It is not a wave, but a background current. The advance of ultranationalist, populist or right-wing extremist candidates and parties in the democracies of Europe and America over the last decade has been marked by ups and downs. Acceleration and braking and acceleration again. The latest, this week, with the victory of Javier Milei and Geert Wilders a few days apart in two countries as different as Argentina and the Netherlands. The electoral success of Milei, the elected president, and Wilders, who will not have an easy time finding a majority for prime minister, follows the defeats of the nationalist right in countries such as Spain and Poland. In the United Kingdom, Labor is on the verge of power after a desert journey of almost three decades.
But next year is also the year of the European Parliament elections, in which the right’s advances can be consolidated. And in the United States, Donald Trump, the inspiration and greatest expression of this movement, could return to the White House.
There are no waves in politics: reality is more incoherent. What does exist are background currents. dissatisfaction with politics. The rejection of the elites. Economic and territorial inequalities. The feeling of a threatened identity. The resentment. And in this first quarter of the 21st century, few have captured this discontent and these fears as well as the Trumps, Wilders, Milei and other members of this motley ideological family.
“If populism thrives, it is precisely because it attracts a population that feels unfairly treated and despised,” says historian Pierre Rosanvallon in a room at the Collège de France, the august educational institution in Paris where he is an honorary professor. “Against this background, a double scapegoat emerges: the elites and the immigrants.”
There is a difference between populist phenomena of the past, such as the People’s Party in the USA at the end of the 19th century or Poujadism in France in the 1950s, and the current ones, says another historian, Marc Lazar, on the phone. Previously there had been “small bouts of fever that disappeared quite quickly”. No longer. “For thirty years,” Lazar summarizes, “we have been confronted with a cycle of populist protest that is long-lasting and rooted in society.” There may be failures, there may be victories, but the phenomenon is there because it is with corresponds to three deep crises in our societies.”
Three crises
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The first is the crisis of representative democracy. “There is distrust and rejection of the political class and institutions, as well as a feeling that political leaders are distancing themselves from the concerns of the population,” explains Lazar, a professor at Sciences Po in Paris and at LUISS University in Rome. “These right-wing populist movements do not present themselves as authoritarian movements, as they once did, but rather as the most democratic, the ones closest to the people.”
The second crisis is social. It’s not just the inequalities. Also “the feeling of not being taken into account in a part of society,” says the historian.
The third crisis is cultural and has to do with identity: “Are you French?” Or European? Dutch or European?” Lazar adds immigration: “Cultural and religious pluralism and Islamist attacks fuel fears and concerns that right-wing populists exploit.”
It happened last weekend in Crépol, a town of 500 inhabitants in deep France. A dance was held. A group of young people armed with knives rushed in. A 16-year-old teenager was murdered. There are several prisoners. It might have been a simple event, but it was more. Journalistic reports suggested that the attackers were boys from a suburb near the nearby town of Valence. That means children with a migrant background. The victim was a local youth.
In Crépol, all the ingredients come together: an idyllic rural France, disturbed by blind violence from outside and the specter of civil war, repeatedly stoked by politicians and intellectuals of the French extreme right.
“Nobody is safe anywhere anymore,” Marine Le Pen, a candidate to succeed centrist President Emmanuel Macron in 2027, told Valeurs Actuelles magazine. “A new threshold has been crossed.” Meanwhile, xenophobic riots broke out in Dublin after three children and a woman were stabbed. This is Europe, autumn 2023.
Marine Le Pen, President of the French National Assembly, speaks this Friday during the meeting on Identity and Democracy in Lisbon, Portugal. TIAGO PETINGA (EFE)
“Something happens”. Essayist Dominique Moïsi mentions the riots in Dublin, the elections in the Netherlands and the European elections in France that, unless there is a surprise, Le Pen’s party will win. “There is a feeling among a part of the population that they are losing control over their own lives, and also the feeling that politicians and politics are no longer credible in the face of this loss of control.”
crossing
What happens? “A new fact is emerging,” says Moïsi, “it could be the migration phenomena and the associated question of security.” Or artificial intelligence and new technologies. The world we live in is no longer recognized, it is a scary world. In this context, the extreme right is something that has never been tried, or at least not tried for a long time, and therefore appears to be a last resort.”
The essayist Alain de Benoist, priest of the so-called “New Right” in the eighties and an international reference for the populism of that decade and personalities of this extreme right, responds by email after the victories of Wilders and Milei: “It is obvious there is a wave driven by the rejection of the old governing parties that lies at the heart of the current crisis of liberal democracy. These results are characteristic of a period of transition between the world before and the world after.”
According to De Benoist, there is a common point between these movements: the populist style. Because, he affirms, “Populism is nothing more than a style, which means it can be combined with a wide variety of policies and ideologies.” Added to this is the common denominator of the rejection of population immigration.”
The differences? “Very big,” he replies. “Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement Nationale, which reaches primarily the popular classes and whose electorate brings together a large number of left-wing and extreme-left voters, is a movement that is primarily hostile to economic liberalism and advocates France’s non-alignment with the positions of the United States . More or less the opposite of the delusional positions of Milei, who wants to use a chainsaw to replace the national currency and reduce public services.”
“These rights thrive in a climate where the idea of the future seems canceled, where everything is dystopian and catastrophic,” says Pablo Stefanoni, author of Did Rebellion Turn Right? (21st Century Editor). “There seems to be no horizon and these rights allow, as they say in Argentina, to kick the board.”
Perhaps the last time that there was still a future was the 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was a liberal utopia. That of happy globalization and the unstoppable expansion of human rights and democracy. It was aborted first by the attacks of 2001 and later by the financial crisis of 2008, the migration crisis of 2015, the pandemic of 2020 and the environmental crisis. And in the meantime, Trump bursts in. And Brexit. And the ultranationalist governments in Poland and Hungary. And Vox in Spain and the extreme right-backed governments in Nordic Europe, a model for decades of coexistence and democratic values. And in Italy an heir to neo-fascism: Giorgia Meloni. And finally Wilders in another showcase of the wealthiest and most democratic Europe, the Netherlands. And across the pond, the Milei phenomenon, with its ideological “anarcho-capitalism” and outbursts reviving the Trump of 2016.
Former President Donald Trump before his speech at Fort Dodge Senior High School on November 18, 2023 in Fort Dodge, Iowa. Jim Vondruska (Getty Images)
And yet the double victory of Macron against Le Pen in the presidential elections in France, the return of the Social Democrats in Germany, the left-wing majorities in Spain, and Joe Biden’s victory over Trump all fall within the same period. Is there anything in common in all of this? Or is everything too chaotic to talk about waves and trends?
Latin America
“If you compare Latin America with Europe, for example, a nuclear problem for the European extreme right is missing in Latin America, namely Islam,” says Stefanoni. “There is an anti-progressive reaction that takes different forms. They have established the idea that the elites are now on the left and the common people can find a shield in the right to defend their freedoms and interests.”
It also brings to the fore what he calls “right-wing insurgent emotion.” We saw it in the storming of the Capitol, in the demonstrations during the pandemic in Germany, in the attack on government headquarters in Brazil after the defeat of Jair Bolsonaro or in the protests this week in front of the PSOE headquarters in Madrid: “In 2010 the movements were indignant, they were leftists. Now they are on the right.”
Not everyone follows the same path. In France, Le Pen forces his MPs – the first opposition party in the National Assembly – to wear ties. You avoid insults and outbursts. At the same time, the cordon sanitaire that prevented it from entering the halls of power and being recognized as a republican party is being relaxed. They are no longer anti-system. They want to be the party of order; not that of arguments. The war in the Middle East is accelerating the transformation of a party that was founded half a century ago by Nazi Germany sympathizers and is now committed to the fight against anti-Semitism.
“The National Front, now the National Regrouping, is two things: a populist movement implanted into a historic extreme right,” says Professor Rosanvallon. “Otherwise I wouldn’t get these results. Look in Italy, it’s even clearer there.”
Fascist law now prevails in Italy in accordance with the EU and NATO. Meloni is trying to institutionalize himself, unlike Trump or Bolsonaro, who, as Stefanoni recalls, “ruled against the state.” Milei won thanks to the support of the traditional right and her candidate, Patricia Bullrich, will be part of his government.
What to do? ask progressives and liberals. For example, how to address concerns about immigration or the costs to workers of climate change action? “We cannot compromise on our principles,” says Dominique Moïsi. “At the same time, if we don’t have answers to the problems populists raise, we will fail.”
Nothing is inevitable. The mayor of Paris, the socialist Anne Hidalgo, pointed this out this week at a breakfast with a group of journalists. “Despite everything, Pedro Sánchez manages to win a government in Spain and that is good news for the climate and for Spain,” he said. “And in Poland it is good news for the climate and democracy that progressives and centrists who are not climate skeptics and are pro-European have won.”
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