The Decibel - Europe’s far-right is moving into the mainstream

Episode Date: November 29, 2023

Last week, a far-right party and its controversial leader in the Netherlands won a surprising election victory. This comes on the heels of several other European countries that are seeing far-right parties become more popular.Today, The Globe’s international affairs columnist Doug Saunders explains why we’re seeing this shift to the far-right and what it will mean for European politics.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Last week in the Netherlands, a far-right party led by a controversial politician won the general election. This party and its leader, Geert Wilders, are known for extreme anti-immigration and anti-Islam sentiments. And the Netherlands isn't alone here. Several countries across Europe have seen far-right parties become more and more popular. Doug Saunders is The Globe's international affairs columnist, and today he explains why we're seeing this trend in Europe. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms,

and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Doug, thanks so much for joining me today. A real pleasure to be here. I'd like to start with the election that we just saw recently in the Netherlands. This happened last week. What happened with this election? So elections in the Netherlands during the last last week. What happened with this election? So elections in the Netherlands during the last 10 or 15 years have always been very chaotic things with a lot of little tiny parties and fragmenting parties competing for votes under their proportional representation system, where if a party gets 4% of the vote,

they get 4% of seats. And a big figure, certainly for the last 15 years, has been Geert Wilders, who people recognize for his crazy hair and for his basically single-issue politics, which is opposition to what's sometimes described as immigration, but really he means racial and religious minorities, specifically Muslims and also Eastern Europeans, and the institutions that he blames for diversity. We will make sure that the Netherlands will be for the Dutch people again. We will restrict the asylum tsunami and migration. People will have more money. His key positions include promises to expel or otherwise cause to leave anyone of Muslim background from the Netherlands, not just immigrants, but also Dutch citizens.

He would pull the Netherlands out of the European Union and ideally abolish the European Union. And he would end all aid to the Ukrainians. And I mean, he was a supporter of the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine and broadly speaking, would like to align his country and Europe as a whole with Russia rather than with NATO in the West. And Wilders actually got the most votes then in this election. Well, this is the thing. He surprised people, including pollsters in the Netherlands, by getting 23% of the votes, which for a number of reasons was the most of any party.

He had been sort of part of a coalition government in 2010 for a couple years, where the prime minister of the Netherlands for a long time, Mark Rutte, has been prime minister of the Netherlands for more than a decade. He's a normal sort of conservative politician. More middle of the road kind of thing. Yeah. But he had been somewhat willing to play ball with Wilder's Freedom Party in allowing them to support votes in order to get a 50% vote in parliament on various things. But also, most significantly, he'd adopted some rhetoric and stances of the Freedom Party.

So he'd made it seem acceptable to a lot of Dutch voters to vote for Wilders, whereas it had been kind of socially unacceptable, as it should be. I mean, the Netherlands is a country with an experience of violent intolerance toward religious minorities. It was occupied by the Nazis. It has a dark history in this area. For many Dutch people, it's socially unacceptable to vote for a party of intolerance. But that obviously broke down this year. They'd never had something like 23%.

That doesn't mean that Geert Wilders is going to become prime minister of the Netherlands, intolerance. But that obviously broke down this year. They'd never had something like 23%. That doesn't mean that Geert Wilders is going to become prime minister of the Netherlands, although it is theoretically possible at this point. So why not? Well, you need to assemble a coalition government that has 50% of the seats or the votes in the legislature. In Europe, generally after an election, you have a long period of trying to form a coalition. And a number of major parties have what's in Europe known as a cordon sanitaire, a sanitary barrier, which is to say they refuse to work with or acknowledge the Freedom Party or whatever is the party of the extreme right. So I guess I'm wondering, Doug, like what's

changed here in a way? Because you said, you know, before it wasn't necessarily acceptable to vote for someone like Wilders. But if he gets 23 percent of the vote now, I mean, why do you think his party suddenly gained so much support in this election? A lot of people in the Netherlands say it's because Mark Rutte, the moderate conservative prime minister, was willing to echo the rhetoric and some of the ideas of Wilders, of being hostile to refugee claimants, imposing citizenship tests that are basically designed as punishments for people of religious backgrounds, things like that. His most quoted line is, why vote for the copy when you can vote for the original? And I think he managed to gain some ground by voters who thought, okay, well, the fact that mainstream parties are echoing his lines means that it's okay to vote for this. I'm not going to be shunned by wider society for doing something almost criminal and voting for him and said, it's a thing I can do. Interesting. Yeah. Okay. So, you know, we've been talking about the

Netherlands here, but this is also kind of a part of a bit of a trend in Europe, Doug, of countries shifting more to the right. Where else have we seen this happening? Now, let's be clear that there aren't that many countries that as a whole have shifted to the right, which is to say that extreme right governments have taken over in notably Hungary, where Viktor Orban's party has for a decade and a half has had a solid majority and sometimes even two thirds of the vote enough to change the constitution in ways that guarantee empower. We're seeing it becoming more acceptable to vote for far-right parties of intolerance in a number of countries. A few weeks ago, I was in Dresden in Eastern Germany, and Dresden has suffered from marches every Monday by extreme right groups who are opposed to Jews and Muslims and so on for a number of years. But it now looks in polls like the state that Dresden is in, Saxony, is in danger of actually having one of these far right parties, the AFD or Alternative for Germany,

win a majority of votes and become the governing party in the state, which would be the first time that party has governed alone. There's, for obvious historical reasons in Germany, there's a real cordon sanitaire. No mainstream party will work with the AFD. So that breakthrough is alarming. In a number of other countries, we've seen these sorts of parties rise above thresholds. Of course, in Italy, the party of Georgiana Meloni, which now runs Italy, is a party of the extreme right. And in Sweden and in Finland, parties of the extreme right have

become part of coalition or de facto coalition governments. And I think in France, we've got the opposition, right? Marine Le Pen's party's in opposition there. Really throughout this century, the Le Pen party under Marine Le Pen and previously under her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, it's a party of intolerance. It's a party that started out as an anti-Semitic party. I will bring back France's sovereignty in all areas, which means the freedom for the French people to decide for themselves and defend their interests.

I will control immigration and re-establish security for all. Again, all of these parties have some kind of domestic policy, but everybody knows that their main thing is intolerance. That's why people vote for them. Which countries have we not seen this trend in Europe, Doug? There's a lot of churn in Europe, you could say. There are countries where the extreme right seems to be rising, but there's also countries where there's been a backlash and where the extreme right has been beaten back or defeated. Spain, for example, which had a rising far right, it's managed to keep them out of government. Britain, to the extent that the

Brexit governments of Britain could be called far right, they're certainly to the far right of the Conservative Party there, is going to have an election next year that will most certainly return the country to more moderate government. And the biggest case, and the one that's really held up as a shining example, is Poland, where the far right Law and Justice Party, PIS, as it's known, has governed for a number of years. And had successfully manipulated the institutions of democracy and changed the constitution, loaded the courts with supporters of the party and made them non-independent. In October, there was an election where a lot of polls came out against this trend and successfully elected a moderate, democratic, pro-European, pro-Western party. I think then the big question is why we're seeing this, right? So it sounds like there's some exceptions, but many countries are seeing a

bit of a shift here. So why are we seeing this trend in so many countries in Europe, Doug? I think there are a number of reasons. There's sort of the weird psychology of this moment, of this post-pandemic economic recovery moment, if you could call it that. But also, I think there's the elephant in the room, which is the United States. And the election of Donald Trump, who's unquestionably from the intolerant far right, in 2016 had a number of effects in Europe, mostly to make European leaders and a lot of citizens realize that the United States is no longer a reliable, stable partner and that it could shift out of the acceptable fold of democratic normality. And a number of far-right leaders around the world have attempted to manipulate European politics. Of course, most famously, Vladimir Putin. He has close relationships with Hurt Wilders and with Maloney in Italy and with Le Pen in France. They've gone to Russia to celebrate him and he has celebrated them. But the United States as well.

I mean, when Trump was president, it was mostly chaos. But, for example, he appointed an ambassador to Germany who became an infamous figure there because he refused to meet with Angela Merkel, who was then the chancellor, and instead had big meetings and parties and gatherings with the AFD, with this party of the extreme right, which it's very unusual for a diplomat to meet with an opposition party that has no chance of being in power and in Germany to meet with a party of the intolerant extreme right. I mean, that's quite a statement, as you're saying, like the kind of emboldening people to think this is OK, that makes a big statement. Yeah.

So you have these two powerful leaders. You have Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump both sending messages, both explicitly and also just through their actions, that it's normal and acceptable to vote for parties of intolerance. So, yeah, we have to worry about the elections next year in the United States, because certainly if the United States fell back into Trumpism, then the idea of a larger Western coalition of extreme right parties could become much more viable. You know, we're talking about Europe, but you know, we also saw a far right leader being elected in Argentina last week. You're talking about the influence of America here as well.

I guess, can we talk about what unites all of these movements in a way, Doug? Like, let's just spell it out. What do we tend to see with far right politics? We tend to see extreme nationalism and usually ethnic nationalism. And blaming the difficulties and faults of a country or its economy or change the democratic institutions, the courts, the checks and balances and so on. In Poland, this happened under the Law and Justice Party. Putin, of course, has done that. He's eliminated state governments and made them directly appointed by him. He's imprisoned or killed any viable opposition leader. In Turkey,

Recep Erdogan has changed the constitution and the institutions and the courts so that he controls them. And in, of course, Hungary, Viktor Orban has taken control of the media and the courts and so on to give himself permanent power. So in a worst case scenario, we could imagine a situation where parties like this managed to get government for one term, but also managed to change the constitution and the courts and the institutions of democratic checks and balances to give their party leadership for life. Of course, that resembles a lot what happened in the 1930s in Germany and Italy and all the other countries that went to fascism. I wouldn't say it's exactly the same thing or the same pattern, but that worst case scenario, yes, that could happen. And that does worry people that there could be a tipping point where these parties breach a threshold in major countries where they can become governing parties and then lock themselves in to be governments for life, reveal their true colors and set off another period of dangerous authoritarianism around the world. We'll be right back.

It feels like there's a lot of concern around the far right, particularly in Europe. I mean, is this just because of recent history? Or I guess, why do we pay attention to this so much in European countries? Europe now has a generation of people who did not grow up with any memory of the Second World War, either themselves or their parents, who are now enough generations removed. They have no firsthand memory and don't see the resonances of these things and don't instinctively recognize that parties of extreme nationalism and ethnic nationalism lead to horrible bloodshed and ruination and economic decline and genocide in the worst case. I mean, the obvious example, we're talking about Nazi Germany here, right?

And everything that happened- Nazi Germany, but also fascist Italy and so on. The rise of these parties in the 1930s followed this pattern. And during the decades after the Second World War, a whole generation of Europeans who recognized that the rise of nationalist parties is doom for the continent and its people, created a set of institutions that eventually became the European Union in order to prevent the rise of nationalisms, in order to make sovereignty pooled, in order to make nationalism less desirable than shared institutions and trade and these sort of things. And even during this period of far-right upsurge, the European Union is holding on quite

well as a guardian against these things. It's very interesting that the countries that have been taken over by far-right leaders, Hungary, Italy, Poland until October, have not attempted to leave the European Union. Even though a lot of the rhetoric seems to be kind of anti-EU, we're saying, in terms of like far-right stuff. Oh, they do like to use anti-EU rhetoric. But Viktor Orban, who rails against the European Union, who tries to manipulate it from within, has not talked about having a referendum to leave the EU. The PIS party in Poland, when it was in power, very anti-EU.

It outlawed abortion and turned the courts into partisan organs. It set it at a sort of war position with the EU. But there was never an attempt to leave the EU. A lot of these countries like Slovakia that have far-right governments and so on that they've not attempted to, Italy under its various far-right governments has not attempted to leave the EU. And that's for the simple reason that the citizens of those countries really like the EU. Not necessarily because it's anti-nationalist, but because it gives them free travel, it gives them access to banking, it allows their small businesses and farms to trade widely and to get aid and so on. It allows them to go to school and to collect

welfare benefits in any country in Europe they want. The popularity of the EU with citizens has prevented leaders from doing this. And frankly, a lot of them also probably look at the horrific British experience of four years of turmoil and punishment as being something that they don't particularly want to go through. So citizens like the EU, I guess I'm wondering about the EU's perspective, though, because as a bloc, some of these changes that are happening in countries like Poland don't seem that appealing to be representative of the EU, right? There have been big debates within EU institutions about how to respond to Poland before October and Hungary now having slipped out of the democratic norms that are considered prerequisites for membership in the EU. So if a country wants to join the EU, it needs to meet economic conditions and it needs to meet conditions of democratic institutions.

You know, Serbia would like to join. The EU says it's not quite there yet. Ukraine had its popular uprising in 2014 over the desire of its citizens to join the EU. It's at war, so we don't know. But also, it'll take some time because it's not there yet. I guess, is there a risk of countries getting kicked out of the EU, though? Well, that's the debate, yeah. The debate with Poland and Hungary, both of which had clearly slipped out of the envelope

of democratic stability that allows you to be a member of the EU. Poland had almost all of its EU aid cut off over the court's issue. And there's been similar punishments of Hungary. But there's also a worry among a lot of EU members and within the European Parliament that you can't put the cork back in the bottle. I mean, once a country is out, it's out. And Poland is an interesting example. It was firmly, and it seemed like maybe permanently, in the far right camp. It had slipped out of democratic and institutional norms. But then the election in October brought it back in very firmly and decisively. People from democratic movements in Hungary and democratic parties in Hungary always tell me that as dark as it looks there, as much as it looks like the country has been taken over permanently by an extreme right party, they still believe that it's possible within the next few years for them to escape this.

I guess what does it mean for the world then, Doug, to be seeing this rise in far-right politics in Europe? Could this inspire or embolden other parties elsewhere to do similar things? Well, it's a tricky time right now for democratic norms around the world. We've seen a lot of countries that had democratic moments slip back into authoritarianism in North Africa and the Middle East, in Asia, in Russia, of course. And next year is going to be a big year. Half the people of the world are going to go to the polls in some form of national election next year. I think it's going to be a tense year as we see if this is just a blip, if this rise of extreme right parties in Europe is a momentary response to a very odd

social and economic moment, or whether it's part of a more general rising trend that we should be more deeply concerned about. Doug, thank you so much for being here today. A real pleasure. Thank you. That's it for today. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin.

David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer. And Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.