PARIS — The gathering menace of Europe’s ascendant far-right nationalists — hostile to minorities, migrants, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ communities, climate science and, often, pluralist democracy itself — is prompting mainstream leaders to make decisions that previously would have been unlikely or unthinkable.
Almost no European country has found an elixir to defeat the surge of populist parties, some of which are in thrall to Donald Trump and have styled themselves in his image.
Strategies to demonize, confront, accommodate or ignore these parties have dampened their appeal in certain countries more than others. But in some places, the cost for politicians seeking to marginalize extremist blocs has been high, and potentially destabilizing. In confronting the far right, European leaders are also grappling with their own identities.
The consequences are a matter of calculation and guesswork. In Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has just made a very big guess.
Sánchez, a center-left politician seeking a second term, failed, along with his coalition allies, to win enough votes to form a government in last summer’s general elections. But so did his main center-right rival, allied with the far-right Vox party, whose leaders favor scrapping laws that protect women from gender-based violence.
The result has left Spain in a state of political paralysis for nearly four months. To avert an electoral do-over, Sánchez took the only way out available — forging a constitutionally dubious deal with a fringe separatist party, Junts, that wants independence for the Spanish region of Catalonia.
There was a steep price to pay to seal that deal, and last week Sánchez said he would pay it. He agreed to support a mass amnesty for hundreds of separatist politicians, officials and party workers who organized an illegal vote on Catalan independence in 2017, misappropriating public funds in the process. As a candidate, Sánchez had ruled out exactly such a deal, but he struck it anyway in return for the separatists’ backing, to keep his job; he is expected to be confirmed by parliamentary vote this week.
Beyond the opportunism, there’s political logic to the move. By partnering with the separatists, Sánchez induced them to back the government and subvert their own defining cause, breaking away from Spain, even if they cling to their old rhetoric. And he avoided new elections that could bring the far right to power, a scenario he calls “the abyss.”
That might backfire. At least two-thirds of Spaniards oppose mass amnesty, and hundreds of thousands of demonstrators filled the streets last weekend, protesting the deal. Leaders of Vox, who vehemently oppose regionalism, pledged “no restraint … no calm or tolerance” to stop what they called a coup d’état. The danger is that some Spaniards, enraged at a broad amnesty, might be driven into Vox’s arms, edging Spain closer to the very “abyss” Sánchez fears.
The specter of the hard right’s rise has been instrumental in other recent shifts around Europe.
In Germany, Chancellor Olaf Scholz struck what he called a “historic” agreement this month to slash social benefits for migrants and accelerate asylum procedures, potentially speeding deportations. That marked a sharp turn for his center-left coalition government, which includes the Greens, who have long favored immigration.
It also carried a whiff of desperation, coming against a backdrop of rising poll ratings for Alternative for Germany, known by its German acronym, AfD. The anti-immigration, extreme nationalist party’s fortunes have soared along with flows of asylum seekers. AfD is now Germany’s second-most popular party.
In France, centrist parties are incredulous at the steady rise of Marine Le Pen, a far-right nationalist who has run, and lost, in three straight presidential elections. By all appearances, President Emmanuel Macron is paying attention.
During last year’s election, Macron said Le Pen would trigger “a civil war” by banning Muslim women from wearing headscarves in public. But this year the French education minister, a Macron ally, prohibited girls from attending public schools wearing the abaya, a traditional long robe popular among Muslims.
That looked like a sop to voters drawn to Le Pen for her opposition to Islam’s encroachment. But it also marked a shift away from tolerance by a centrist French government. And Le Pen still tops the polls among plausible candidates ahead of France’s next presidential elections, in 2027.
There are no magic bullets to sap the appeal of hard-right parties, especially given the dramatic spike in migration across Europe that animates most of them.
Scholz’s coalition government’s popularity has plummeted. For Sánchez’s part, he appears to have secured a new term in office by supporting amnesty for Catalan separatists, but he faces stormy seas, given the public reaction.
Driven by expediency, survival or wishful thinking, the moves by European centrists might contain the seeds of their own demise. In their efforts to keep the extreme right at bay, Europe’s traditional parties have embraced an iffy strategy for survival.
Source link : https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/15/europe-far-right-spain/
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Publish date : 2023-11-15 08:00:00
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