Economic stagnation has left voters, particularly young people and the working classes, looking for alternatives
Published Jun 17, 2024 • Last updated 7 hours ago • 5 minute read
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French Rassemblement National, or National Rall party leader Marine Le Pen (C) meets local residents during a campaign visit at a market in Henin-Beamont, North of France on June 14, 2024, ahead of France’s upcoming June 30 and July 7’s snap elections for a new national parliament. (Photo by DENIS CHARLET/AFP via Getty Images)Article content
FRANKFURT – The European nationalist right is here to stay.
Despite the best efforts by the established mainstream parties to stave them off, nationalists now either lead governments or support them in Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Finland.
From June 6 to 9, European parliament elections were held, and the results were a huge success for nationalists, which critics dismiss as far right regardless of the actual policies of each party, across the EU. Once isolated on the political fringes, the nationalist right of France, Italy, Austria and Poland won the most seats allotted to their respective countries, and in Germany the populist right AfD finished ahead of the ruling social democrats.
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The business-first conservatives and social democrats who led the EU in the post-Cold War era have only themselves to blame for voters abandoning them in droves. This duopoly presided over two major economic downturns, first during the 2008 financial crisis, then after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mass immigration is a major problem in Europe, with 5.1 million newcomers arriving in 2022 alone. Surveys show Europeans are more than uncomfortable with those numbers and the radical social and economic change that comes with it, but the political duopoly have been reluctant to take it seriously.
Still, European voters might have been prepared to look it over if their lives were getting better. Instead, they are getting worse and worse, and like the migration issue, the duopoly has had few or no answers.
Even prior to the pandemic in 2019, there were questions about whether Europe would ever recover, from the Great Recession a decade earlier, which drove up youth unemployment to levels currently above 20 per cent in France. Wages were made stagnant, and inflation in the aftermath of the pandemic is squeezing Europe’s youth even tighter.
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Both the business conservatives and social democrats have marketed themselves as EU’s well-dressed technocrats since the end of the Cold War. That reputation deservedly lies in tatters.
In France, the old Gaullist conservatives have been gutted on both sides by the hard-right, populist National Rally headed by Marine Le Pen, and centrist President Emmanual Macron’s Renaissance party. Now even Macron is suffering from the same reputational damage as the rest of the EU’s technocrats, with France’s fiscal situation deteriorating considerably in the past few years.
The irony of Macron’s unpopularity is that he came to power in 2017 with a promise to bridge the divide between right and left in an effort to fix France’s calcified economy, which grew less than one per cent in 2023. Having largely failed in that task, the nationalists are an appealing option for disaffected voters, especially the youth, during France’s upcoming domestic parliamentary elections.
This was also true of last year’s Dutch elections, where the right-wing populist PVV led by Geert Wilders won a strong plurality of seats. The PVV formed a government with the rest of the Dutch centre-right parties earlier this month and now dictates much of its legislative agenda, which includes cracking down on migration and gutting the Netherlands’ tight green regulations.
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Greece is an outlier, where the established centre-right New Democracy was rewarded with a second conservative majority last year because it governed with competence and has tangibly improved the state of the country. Granted, there is far more room to improve Greece compared to the rest of the EU, but it doesn’t change the fact that voters reward good governments and punish poor ones.
Much like mass immigration, voters also do not appreciate their governments appearing to be more energized by idealistic, EU-wide campaigns to ban combustion engines than the cost of living. While the establishment conservative faction of the European parliament remains the largest, their leader has pledged to cut that ban in response to the nationalist gains in the election.
Europe may be excellent when it comes to letting cafes and bars operate with ease, but has a distinct fetish for regulating anything more advanced than pouring wine.
Last year, the European parliament passed a sweeping AI regulation bill that shackled the new and growing industry, with various MEPs who supported it were caught on camera clapping like seals and grinning like idiots.
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Predictably, the European Court of Auditors released a report in May stating that the EU was falling far behind its peers when it came to building an AI ecosystem and drawing investment towards that sector.
If the EU wants to be anything greater than a glorified tourist destination populated by pensioners because the young people have fled to America for jobs, it requires a serious re-think on how it grows its economies. AI is going to be part of the modern economy, and failing to integrate it properly will be crippling.
It is not just the professional classes who are seeing their opportunities slashed due to the establishment’s policies.
Young people and the working-classes typically compete for lower-paid, unskilled jobs, and adding millions of migrants to the mix has not been appreciated by Europe’s youth and blue-collar communities. Both these demographics rejected Macron’s pro-business centrists and voted in large numbers for France’s National Rally in the European parliament election, especially outside Paris.
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These two demographics would usually be expected to vote for the centre-left, but that half of the European establishment’s duopoly went all-in on white-collar professionals and paid the price. The vote swing towards Europe’s nationalist parties has largely been at the expense of the left.
As far back as 2016, the Financial Times reported that 45 per cent of France’s blue collar workers and 38 per cent of the unemployed would vote for National Rally.
Furthermore, the political left in Europe has almost wholly rejected the ideals of patriotism or nationalism that the new right stands for. The centre-left’s rhetoric sounds like canned metropolitan social liberalism, written by the human resources consultants who vote for them.
One of the few European centre-left leaders with any measurable popularity is Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen, who stated in a biography that, “For me, it is becoming increasingly clear that the price of unregulated globalization, mass immigration, and the free movement of labour is paid for by the lower classes,” and has governed accordingly.
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With the nationalists poised to win more elections in the coming years, there will be less attention paid to how they win elections, and more towards how they actually govern. Thus far, Italy’s right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has presided over a reasonably competent government and earned the respect of her more moderate peers.
Not only a leading European nationalist, the recently-single Meloni has become one of Europe’s most prominent leaders, and was greeted at last week’s G7 meeting with two kisses on the cheek by the freshly-single Justin Trudeau.
Ten years ago, it seemed incomprehensible that a stalwart progressive like Trudeau would ever smooch a hard-right European nationalist. Now, Trudeau and his successors may just have to get used to it, unless it turns out the nationalists have no answers to Europe’s woes either.
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Source link : https://nationalpost.com/opinion/geoff-russ-europes-nationalist-right-smashes-the-failing-centre-left-consensus
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Publish date : 2024-06-17 16:33:26
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