josef Švejk in that it is half-witted and bumbling, and therefore less threatening. Hungary, meanwhile, has gangster populism. Poland’s ruling party, the Law and Justice Party (PiS), is like a monastery, Hungary’s Fidesz is like the mob, and Andrej Babiš’s ANO is like a madhouse. The populism of Slovakia’s former prime minister, Robert Fico, does not resemble anything—it is an invisible populism, although it involves the rather surreal element of cooperation with the Italian mafia. Fico’s invisible populism has proven the least populist, and fostered economic growth in Slovakia. On the other hand, it has also proved the most murderous—only Slovakia has experienced the killing of a journalist, most likely with the involvement of businessmen cooperating with government authorities.

As political scientists Martin Eiermann, Yascha Mounk, and Limor Gultchin of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change have shown, only in Europe’s post-communist east do populists routinely beat traditional parties in elections. Of 15 Eastern European countries, populist parties currently hold power in seven, are part of a ruling coalition in two more, and are the main opposition force in three.

Eiermann, Mounk, and Gultchin also point out that whereas populist parties captured 20 percent or more of the vote in only two Eastern European countries in 2000, today they have done so in 10 countries. In Poland, populist parties have gone from winning a mere 0.1 percent of the vote in 2000 to the current PiS government winning two consecutive parliamentary majorities. And in Hungary, support for Prime Minister Orbán’s Fidesz party has at times exceeded 70 percent.

Liberalism Is a Western Import

Hard data aside, we need to consider the underlying social and political factors that have made populism so much stronger in Eastern Europe. For starters, Eastern Europe lacks the tradition of checks and balances that has long safeguarded Western democracy. Unlike Poland’s de facto ruler, PiS chairman Kaczyński, Donald Trump does not ignore judicial decisions (so far, at least).

Or consider Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump and his campaign’s ties to Russia. Mueller was appointed by US Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a government official who is subordinate to Trump within the executive branch. But while Trump has the authority to fire Mueller or Rosenstein, he didn’t dare to do so. The same cannot be said for Kaczyński.

Another major difference is that Eastern Europeans tend to hold more materialist attitudes than Westerners, who have moved beyond concerns about physical security to embrace what sociologist Ronald Inglehart calls post-materialist values. One aspect of this difference is that Eastern European societies are more vulnerable to attacks on abstract liberal institutions such as freedom of speech and judicial independence.

This shouldn’t be too surprising. After all, liberalism in Eastern Europe is a Western import. Notwithstanding the Trump and Brexit phenomena, the United States and the United Kingdom have deeply embedded cultures of political and social liberalism. In Eastern Europe, civil society is not just weaker; it is also more focused on areas such as charity, religion, and leisure, rather than political issues.

Attractive for Losers and Winners

Moreover, in the vastly different political landscapes of Europe’s post-communist states, the left is either very weak or completely absent from the political mainstream. The political dividing line, then, is not between left and right, but between right and wrong. As a result, Eastern Europe is much more prone to the “friend or foe” dichotomy conceived by the anti-liberal German political and legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Each side conceives of itself as the only real representative of the nation and treats its opponents as illegitimate alternatives who should be disenfranchised, not merely defeated.

Another major difference between Eastern and Western European populists is that the former can count on support not only from the working class, but also from the middle class. According to research conducted by Maciej Gdula published in Krytyka Polityczna, political attitudes in Poland do not align with whether one benefited or lost out during the country’s post-communist economic transformation. The ruling party’s electorate includes many who are generally satisfied with their lives, and are benefitting from the country’s development.

For such voters, the appeal of the populist message lies in its provision of an overarching narrative in which to organize positive and negative experiences. This creates a sense of purpose, as it ties voters more strongly to the party. Voters do not develop their own opinions about the courts, refugees, or the opposition based on their own experiences. Instead, they listen to the leader, adjusting their views according to their political choices.

The success of the PiS, therefore, is rooted not in frustrated voters’ economic interests. For the working class, the desire for a sense of community is the major consideration. For their middle-class counterparts, it is the satisfaction that arises not from material wealth, but from pointing to someone who is perceived as inferior, from refugees to depraved elites to cliquish judges. Orbán and Kaczyński are experts in capitalizing on this longing.

Dissimilar Twins

Stalin, in the first decade of Soviet power, backed the idea of “socialism in one country,” meaning that, until conditions ripened, socialism was for the USSR alone. When Orbán declared, in July 2014, his intention to build an “illiberal democracy,” it was widely assumed that he was creating “illiberalism in one country.” Now, Orbán and Kaczyński have proclaimed a counter-revolution aimed at turning the European Union into an illiberal project.

After a day of grinning, backslapping bonhomie at the 2018 Krynica conference, which styles itself a regional Davos (Orbán was named its Man of the Year), Kaczyński and Orbán announced that they would lead 100 million Europeans in a bid to remake the EU along nationalist/religious lines. One might imagine Václav Havel, a previous honoree, turning in his grave at the pronouncement. And former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko, another previous winner, must be aghast: her country is being ravaged by Russia under President Vladimir Putin, the pope of illiberalism and role model for Kaczyński and Orbán.

The two men intend to seize the opportunity presented by the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum, which demonstrated that, in today’s EU, illiberal democrats’ preferred mode of discourse—lies and smears—can be politically and professionally rewarding. The fusion of the two men’s skills could make them a more potent threat than many Europeans may realize.

What Orbán brings to the partnership is clear: a strain of “pragmatic” populism. He has aligned his Fidesz party with the European People’s Party (the group in the European Parliament that brings together conventional, center-right parties including Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU), which keeps him formally within the political mainstream and makes the German chancellor an ally who provides political protection, despite Orbán’s illiberal governance. Kaczyński, however, chose to ally the PiS with the marginal Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists, and he quarrels almost ceaselessly with Germany and the European Commission.

Cynic vs. Fanatic

Moreover, Orbán has more of the common touch than his Polish partner. Like Donald Tusk, the former Polish prime minister who has served as President of the European Council since 2014 (and whose tenure is about to end), he plays soccer with other politicians. Kaczyński, by contrast, is something of a hermit, who lives alone and spends his evenings watching Spanish rodeo on TV. He seems to live outside of society, whereas his supporters seem to place him above it—the ascetic messiah of a Poland reborn.

It is this mystical fervor that Kaczyński brings to his partnership with the opportunistic Orbán. It is a messianism forged from Polish history—a sense that the nation has a special mission for which God has chosen it, with the proof to be found in Poland’s especially tragic history. Uprisings, war, partitions: these are the things a Pole should think about every day.

A messianic identity favors a certain type of leader—one who, like Putin, appears to be animated by a sense of mission (in Putin’s case, it is the same mission proclaimed by the czars: orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality). So, whereas Orbán is a cynic, Kaczyński is a fanatic for whom pragmatism is a sign of weakness. Orbán would never act against his own interests; Kaczyński has done so many times. By attacking members of his own coalition government, for example, Kaczyński lost power in 2007, only two years after he had won it. He seems to have no plans. Instead, he has visions—not of fiscal reform or economic restructuring, but of a new type of Poland.

Orbán seeks nothing of the kind. He doesn’t want to create a new-model Hungary; his only aim is to remain, like Putin, in power for the rest of his life. Having governed as a liberal in the 1990s (paving the way for Hungary to join both NATO and the EU) and lost, Orbán regards illiberalism as the means to win until he takes his last breath.

Different Motives, Identical Methods

Kaczyński’s illiberalism is of the soul. He calls those outside his camp “the worst sort of Poles.” Homo Kaczynskius is a Pole preoccupied with his country’s fate, and who bares his teeth at critics and dissenters, particularly foreign ones. Gays and lesbians cannot be true Poles. All non-Polish elements within Poland are viewed as a threat. The PiS government has not accepted a single refugee of the tiny number—just 7,500—that Poland, a country of nearly 40 million, agreed with the EU to take in.

Despite having different motivations for embracing illiberalism, Kaczyński and Orbán agree that, in practical terms, it means building a new national culture. State-funded media are no longer public, but rather “national.” By eliminating civil-service exams, offices can be filled with loyalists and party hacks. The education system is being turned into a vehicle for fostering identification with a glorious and tragic past. Only cultural enterprises that praise the nation should receive public funding.

For Kaczyński, foreign policy is a function of historical policy. Here, the two men do differ: whereas Orbán’s pragmatism keeps him from antagonizing his European and US partners excessively, Kaczyński is uninterested in geopolitical calculation. After all, a messiah does not trim his beliefs or kowtow; he lives to proclaim the truth.

So, for the most part, Kaczyński’s foreign policy is a tendentious history seminar. Poland was betrayed by the West. Its strength—today and always—comes from pride, dignity, courage, and absolute self-reliance. Its defeats are moral victories that prove the nation’s strength and courage, enabling it, like Christ, to return from the dead after 123 years of absence from the map of Europe.

The Four Lessons of Populist Rule

The conventional view of populism posits that an erratic ruler will enact contradictory policies that primarily benefit the rich. The poor will lose, because populists have no hope of restoring manufacturing jobs, despite their promises. And massive inflows of migrants and refugees will continue, because populists have no plan to address the problem’s root causes. In the end, populist governments, incapable of effective rule, will crumble and their leaders will either face impeachment or fail to win re-election.

Kaczyński faced similar expectations. Liberal Poles thought that he would work for the benefit of the rich, create chaos, and quickly trip himself up—which is exactly what happened between 2005 and 2007, when PiS last governed Poland. But the liberals were wrong: PiS has transformed itself from an ideological nullity into a party that has managed to introduce shocking changes with record speed and efficiency. In fact, recent years have brought us four lessons about what makes populist rule more durable.

First, no neoliberalism. Between 2005 and 2007, PiS implemented neoliberal economic policies (for example, eliminating the highest income-tax bracket and the estate tax). But since returning to power in 2015, it has enacted the largest social transfers in Poland’s contemporary history. Parents now receive a 500 złoty ($120) monthly benefit for every child. As a direct result, the poverty rate has declined by 20 to 40 percent, and by 70 to 90 percent among children. And that’s just the most discussed example. In 2016, the government introduced free medication for people over the age of 75. The retirement age has been reduced from 67 for both men and women to 60 for women and 65 for men. The government is also planning tax relief for low-income taxpayers.

The 500 złoty child subsidy has changed the political paradigm in Poland. Now, no electoral promise that is not formulated as a direct offer of cash can have any hope of appealing to voters. PiS won big in the European elections in May 2019 thanks to its promise of paying out a 13th month of retirement benefits, which was enacted a week before voters went to the polls. In the campaign ahead of the Polish parliamentary elections in October 2019 the party ran on a promise of almost doubling the minimum salary (from 2250 złoty in 2019 to 3000 złoty in 2020 and 4000 złoty in 2023).

Second, the restoration of “order.” Independent institutions are the most important enemy of populism. Populist leaders are control freaks. For populists, it is liberal democracy that leads to chaos, which must be “put in order” by a “responsible government.” Media pluralism leads to informational chaos. An independent judiciary means legal chaos. Independent public administration creates institutional chaos. And a robust civil society is a recipe for chronic bickering and conflict.

But populists believe that such chaos does not emerge by itself. It is the work of perfidious foreign powers and their domestic puppets. To “make Poland great again,” the nation’s heroes must defeat its traitors, who are not equal contenders for power. Populist leaders are thus obliged to limit their opponents’ rights. Indeed, their political ideal is not order, but rather the subordination of all independent bases of power that could challenge them: courts, media, business, cultural institutions, NGOs, and so forth.

Third, electoral dictatorship. Populists know how to win elections, but their conception of democracy extends no further. On the contrary, populists view the separation of government powers, minority rights, and independent media—all staples of liberalism—as an attack on majority rule, and therefore on democracy itself.

The political ideal that a populist government strives for is essentially an elected dictatorship. And recent US experience suggests that this can be a sustainable model. After all, everything depends on how those in power decide to organize elections, which can include redrawing voting districts or altering the rules governing campaign finance or political advertisements. Elections can be falsified imperceptibly.

Fourth, might makes right. Populists have benefited from disseminating fake news, slandering their opponents, and promising miracles that mainstream media treat as normal campaign claims. But it is a mistake to think that truth is an effective weapon against post-truth. In a post-truth world, it is power, not fact-checking, that is decisive. Whoever is most ruthless and has the fewest scruples wins.

To Defeat Populism, Be Ruthless

Populists are both unseemly and ascendant. Trump’s supporters, for example, have come to view tawdriness as evidence of credibility, whereas comity, truth, and reason are evidence of elitism. Those who would resist populism must come to terms with the fact that truth is not enough. They must also display determination and ruthlessness, though without becoming the mirror image of their opponents.

In postmodernity, nationalism does not disappear into thin air. Unfortunately, in Poland and elsewhere, the only ideology that has survived in the post-ideological era is nationalism. By appealing to nationalist sentiment, populists have gained support everywhere, regardless of the economic system or situation, because this sentiment is being fueled externally, namely by the influx of migrants and refugees. It does not have to be real; imagined dangers also work well. Polish anti-Semitism does not need Jews, anti-communism works without communists. Another good example are anti-migration feelings, which can be whipped up without a single migrant or refugee around.

Mainstream politicians, especially on the left, have no effective message on the issue. Opposing migration contradicts their ideals, while supporting it means electoral defeat.

But the choice should be clear. Either populism’s opponents drastically change their rhetoric regarding migrants and refugees, or the populists will continue to rule in Eastern Europe. Migrants and refugees lose in either scenario, but in the second, liberal democracy does as well. Such calculations are ugly—and, yes, corrosive of liberal values—but the populists, as we have seen, are capable of far nastier trade-offs.

Kaczyński had succeeded in establishing control over two issues near and dear to voters: social transfers and nationalism. As long as he controls these two bastions of voter sentiment, he is safe.

The post Eastern Differences appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Carlos Barria

The European Union usually plays only a subordinate role in the American debates on Europe. But recently, interest in the European Parliament elections has picked up markedly—focused mainly on the current upswing, real or imagined, of conservative or far right populist parties. And there is certainly someone who would welcome a strong result for these nationalist forces: US President Donald Trump.

After a troubled decade most US observers see the EU as a weakened organization. This perceived weakness hasn’t softened Trump’s ire, however. While frequently criticizing those governments that support further European integration, Trump lavishes attention on the nationalist governments in Warsaw and Budapest. Following Trump’s speech in Poland in 2017, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Budapest and Warsaw this February; a Berlin visit, planned for earlier this months, was canceled on short notice. And last week, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was a guest at the White House, allowing Trump to clearly indicate which political forces he is routing for in the European elections.

Prior to the Trump-Orbán meeting, both Republican and Democrat senators had called on the US president to address the Orbán government’s increasingly repressive actions against civil society and independent media organizations in Hungary. Instead, Trump praised Orbán (“respected all over Europe”) for his stance on immigration and that he had been “great with respect to Christian communities.” In other words, the president sided clearly with Europe’s nationalist, euroskeptic, and anti-liberal forces. For Orbán, whose Fidesz party has been suspended from the center-right EPP parliamentary group and whose government is in dispute with the EU, Trump’s support could not have come at a more favorable time.

Good and Bad Allies

Trump’s EU-critical stance has been reinforced by his National Security Advisor John Bolton, who openly opposes the supranational EU and sees in it an anti-American organization that deprives its member states of their national sovereignty. Like Trump, Bolton supports Brexit and has promised the United Kingdom special trade relations with the US after it leaves the EU. In addition, the Trump administration—similar to some members of the government of George W. Bush—seems to distinguish between EU members that are considered good and those that are considered bad partners for the US. The present aversion against the EU was also at play in the small, but symbolic step taken by the State Department at the end of 2018 to downgrade the diplomatic status of the EU delegation in Washington, DC. (It reversed the decision after protests.)

Meanwhile, similar to politics, the US news media, conservative and liberal, is particularly interested in the surge of the right-wing populists and nationalists in Europe. Fox News, whose commentators often share Trump’s EU-critical stance, argued that the election could become a tipping point in post-war European politics. Others zoomed in on the strong poll ratings for the Brexit Party in the UK and Nigel Farage’s announcement that his fight against the “globalist project that seeks to replace national democracies with unelected bureaucracies” would be continued after the election.

Breitbart News, the website once run by the one-time White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, also mostly focused on the UK campaign, reporting on Tony Blair’s “desperate” calls on the British not to vote for the Brexit Party. It also pointed to strong poll results for the French Rassemblement National and on Marine Le Pen’s call on Macron to step down if his party La République en Marche won’t come top in France in the European elections.

The Washington Post focused on the strength of Farage, Le Pen, and Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, but also reported on the difficulties the latter had to bring together all right-wing populist parties. The populist parties can only agree on a few topics beyond advocating for strong national borders, rejecting immigration, and combating Islamic terrorism, The Atlantic concludes.

A Trump-like Triumph?

The great interest among US observers in the right-wing populist movements can be partly explained by the fact that many see parallels to the developments in the US, and some wonder whether nationalist politics will continue to gain ground. Polls across Europe showed that “the forces that fueled President Trump’s rise are gaining, not losing, strength,” argued the conservative Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen. Since Trumpism would outlast Trump, the mainstream parties would need to adapt and offer real, effective responses to drive down populist discontent, Olsen wrote.

With Bannon eager to pave the way for a global revolution, US observers have also shown much interest in his efforts to bring together the right-wing populist parties in Europe. However, Bannon has been largely unsuccessful so far, as far-right leaders like Le Pen have rejected his advice, pointing to Bannon’s lack of understanding Europe, The New Yorker reported.

This may make gratifying reading for Bannon’s critics. But the queasy feeling that European right-wing populists could achieve a surprise success next Sunday remains—just like Donald Trump did it in 2016.

The post Focused on the Far Right appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Sergio Perez

Spain’s general election has redrawn the country’s political landscape, restoring the center-left Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) as the country’s primary force. And although it has given the far right a foothold in parliament, the result suggests a rejection by Spaniards of the radicalism that the country’s Catalan crisis has generated.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s PSOE made substantial gains from their previous 85 seats to score a clear victory on April 28, although with 123 seats in the 350-seat Congress it fell well short of a majority.

The collapse of their long-time rival, the conservative Popular Party (PP), underlined the Socialists’ win. The PP lost more than half of its seats and is now only just ahead of the center-right Ciudadanos party, which made gains.

To the left of the Socialists, the Unidas Podemos coalition suffered losses, although it hopes to play a key role in the formation of a new government.

The newest force in parliament is Vox, a radical right-wing party which has further polarized an already divided political arena. The fact that it won 24 seats means that for the first time in the democratic era, a far-right party has parliamentary representation.

Remarkable Turnaround

This result marks Sánchez’s first election victory in three attempts and completes a remarkable turnaround for the 47-year-old. His relationship with his own party has at times been strained and after leading it to record defeats in the 2015 and 2016 general elections he was eventually removed as leader. Yet the following year, he defied the PSOE old guard to run in the party primary and reclaim the leadership. Last May, he launched a parliamentary no-confidence motion against the then-prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, whose PP was beset by corruption scandals. On winning the motion, Sánchez became Spanish leader, leading a fragile minority government for 10 months before calling this election.

The gains he made on April 28 mean that he now has a political credibility that many critics, casting him as a lightweight, believed he lacked. The result also offers him a stronger foundation on which to build a new administration.

However, that will not be easy. The Socialists’ most natural ally is Podemos, which appears willing to enter a coalition, although Sánchez would prefer a less formal confidence-and-supply arrangement. To govern they would still need more support, which could come from smaller regional parties and, more controversially, Basque and Catalan nationalists. However, Spain’s investiture system means that such support could include abstentions.

Another possible alliance, offering a less complicated majority, would be between the PSOE and Ciudadanos. However, relations are poor between the two parties and Ciudadanos has already ruled out helping Sánchez govern.

Inter-party talks are unlikely to get under way in earnest until after May 26, the date of European, regional and municipal elections. Even then they could be lengthy, a reflection of the new Spanish political landscape which in recent years has seen the dominance of the PSOE and the PP challenged by the arrival of Podemos, Ciudadanos and, more recently, Vox. Spain’s two-party politics are a thing of the past and a new era of governing partnerships, coalitions—and instability—is now under way.

Sweet Victory

But with the Spanish economy growing faster than most of its European neighbors and the enthusiastically pro-EU Sánchez running on a moderate platform, his win will reassure Brussels amid the turmoil of Brexit and populism.

The Socialists’ victory is their first since 2008 and it tastes all the sweeter because of the performance of the PP, which was its worst ever. Although he has only been the PP’s leader since last summer, the future of 38-year-old Pablo Casado is now in some doubt, possibly depending somewhat on the party’s performance in the European elections in May. His decision to lead it further to the right has contributed to the recent polarization of Spanish politics and turned out to be a serious electoral miscalculation.

The PP, like Ciudadanos and Vox, have sought to place Spain’s ongoing territorial crisis at the heart of the national agenda, ensuring a constant tension with the left. The legacy of Catalonia’s failed bid for independence in 2017 continues to cast a large shadow over national politics. Several independence leaders are living in self-imposed exile abroad, while others are in prison. Twelve are currently on trial at the supreme court for charges that include violent rebellion, sedition, and misuse of public funds.

The north-eastern region’s current government, led by Quim Torra, still advocates independence although its strategy in recent months has been erratic. It and the Catalan independence movement as a whole have labelled the supreme court trial a politically motivated sham which, they say, reflects worrying deficiencies in Spanish democracy as a whole.

In such a context, it has been difficult for Sánchez to govern. Last summer, his Socialists needed the support of an array of parties, including Catalan and Basque nationalists, in order for the no-confidence motion against Rajoy to be passed. Throughout his ensuing tenure, the political right used the support of pro-independence parties for his government as ammunition against him.

Rejection of Belligerence

Casado, for example, described Sánchez as a “villain” and “the greatest traitor of our democracy” because the prime minister had engaged in talks with the Catalan government. The PP leader accused him of making secret deals with Catalan nationalists on issues of sovereignty in exchange for their parliamentary support. No evidence of any such deal has emerged and Catalan nationalists have also attacked Sánchez for not going further in his discussions with them. His refusal to discuss the holding of a Scotland-style binding independence referendum ultimately caused Catalan parties to withdraw their support for his government in February, triggering the election.

Although Ciudadanos, which performed well, has also taken a tough line against Sánchez over Catalonia, the rejection by voters of the PP’s particularly belligerent stance is telling.

In Catalonia itself a similar picture emerged. For the first time, the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) won an election in the region. Although it has a long pro-independence history and its leader Oriol Junqueras is one of those currently on trial, ERC has restrained its rhetoric in recent months, still advocating secession but on the back of dialogue with Spain rather than unilateral action. Such moderation contrasts with the stance of the Together for Catalonia (JxCat) party led by former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont, who is living in Belgium. After the election he warned that “independence shouldn’t rely on Madrid,” but his party’s poor result shows that many Catalan nationalists disagree.

On the unionist side, there was also a swing towards moderation in Catalonia. The tough-talking anti-independence stance of the right fell flat, with the Socialists making gains.

And yet, despite the surge in support for the progressive policies of Sánchez’s PSOE and the shift away from radicalism in Catalonia, this election saw the arrival of a far-right party in parliament for the first time since the democratic transition four decades ago.

Gender, not Europe, as Fault Line

Vox’s 24 seats represent a modest haul, at only 10 percent of the vote—less than the vote share that far-right parties enjoy in countries such as France, Germany, Sweden, or Austria. But the result is still significant, reflecting an appetite among a small minority of Spaniards for policies that combine some elements of European populism with other more uniquely Spanish ingredients.

Vox has called for a clampdown on immigration, while offering conservative social policies that include restricting abortion, rolling back gay marriage legislation, reintroducing military service and lifting restrictions on the possession of firearms. In particular, it has had a big impact on the gender debate, countering a cross-party national consensus on measures to fight violence against women, claiming they were part of a wave of radical feminism sweeping the country.

But unlike its counterparts, such as France’s Rassemblement National and Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Vox rarely broaches the issue of Europe. Since joining the EU in 1986, Spain has been one of the bloc’s keenest members, benefiting enormously from both the financing and the democratic cachet afforded by membership. As a result, euroskepticism is virtually absent from Spanish politics.

Instead, Vox has used the Catalan crisis to drive its support, presenting itself as the most uncompromising of all the unionist parties on the issue. As one of the plaintiffs in the supreme court trial of independence leaders, Vox has maintained a high profile on this question and its proposals—which include introducing direct rule in Catalonia indefinitely and recentralizing the Spanish state—has dragged the parties on the right towards it. In March, President’s Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon was quoted as saying admiringly of Vox that it was “clear proof, more than any other party, of how you can go from having zero influence to playing an important role in a country.”

A left-leaning, Sánchez-led government is likely to form eventually and Vox’s presence in the Spanish parliament may be small but it will now have an institutional platform from which to deliver its radical message.

The post A Welcome Victory for Moderate Forces appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

Artwork © Dominik Herrmann

In an atmosphere of crisis such as the one we’re currently enduring, there’s no easier way to dismiss your political opponents—especially if you’re in a rush and you need to find the killer stroke in an internet-based brawl—than to call them a “populist.”

It makes things so easy because everyone knows what the word implies, if not what it actually means. It suggests a sort of childish disposition: a populist insists on their moral rightness, they’re not able to have a rational argument, they have no patience for liberal compromise, and—here’s the main thing—they are easily seduced by an “elites” versus “people” view of the world.

That last point is the key element of what has become the textbook definition of the term “populism,” developed by Dutch academic Cas Mudde. In his 2004 paper, the “Populist Zeitgeist,” he defined populism as “an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite,’ and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.” This sharpened the focus of the academic understanding of populism, and though it was apparently little read on publication, it hit its moment emphatically a few years ago.

Mudde’s description of populism chimed particularly well with the global political upheaval that began circa 2014: new parties were suddenly undermining institutions that held the world together, winning elections by exploiting a lack of trust in the mainstream. These insurgents broke the grip of old parties, and they did it by pitting an indivisible “will of the people” against a rich urban elite.

Mudde’s definition proved even more useful because it talked about populism as something more than a strategy but less than a proper ideology. He explained that populism isn’t just rabble-rousing demagoguery—it is a kind of parasite, a simple set of ideas that can feed off either left or right-wing politics. This incidentally turned out to a good explanation for why the term has proved so difficult to define: populism is a boneless, shape-shifting creature, clinging onto other ideologies.

The theory proved a handy intellectual way of explaining the old “horseshoe” cliché about how left and right-wing extremists end up resembling each other. As a result, the doors were opened to countless alarming parallels with the rise of fascism and communism in the early 20th century, which brought with them the sense that a century-long cycle had come round again, and the would-be dictators were on the rise.

Creeping In From the Edges

To bring the point home, Mudde’s definition was adopted by The Guardian in its “new populism” section, which has been tracking the growing success of populist politics all over the world. In the past few months, the United Kingdom’s leading liberal newspaper published two major studies it had commissioned from a team of political scientists across dozens of countries, which came to two conclusions: firstly, that populist parties had tripled their support in Europe in the last twenty years, and secondly, that in the same period there had been a corresponding surge in populist rhetoric from political leaders.

This second survey showed “empirically,” Mudde wrote in the same newspaper in March, “what many have asserted and felt”: that populism was creeping from the edges into the middle. Political leaders from nominally centrist old parties were getting spooked by populist successes, and so “more and more mainstream politicians are using ‘pro-people’ and/or ‘anti-elite’ rhetoric to win voters—in part to fight off electoral challenges from true populist actors.”

The consequence is that populism appears to be a threat to democracy itself: the people’s gateway opiate to full-blown authoritarianism. That is a story told by many new popular politics books, such as How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.

It’s hard to argue against this reading, given the developments of the last few years across Europe. That populism is a direct threat to the democratic order of the European Union was shown by the UK’s Brexit referendum in 2016, when the Leave campaign shamelessly employed anti-elite rhetoric to make its case.

And for evidence that populists attack democratic institutions as soon as they gain power, one need only look as far as Poland, where the European Court of Justice has had to intervene to stop the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) loading the supreme court with friendly judges. Or one could point at Hungary, whose right-wing Fidesz-led government has been sanctioned by the EU for undermining media plurality and suppressing civil society.

Populism Is Just Politics

But there’s a danger that this narrative widens the definition of populism so far it becomes meaningless: simply conflating populism with the ideologies it might enable doesn’t really help us to understand much. It certainly doesn’t help understand the more profound reasons why our democracy is under threat.

As political scientist Jason Frank of Cornell University wrote in the Boston Review last year, crying populist only perpetuates confusion over the nature of new movements. “Authoritarian attempts to centralize and expand the state’s executive power and wield it against ‘enemies of the people’—however defined by Trump, Erdoğan, Orbán, and others—should never be equated with the radically democratic institutional experimentalism of Podemos (in Spain) or the Farmers’ Alliance (in 1880s USA),” Frank argued.

Not only that, making populism the preserve of the radicals obscures the fact that apparently rational centrist politicians are just as capable of making blatantly populist moves—like Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) regularly announcing tax cuts just before elections.

The Mudde definition of populism has been questioned by other academics too. Chantal Mouffe of the University of Westminster in London is among those to argue that what gets dismissed as populism is actually just a necessary correction to a system that has seized up. As center-right and center-left government parties fused into a kind of management board whose main job is to oversee a neoliberal debt-based economy, Mouffe argued in The Guardian, something had to give when evidence mounted that that system was failing. No status quo lasts forever.

For Mouffe and others, the rise of populism is actually the sight of politics being reacquainted with its life-blood: a basic conflict about how society should be organized. In fact, one could conclude that the sooner the old centrist politicians start joining that debate, rather than desperately painting the new parties on the right and left as extremist threats, the more likely they will be to survive.

The post Words Don’t Come Easy: “Populism” appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Bernadett Szabo

The widespread assumption that good governance and high quality of democracy lead to better policy outcomes may hold true for many countries, but not for all. The 2018 report of the Bertelsmann Stiftung’s Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI) found that “all eastern European countries (…) achieve better political results than their governance quality would suggest.” In other words, despite democratic backsliding and political polarization, even countries like Hungary, Poland, and Romania receive better scores for policy outcomes than might be typical for countries with institutional and governance problems.

And the SGI report notifies another very important fact: Decreasing the quality of democracy does not immediately reduce citizens’ confidence in the government. The report concludes that “fundamental democratic values are not sufficiently anchored in the political consciousness of a considerable part of society.” A high level of trust in governments with poor rule-of-law scores is mainly observed in central and eastern European countries—and Turkey, which will be left aside here. But what are the root causes of this trust? It would be foolish to focus solely on governmental influence on media, state capture of the public sector, or disinformation campaigns—all of them have their impact, but the origins of this phenomenon have to be searched for in different places.

Own Way Is Best

While these countries are as different as their respective paths, there are a few common features. Firstly, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, and Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic have all questioned the transformation process of the 1990s. They have characterized the import of economic liberalism and some political attitudes (but not the whole process of democratization) as a failure, one which primarily served the interests of new political and economic elites and therefore must be undone or corrected. Such political messages understandably attracted a significant number of voters who lost out during the economic transformation process. It’s not an accident that two of these national-conservative and right-wing populist parties, Fidesz in Hungary and Law and Justice (PiS) in Poland, have strong support in economically underdeveloped and peripheral areas.

Secondly, some people still feel left behind despite the improvement of general economic performance since 1990.  In particular, the social policies of the 1990s and 2000s were perceived as underdeveloped by the public, and the new governments partly succeeded in filling this gap. For example, a study by the Polish Public opinion research center CBOS shows how the activities of the state toward the family were assessed over time: from mid 1990s until 2013, only around 10 percent of the respondents rated the state’s policy toward families as good or very good. But since the PiS government came to power and introduced a program of subsidies for families with two or more children, the public rating of government’s family policies rocketed. In 2016 and 2017, around 50 percent assessed it as good or very good, 35 percent as sufficient, and only 10 percent as poor. However, in other social policy areas, especially education, PiS hasn’t been as successful. Poles criticized the government’s education reform for overly centralizing control—they perceive the quality of education to be worse than before.

Thirdly, identity politics also plays an important role in maintaining support for the present governments. Political leaders have exploited the so-called refugee crisis in Europe to consolidate of their popularity. The depiction of refugees as a security threat became part of the political mainstream, and politicians like Slovakian Robert Fico, Orbán, or Babiš have spread the message that their firm attitude of “zero tolerance” would stop migration. Moreover, their political narrative also included islamophobia and bashing of the Western European countries for their policies of tolerance and solidarity. It has to be said that politicians and the vast majority of the public are on the same page in this regard.

Confronted with an East-West Divide

These leaders are aware of the great confidence they enjoy among citizens. They are also backed by good economic performance. Though nothing should be taken for granted in politics—the next general elections could change the current political course, at least in some countries like Poland and Slovakia—the growing self-confidence among the present central and eastern European leaders has implications for the EU.

More generous social policies make people feel that they are being seen and recognized. Moreover, assertive foreign policies create a distinction between the new governments and the previous political elites, who generally followed the western European (development) model.

Migration remains a key issue. The division between some central and eastern European countries on one side and EU institutions as well as some western European countries on the other side regarding compulsory relocation of asylum-seekers still resonates. Especially the Visegrád Group countries (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia) see these liberal migration policies as a threat to their identities, for they believe that the “policies of multiculturalism” would ruin central European societies, value systems, and cultures—as has allegedly happened in western Europe.

Enlargement fatigue—the feeling in some member states, including France and Germany, that the major round of accessions in 2004 has weakened the EU—has transformed into the present East-West divide. The East, for its part, is presenting itself as a confident player, with leaders who are not connected with the liberal transformation and meet the expectations of the public to speak up for their interests at EU level. The quarrel started with migration policies, but it is spilling over into a broader cultural conflict.

Central European leaders win additional points for saying that this part of Europe is different (that is to say better) than western Europe, which must be no longer so diligently imitated. This East-West fragmentation (like the North-South divide on austerity) will play a significant role in the run-up to the European elections in May. And after that, it may be difficult to put the European puzzle together again.

The post Weak Polity, Strong Policy? appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

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.

The post Europe by Numbers: Trust Issues appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

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.

The post Close-Up: Matteo Salvini 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.

The post Fortress Europeans appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© 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.” 

The post Flying High on Pessimism appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

Even under pressure, Angela Merkel excels at tactics. Recently on the domestic front, she skillfully played for time to keep her government from breaking up. Just one day later, at a meeting with France’s President Emmanuel Macron and the most important ministers of both governments, Merkel pulled off an agreement on EU reform. It’s not yet victory snatched from the jaws of defeat, but two big steps have been taken.

Yet Merkel’s strength is her weakness, too. The méthode Merkel is built on a low-key approach, a firm grasp of detail, an avoidance of all emotions, and a gift for delaying unpleasant decisions. It’s a highly effective toolkit for international negotiations as well as for dealing with internal rivals. But it has left Merkel unable to provide the bigger picture that Germany and Europe need to be able to fend off populism. So over time, Merkel is actually contributing to the erosion of her own power base.

Take the refugee issue that nearly brought down her government last week. On the surface, it is a petty quarrel within the conservative bloc. Merkel’s Bavarian ally, the Christian Social Union (CSU), is terrified it will lose it absolute majority in the regional elections scheduled for October. To stop the rise of the right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the CSU is trying to demonstrate how tough it is on immigration.

In Berlin, the CSU is part of Merkel’s coalition and it just so happens that her interior minister Horst Seehofer is leader of that party. Seehofer, never a friend to Merkel, recently announced that he would instruct the German border police to refuse entry to refugees already registered elsewhere in the EU. He then upped the stakes by saying that as interior minister, he could take this measure without the chancellor’s agreement.

Never mind that rejecting refugees at the border would be legally problematic. It might be ineffective as well because other EU countries could simply stop registering refugees. From the CSU’s point of view, the measure still has three benefits: It speaks to popular concerns over the number of refugees admitted to Germany; it is a unilateral national measure, which should please euroskeptic voters on the right; and it allows the CSU to confront Merkel, which tends to play well in Bavaria.

Merkel could not let this challenge to her authority pass, nor could she accept a complete repudiation of her 2015 open-border policy for refugees, regardless of her own efforts to cut down on the number of asylum seekers admitted to Germany since. So she made it clear that Seehofer would be fired from the government if he implemented the border measure against her will.

No Drama Merkel

This could have led to a high noon-type shoot-out, a break-up of the conservative bloc and the end of the government—except for Merkel’s dislike of drama and her skilful use of delaying tactics. With little fuss, she persuaded the CSU to give her two weeks to try and sort out asylum policy at the European level. At best, this endeavor will yield a partial success—but in the meantime, the CSU has stepped back from the brink. It will not find it easy to rekindle its revolutionary fire.

In tactical terms, Merkel played her hand well. But looking at the bigger picture, she carries much of the responsibility for making refugee policy such a poisonous issue in the first place. Germany—like many other countries in the world—is deeply divided over immigration and the cultural and religious conflicts resulting from it. The chancellor, having taken the decision to let in a million refugees in 2015, failed to provide any kind of vision of how to hold a much more diverse society together.

Nor has Merkel been able to assure the public that the security issues are under control. There have been several highly publicized violent crimes committed by refugees; this week saw the opening of a trial against a young Afghan man accused of murdering his 15-year-old German girlfriend out of jealousy. The government has also come under pressure because thousands of refugees in Bremen were allegedly granted asylum without being checked. Such incidents gain weight because Merkel and her government have failed to provide and communicate a comprehensive strategy on migration.

On Europe, the situation is similar. To avoid conflict within her own coalition, Merkel postponed her answer to Macron’s bold proposals on EU reform for as long as possible. On a small scale, this has worked well for her: the CSU is now concentrating on asylum policy and won’t be able to raise a huge stink over euro reform before the EU summit at the end of June. At the same time, Merkel got Macron—who for his own domestic reasons urgently needed German concessions on the euro—to pledge his support on the asylum issues.

Yet none of this adds up to a big picture or even an overall sense of direction. After the catastrophic G7 summit with US President Donald Trump in Canada in early June, Merkel understands that Germany needs Europe more than ever. But she still does not explain how she sees the future of Europe, its role in the world, and its social and political cohesion.

It is this lack of a larger narrative that allows populist movements to fill the vacuum with their nationalistic and xenophobic interpretation of the world. This is just as true for migration policies as for European integration. The méthode Merkel may be very useful to defend power in the short term. But given the fundamental nature of the challenges that Germany and Europe are facing, it is simply not enough.

The post The Flaws of the Merkel Method appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.