Luca Bruno/AP Photo
From left, the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, Italy’s Matteo Salvini, Germany’s Jörg Meuthen, and Marine Le Pen of France attend a rally of nationalist parties in the lead-up to the European Parliament elections in May 2019.
Another election, another defeat for Team Steve Bannon. Sunday’s election for the Austrian parliament saw the far-right Austrian Freedom Party, FPÖ, lose votes and seats. The traditional center-right Austrian People’s Party, ÖVP, and center-left Socialist Party, SPÖ, won over half the votes, with the greens and liberal party doing well.
In 2017, Austria’s young chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, formed a coalition with the FPÖ, which was founded in the 1950s by ex-SS officers and Nazi functionaries but collapsed as the FPÖ leader was filmed drunkenly asking for money from an emissary of President Putin.
The Kremlin strongman backs nationalist hard-right parties across Europe, from Serbia to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, but the claims before the European Parliament election that the extreme right was going to have a much greater presence in European politics have not being confirmed.
Professor Matthew Goodwin has been the eagle-eyed chronicler of British and European national populism. A year ago, writing in the New Statesman, he proclaimed: “Across Europe, national populist parties and movements are sweeping through our democracies, reshaping them from below. National populists have enjoyed record election results in Italy, Sweden, Austria and elsewhere.”
Before the 2015 general election in the U.K., Goodwin predicted that four or five U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) MPs would be elected. In fact, UKIP leader Nigel Farage has tried to be elected seven times to the Commons and failed each time. Steve Bannon organized a team photo in Italy earlier this year of leaders like Matteo Salvini of Italy’s Northern League party, Geert Wilders from the Netherlands, Marine Le Pen from France, and other nationalist identity political parties.
But other than in England where Boris Johnson seems inspired by Trump and Bannon, the anti-EU populist parties of Europe are not winning votes.
For much of his two years at the top of Italy’s government, Matteo Salvini, the Europhobe anti-immigrant leader of the Lega, was pictured clutching or waving a crucifix at right-wing rallies. He got into trouble with the Vatican when he proposed a law making it obligatory for crucifixes to be displayed in all public spaces, schools, embassies, and prisons.
A subtheme of the new European right in the last decade is that they really do not like Pope Francis and his pro-poor, pro-compassion-for-refugees line. Father Antonio Spadaro, the editor of the Jesuit magazine La Civiltà Cattolica, attacked Salvini, saying that the crucifix should never be used as a political symbol.
“The cross is a sign of protest against sin, violence, injustice and death. It is NEVER a sign of identity. It screams of love to the enemy and unconditional welcome.” But for Salvini and Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orban and others of the 21st-century populist right, all politics is identity politics. Orban was re-elected earlier this year in Hungary with a call for “Christian” nations to defend themselves against “immigration,” and was condemned by global Jewish human rights outfits for his relentless campaign against the Jewish Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros and his NGO operations in Hungary.
Marine Le Pen opposes gay marriage just as the Polish identity politics of Jarosław Kaczynski, leader of the ruling PiS government, extends to creating LGBT-free zones in Polish cities, trying to ban abortion, and criminalizing any historian who pointed out that Poles persecuted Jews in Poland throughout much of history.
The nationalist identity politicians have had a good run for their money (often from right-wing American sources) ever since the crash of 2009 left exposed conventional politicians of right or left who seemed to have no answers for the left-behinds and losers of “Enrichissez-vous” globalization.
But now they may be running out of steam. The claims by Donald Trump’s ideologue, Steve Bannon, that he would conquer Europe at the head of a Trump-like crusade of populist, anti-immigrant, EU-hating rightists now ring hollow.
In Germany, recent elections to the two key East German regional governments of Saxony and Brandenburg did not produce the breakthrough for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) that many predicted. The AfD did well in former DDR Germany where many feel left behind, as they do in post-industrial Northern England or the poor and isolated regions of France that gave rise to the Gilets Jaunes last autumn.
But the mainstream Christian Democrats and Social Democrats survived to fight another day. Mrs. Merkel’s coalition can now breathe easy at least until the next Bundestag election in Germany in 2021.
Something similar happened in Italy when Matteo Salvini tried to pull the plug on the coalition of the Lega party with the Five Star Movement. Salvini hoped to collapse the Italian parliament and force a new general election, in which polls showed Salvini and Lega emerging on top.
But Salvini was stopped by parliamentary maneuvers as the Five Stars formed a coalition with the center-left Partito Democratico, an establishment pro-EU party.
In Britain, the strongest expression of English nationalist identity politics came in the Brexit plebiscite of more than three years ago. But the bitter divisions and political-economic difficulties Brexit has produced have turned many people off the entire project, and most just wish it would go away.
The AfD’s failure to break through, like the difficulties Boris Johnson has in selling his hard Brexit vision, mirrors Salvini’s balloon emptying of air. It may be too early to say that the forward march of the hard right is over, but it seems to be on hold.
Voters like Farage’s and other national populists’ denunciations of immigration and of bossy Brussels, but they are not yet ready to entrust to these often racist demagogues the responsibility over daily lives, in the sense of national government decisions.
Marine Le Pen was easily blocked by Emmanuel Macron. Geert Wilders, the bouffant white-haired Dutch populist, has lost his seat. Denmark has a social democratic prime minister, as has Sweden, despite claims that the Swedish Democratic and Danish People’s Party were poised to win power or at least some control over government. Spain and Portugal, once centers of European fascism, have socialist prime ministers, and the Spanish and Portuguese right are keen on EU membership. There have been both right and left governments in Greece. The hard right performed poorly in the European Parliament election in May.
There is no doubt that since the 2009 financial crash, populism, often on the left as with Syriza and Podemos, secessionist nationalist parties like the SNP or Catalans, or via green parties, has boomed. Some talk of Weimar, but unlike the aftermath of the crash of 1929, the hard right may be egged on by Steve Bannon but is not trusted by the people.
After 1945 in France and Italy, giant anti-establishment, anti-European, anti-immigrant communist parties won up to 30 percent of the vote. But they never entered government. Today, anti-EU, xenophobic national populists have similar support—but in Germany and in Italy, it stops short of putting them into office.
This is no help to the center left, many of whose stalwarts have not realized that 20th-century organized-labor–based politics is dead. But simplistic narratives about the irresistible rise of the far right should be handled with caution.
