Dissects right-wing populism in Europe
Cuperus, René
IN RECENT YEARS, anti-establishment and anti-immigration populism has unsettled Western and Central Europe. Leaders such as Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, Jorg Haider in Austria, Silvio Berlusconi...
...Their protest can be read as a fever signaling that problems are not being dealt with effectively...
...After Fortuyn was murdered, his party served disastrously in the government...
...ASOMEWHAT SIMILAR story of "climax and anti-climax" took place in both the Netherlands and Austria...
...Nervousness, discontent, and loss of national identity are easily channeled through right-wing populist movements...
...European social democracy cannot allow populist discontent to become a monopoly of the right...
...They tap into xenophobia, express protests against the difficulties of contemporary representative democracy, and chastise the "political correctness" of elites...
...Mass media proclaiming continual crisis and social drama have also increased mass insecurity and encouraged a cynical view of institutions, especially those of the struggling welfare state...
...AMAJOR REASON for the "populist momentum" of the 1990s was the decline of ideological confrontation...
...They challenge the "illusion" of a multicultural society and link it to crime and insecurity...
...Another complicating factor might be called the paradox of the Holocaust trauma...
...These patterns suggest that populist movements are poorly equipped for institutional longevity...
...They call for the restoration of standards and values, for order and authority...
...The new populists did fill the new vacuum of left/right-depoliticization...
...Can it retain its allegiance to a European supranationalism that undermines the vitality of democratic representative politics and thereby invites right-wing populists to be the defenders of national identity against cosmopolitan elites...
...The "revolt of the little man" (and, to a lesser degree, woman) highlights an old—but often unadmitted—divide in the democratic left between the well educated and less educated, between "postmateralists" and "materialists...
...A cruel sociology helps to explain the appeal of this populism of disenchantment...
...The disruptive effects of globalization and the retrenchment of welfare states have been accompanied by fundamental changes in the party systems...
...How long can a social democratic party that depends on the support of educationally deprived voters continue to favor liberal penal policies...
...Intellectual discourse was long characterized by a species of political correctness that praised "the foreigner" for enriching society while turning a blind eye to the de facto DISSENT / Spring 2004 n 17 POLITICS ABROAD segregation of many new immigrants and the stresses they placed on social welfare systems...
...There is also widespread unease over the process of European integration...
...At the same time the classical ideological left/right cleavage gave way to unprecedented and unexpected coalitions and cohabitation of former political enemies...
...This may have been due to electoral fragmentation on the left, but it caused political shock waves and led the mainstream left to support tacitly the re-election of Gaullist president Jacques Chirac...
...Consequently, Europe faces two dilemmas: how to maintain communitarian welfare states under conditions of ongoing immigration and whether the ethnic future of Europe will be characterized more by multiculturalism or assimilation...
...To everyone's surprise, Le Pen finished second in the first round of presidential elections, surpassing Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin...
...The empty heart of populism," writes social scientist Paul Taggart, "the lack of key values, means that it is particularly liable to the politics of personality...
...In other countries—Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, France—the moderate, mainstream right and left "cohabitated" in governments, retrenching and reshaping the arrangements of the European welfare states...
...Ironically, leadership conflicts are endemic to POLITICS ABROAD populist parties as the splits in Haider's and Le Pen's parties show...
...Social democrats must focus on the less educated and the displacement on DISSENT / Spring 2004 n 19 POLITICS ABROAD poorly qualified workers...
...Despite the claims of Eurocrats in Brussels, many people see the European Union not as the shield against, but as the "ugly face" of globalization because of its one-sided market liberal approach...
...Populists present "the people" as a homogeneous entity facing a closed, technocratic, "corrupt elite" that has betrayed the interest of the majority...
...Many of them tried to transform themselves into "normal" democratic organizations...
...Old" Europe is nervous...
...This friction between the "chattering Establishment" and the common man is the Achilles' heel of contemporary social democracy...
...The best example is the meteoric rise and fall of the Front National in the elections of 2002...
...These statements are from Austria, but you can find similar ones in Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark in rightwing movements that claim to represent "the people" and to defend and shield national, cultural, or ethnic identity against "outsiders" and stress leadership, law and order, and nostalgia for a "lost world...
...They must reconsider how profoundly crime injures working-class communities and, most controversially, social democrats must begin to appreciate the disruptive impact of immigration when there is no serious program for integrating newcomers...
...Fortuyn's murder sapped what had been the fastest growing political force in the Netherlands...
...These parties are far better at sounding alarms than at becoming partners in a stable government...
...Internal struggles between cabinet ministers and within the beheaded party led to a governmental crisis after eighty days and then to elections, which produced a new government...
...In difficult straits...
...Elites in the academy and state bureaucracies generally ignored these rumbles, assumed that everyone accepted cosmopolitan, relativist norms, and paid no attention to the growing desire to preserve familiar ways of life and forms of identity...
...The right-wing populists push a litany of themes to the forefront of public debate...
...They denounce the shortcomings of representation in today's parliamentary democracies, and they rail against the apparently unstoppable unification of Europe...
...The desire to transcend populism is shortsighted," Michael Kazin observes...
...Their aversion to traditional party structures deprives them of political machines built around "cadres" that enable a degree of continuity and consistency in programs...
...These circumstances did much to provoke populist-xenophobic reactions...
...I am not making an argument for "Haidering" the left, that is, adopting the rhetoric and program, let alone the anti-democratic and anti-humanistic solutions of rightwing populism...
...Although the political success of right-wing populist parties has ebbed over time—and especially after their failing performances in government—their impact on "intellectual" discourse and the politicalcultural climate of Europe remains...
...Leaders such as Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, Jorg Haider in Austria, Silvio Berlusconi and Gianfranco Fini in Italy, Christoph Blocher in Switzerland, and the late Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands pushed themselves onto center stage in politics...
...Ten states, mostly from the exSoviet bloc, are about to join, and their impact on the European Project as a whole in terms of power shifts and socioeconomic imbalances is uncertain...
...Can European social democracy be both cosmopolitan and culturally relativist (as the defender of minority cultures) at the same time...
...RENÉ CUPERUS is senior research fellow and director of international relations at the Wiardi Beckman Foundation, think tank of the Dutch Labor Party (PvdA), and editor-in-chief of the review Socialisme & Democratie...
...Some of these populist movements originated on the extreme right or contain neo-Nazis and fascists...
...Consider what happened when the Italian political system imploded and disrupted both the Christian Democrats and the parties of the left...
...Populist movements are almost by definition unstable...
...And they have a simple solution to all problems: halt all new immigration and compel "old" immigrants to adapt or to assimilate...
...In Vienna, Haider's party was ravaged by internal struggles and splits resulting in electoral losses, even though the F136 returned to government as the shaky junior partner of the Christian Democrats...
...The older mass parties that have ruled most of the region since the end of the Second World War— the Christian or Conservative Democrats and the Social Democrats—have lost members, voters, élan, and a monopoly on ideas...
...They chastise abuses by governing elites and the established "cartel" of political parties...
...A civilized democracy can only survive in the long term when moderates sing more appealing tunes, and keep on doing so...
...Additional factors contributing to the grief of the less educated include a decline of manufacturing jobs, the increasing market value of those who accumulate cultural "capital," the evaporation of the "socialist" dream of a more egalitarian world, the rise of "multiculturalization," and accompanying "ethnocultural" tensions on the microlevel...
...They must learn how to keep in touch again with its "less educated constituents" and recognize that it must begin to make demands that may be at the expense of the more powerful group of the left—the intellectual "knowledge class...
...We should be in, they should be out...
...I am suggesting that the left had better take seriously the underlying causes for the rise of populism in contemporary Europe...
...Europeans seem unable to cope with ethnic diversity...
...They complain about tolerance of immigrants and libertine behavior...
...Right-wing populism is wrong, but it articulates real problems and insensitivities that the left has not faced adequately...
...They object to upheaval caused by neoliberal globalization and the linked "crisis" in the public sector...
...Space opened for Silvio Berlusconi's mediapopulist domination of public life...
...Movements once lodged securely on the far right were thus able to engage a mass electorate and challenge a political establishment that seemed unable to address the fears of ordinary Europeans...
...Others are new creations, such as Berlusconi's Forza Italia, Fortuyn's List in the Netherlands, or Carl Ivar Hagen's Progress Party in Norway...
...This led to a remarginalization of Le Pen on the national level, although he has regional support...
...What should have been a proud achievement of cosmopolitan cooperation between nations has become, instead, a cause of insecurity and alienation...
...20 n DISSENT / Spring 2004...
...Mainstream parties are forced to adopt or even internalize parts of their populist agenda...
...This unprecedented impact of right-wing populism derives from a political identity crisis across Europe...
...Instead, populists often rely on charismatic and authoritarian leaders...
...The Italian Alleanza Nazionale of Gianfranco Fini, with roots in fascism, has 18 n DISSENT / Spring 2004 tried to become something more "responsible" by serving as a governing party (in coalition) in contrast to the French Front National split over such "responsible" prospects...
...Their target seemed to be the worried working classes, but they also sought support from segments of the middle-class and "nouveaux riches" who don't feel represented by today's political system...
...It is only when leftists and liberals themselves talked in populist ways—hopeful, expansive, even romantic—that they were able to lend their politics a majoritarian cast and help markedly to improve the common welfare...
...Populism prefers the simple solution of leadership itself over the complex process of politics to resolve problems...
...He is thinking of America, but this is also true of Europe...
...They are able to affect the political debate and can propagate themselves without sustaining powerful and normal party structures...
...This produced political spaces for outsiders who railed against the political establishment...
...The rise of a "knowledge society" has alienated those who have been unable to keep up with the change, the so-called "losers of the modernization process...
...This means a reorientation of social democratic policy...
...Because they are in most countries the pillars of the parliamentary system and the welfare state, their slow but steady decline affects European societies as a whole...
...For longer or shorter periods, some were in power...
...In a sense, right-wing populism is the cultural revenge of the "working class" against the intellectual elites who run "workers' parties...
...Where does all this leave European social democrats...
...Some parties developed out of older parties (for example, Haider's FPO, Pia Kjaersgaard's People's Party in Denmark...
...How much anti-populism can a mass social democratic party allow itself...
...He is co-editor and author of Multiple Third Ways, European Social Democracy facing the Twin Revolution of Globalisation and the Knowledge Society...
...This explains the popularity of sound bites such as, "We are down— they are up...
...If social democrats still regard themselves as champions of a solidaristic liberal democracy, then they must pay far more attention to the darker aspects of the "modernization" processes that are now sweeping the world...
Vol. 51 • April 2004 • No. 2
