SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
geert wilders
Autocrats Worse Than Trump? Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid
Here's the question to be asking, both in the U.S. and around the world: at what point will the far right achieve a critical mass of support such that it can kick away the ladder that it used to climb to power?
Jun 23, 2024
Poland is supposed to be one of the politically sane places in Europe right now. The far-right Law and Justice Party lost national elections last year to a centrist coalition and exited power after eight long years of democratic repression. Donald Tusk, who’d previously been the president of the European Council, once again became the Polish prime minister. His government immediately set about restoring the rule of law that the Law and Justice Party had been so determined to dismantle.
Sounds good, right?
Yes, but then there’s Grzegorz Braun.
Braun is a member of a party called Konfederacja that stands just to the left of the Nazis. Think that’s an overstatement? Back in December, Braun used a fire extinguisher to put out the candles on a menorah in the Polish parliament, which had been set up to celebrate Hanukah. Just in case anyone might misinterpret the gesture—perhaps he though it was a fire risk?—Braun denounced the Jewish holiday as “satanic” and insisted that “those who take part in acts of satanic worship should be ashamed.” He also favors the criminalization of homosexuality. And he was the only Polish parliamentarian to oppose a resolution in 2022 denouncing the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Is there nothing that far-right politicians can say or do these days that disqualifies them in the minds of voters from holding public office?
And yet, despite these toxic positions, Braun was just elected to represent Poland in the European parliament. And so were five other members of his Konfederacja party, who have equally toxic views. That’s a gain of six seats over their previous showing in the 2019 elections, which had been zero. An astonishing 12 percent of Polish voters endorsed the positions of Braun and his colleagues.
Sure, in those same EU elections, Tusk’s centrist party managed to squeak by Law and Justice, which lost seven of their seats. But it was the party even further to the right that seemed to benefit.
Trump, a crowd surfer without parallel, is riding a wave. Will it crest before November?
Swing to the Right
The big takeaway from the recent European Parliament elections was the success of far-right parties. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally won over 31 percent of the vote in France, prompting French President Emmanuel Macron to make the counter-intuitive decision to dissolve parliament and call new elections. Giorgia Meloni, the far-right leader in Italy, also managed to increase her party’s share of support.
And the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) came in second in Germany with a big boost from the under-30 crowd, who didn’t seem to care about the various scandals involving the far-right party’s leadership. Because of the statements of party member Maximilian Krahl—he said that not all Nazi SS members were war criminals—the AfD was actually kicked out of the Identity and Democracy bloc. And then the AfD kicked Krahl out of the party, not only because of those statements but also because his close ties to Russia and China were attracting unwanted scrutiny. German voters elected him to the European parliament anyway.
Is there nothing that far-right politicians can say or do these days that disqualifies them in the minds of voters from holding public office? Each month, it seems that a new red line is crossed: anti-Semitism, extraordinary corruption, a felony conviction. What’s next, the use of germ warfare?
In the European parliament elections, the far right also took first place in Austria, Hungary, and Slovakia and tied for first in the Netherlands. Indeed, the only places that the far right didn’t do better than their last outing were Sweden, Finland, and Portugal, but even here the results weren’t exactly reassuring. The far-right Sweden Democrats remained steady at 3 seats (as did the Danish People’s Party at one seat). The Portuguese far right Chega party actually made it into the European Parliament for the first time with two seats. Only the True Finns party lost representatives and it was a drop of only one seat.
The good news is that the far-right electoral coalitions—the European Conservatives and Reformists Party (ECR), the Identity and Democracy bloc (ID), and the unaffiliated bloc that includes Fidesz and now the AfD—didn’t win enough votes to take over the leadership of the parliament. The ECR gained 14 seats (thanks largely to Meloni in Italy), the ID gained 9 seats (thanks largely to Le Pen in France), and the now-unaffiliated AfD increased their delegation by six seats. That puts the far right at nearly one-quarter of the total number of seats.
But the center right also did well in the election, increasing their total number of seats to 190. The ECR will not be forced to form a governing coalition with the far right, and that means that the European consensus on the green energy transition will remain more-or-less intact.
The Not-So-Long March
Let’s face it: the European parliament is not the most powerful institution around. What’s important about the far right’s victories is their apparent abandonment of any desire to destroy the EU or, at least, withdraw from it. The new far-right strategy is borrowed from the left (just like some of its economic program): a “long march through the institutions” in order to control them. Bye-bye Brexit and its heir apparents: Nexit, Grexit, Frexit. The far right wants to conquer Brussels.
Meanwhile, it is continuing its long march through national institutions. In Belgium, in federal elections earlier this month, the far-right, Euroskeptical, Flemish nationalist party Vlaams Belang came in second, behind a right-wing, Euroskeptical, Flemish nationalist party New Flemish Alliance. Traditionally, Belgian parties have agreed not to partner with Vlaams Belang to form governments. But with the New Flemish Alliance moving ever further to the right, the Belgians might be on the verge of breaking with this informal pact. Don’t expect a new government any time soon though: it took 18 months to forge a ruling coalition five years ago.
In Austria, the far-right Freedom Party is on track to win elections in September. Its coalition government with the Christian Democratic People’s Party collapsed in 2019 because of the Ibiza affair, which linked Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache of the Freedom Party to a corrupt deal involving a woman he thought was a well-connected Russian. The Freedom Party’s adulterously close relationship to Russia has not seemed to diminish its popularity. Another recent spy scandal broke, involving a top intelligence official passing information to Russia in exchange for money, which took place when the Freedom Party was in charge of the Interior Ministry. And yet Austrian voters concluded that this was just the type of party to send to the European parliament.
And then there’s France. Who knows, perhaps the French far right, too, will take over after the snap elections that Macron has called. The French, it seems, now hate Paris as much as they hate Brussels (the seat of the EU). Marine Le Pen is taking advantage of an anti-elitist, anti-globalist, anti-technocrat spirit that is rebranding reactionary as merely rebellious (sound familiar?). That’s bad news for Macron, whose every gesture and remark scream “Paris elite.” Fortunately, a more genuine challenge to the French orthodoxy has emerged on the left, as the Socialist, Communist, France Unbowed, and Ecologists parties have formed a new coalition. It is currently running neck and neck with Le Pen’s National Rally.
In The Netherlands, meanwhile, the far right has finally managed to put together a coalition government after their surprise victory in elections last year. Firebrand Geert Wilders had to give up on his desire to become prime minister, but in exchange his Party for Freedom (PVV) will control five ministries.
The new head of the migration and asylum ministry, Marjolein Faber of the PVV, is perhaps the last person you’d want in charge of a sensitive issue like immigration. She favors the abolition of Islam. She has called migration “repopulation,” a popular word in the far-right lexicon that has roots in the German word umvolkung, which was used by the Nazis and which today has much the same connotation as the “replacement” of majority white populations with non-white immigrants. And she has been guilty of the worst kind of racial profiling when she said that a stabbing suspect looked like a “North African” when witnesses reported otherwise.
Be Afraid, Very Afraid
Faber, Krahl, Braun: these far-right politicians make Donald Trump look like a conservative Democrat (which he used to be before opportunism beckoned). Of course, the Eurocrazies don’t have as much power as Trump might once again have. But the really scary part is how routine it has become for such people—who, a generation ago, would have been just kooks making long-winded speeches from the audience at public forums—to now be in positions of real responsibility.
It’s also frightening because it’s not just Europe that has been affected by this peculiar political disease. Narendra Modi, despite a drop in his party’s support in the latest elections, will continue on as prime minister of India. Nayib Bukele, the telegenic autocrat in El Salvador, won a supermajority in parliament earlier this year for his New Ideas party. And Vladimir Putin, no surprise here, won his election in Russia.
Trump was blocked from doing his worst by the institutions of a democratic society (Congress, state governments, courts, conscientious objectors at all levels). The EU, after this near miss with near fascism, will also be able to prevent the far right from unraveling the rule of law.
But at what point will the far right achieve a critical mass of support such that it can kick away the ladder that it used to climb to power? The far right’s long march through the institutions has only one ultimate destination: autocracy.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump's Right-Wing Allies Plot Takeover of the European Union
The EU is still a beacon for progressives around the world, but for how long?
Jan 25, 2024
It would be funny if it weren’t so potentially tragic — and consequential. No, I’m not thinking about Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign but a related development: the latest decisions from the European Union (EU) about Ukraine.
As 2023 ended, European nations failed to agree on a $54-billion package of assistance for Ukraine at a time when that country was desperately trying to stay afloat and continue its fight against Russian occupation forces. Bizarrely, the failure of that proposal coincided with a surprising EU decision to open membership talks with that beleaguered country.
In other words, no military aid for Ukraine in the short term but a possible offer of a golden ticket to join the EU at some unspecified future moment. Ukrainians might well ask themselves whether, at that point, they’ll still have a country.
One person, right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, is largely responsible for that contradictory combo. He singlehandedly blocked the aid package, suggesting that any decision be put off until after European Parliamentary elections in early June of this year. Ever the wily tactician, he expects those elections to signal a political sea change, with conservative and far-right forces — think of them as Donald Trump’s allies in Europe — replacing the parliament’s current centrist consensus. Now an outlier, Orbán is counting on a new crop of sympathetic leaders to advance his arch-conservative social agenda and efforts to cut Ukraine loose.
Without a powerful left defending Europe’s gold-standard social safety nets, libertarians are likely to advance their attempts to eat away at or eliminate the regulatory state.
He’s also deeply skeptical of expanding the EU to include Ukraine or other former Soviet republics, not just because of Russian sensitivities but for fear that EU funds could be diverted from Hungary to new members in the east. By leaving the room when that December vote on future membership took place, Orbán allowed consensus to prevail, but only because he knew he still had plenty of time to pull the plug on Ukraine’s bid.
Ukrainians remain upbeat despite the aid delay. As their leader Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted about future EU membership, “This is a victory for Ukraine. A victory for all of Europe. A victory that motivates, inspires, and strengthens.”
But even if Orbán’s resistance were to be overcome, a larger challenge looms: the European Union that will make the final determination on Ukraine’s membership may not prove to be the same regional body as at present. While Russia and Ukraine battle it out over where to define Europe’s easternmost frontier, a fierce political conflict is taking place to the west over the very definition of Europe.
In retrospect, the departure of the United Kingdom from the EU in 2020 may prove to have been just a minor speedbump compared to what Europe faces with the war in Ukraine, the recent success of far-right parties in Italy and the Netherlands, and the prospect that, after the next election, a significantly more conservative European Parliament could at the very least slow the roll-out of the European Green Deal.
And worse yet, a full-court press from the far right might even spell the end of the Europe that has long shimmered on the horizon as a greenish-pink ideal. The extinguishing of the one consistent success story of our era — particularly if Donald Trump were also to win the 2024 U.S. presidential election — could challenge the very notion of progress that’s at the heart of any progressive agenda.
Orbán’s Allies
For decades, Dutch firebrand Geert Wilders, leader of the far-right Party for Freedom, has regularly garnered headlines for his outrageous statements and proposals to ban Islam, the Quran, and/or immigrants altogether. In the run-up to the November 2023 parliamentary elections in the Netherlands, it looked as if he would continue to be an eternal also-ran with a projected vote total in the mid to upper teens. In addition to the usual obstacles he faced, like the lunacy of his platform, he was up against a reputed political powerhouse in Frans Timmermans, the architect of Europe’s Green Deal and the newly deputized leader of the Dutch center-left coalition.
To everyone’s surprise, however, Wilders’s party exceeded expectations, leading the field with 23% of the vote and more than doubling the number of Party for Freedom seats in the new parliament.
Although mainstream European parties had historically been reluctant to form governments with the far right, some have now opportunistically chosen to do so. Far-right parties now serve in governments in Sweden and Finland, while leading coalitions in Italy and Slovakia.
Wilders, too, wants to lead. He’s even withdrawn a 2018 bill to ban mosques and the Quran in an effort to woo potential partners. Such gestures toward the center have also characterized the strategy of Giorgia Meloni, the head of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, who downplayed its fascist roots and pledged to support both NATO and the EU to win enough centrist backing to become Italy’s current prime minister.
But what happens if there’s no longer a political center that must be wooed?
That’s been the case in Hungary since Viktor Orbán took over as prime minister in 2010. He has systematically dismantled judicial, legislative, and constitutional checks on his power, while simultaneously marginalizing his political opposition. Nor does he have to compromise with the center, since it’s effectively dropped out of Hungarian politics — and he and his allies are eager to export their Hungarian model to the rest of Europe. Worse yet, they’ve got a strong tailwind. In 2024, the far-right is on track to win elections in both Austria and Belgium, while Marine Le Pen’s far-right party leads the polls in France and the equally intemperate, anti-immigrant Alternative fur Deutschland is running a strong second to the center-right in Germany.
No less ominously, the Identity and Democracy bloc, which includes the major French and German far-right parties, is projected to gain more than two dozen seats in the European parliamentary elections this June. The European Conservatives and Reformists bloc, which contains the Finnish, Polish, Spanish, and Swedish far-right parties, will also probably pick up a few seats. Throw in unaffiliated representatives from Orbán’s Fidesz party and that bloc could become the largest in the European parliament, even bigger than the center-right coalition currently at the top of the polls.
Such developments only further fuel Orbán’s transnational ambitions. Instead of being the odd man out on votes over Ukrainian aid, he wants to transform the European Union with himself at the center of a new status quo. “Brussels is not Moscow,” he tweeted in October. “The Soviet Union was a tragedy. The EU is only a weak contemporary comedy. The Soviet Union was hopeless, but we can change Brussels and the EU.”
With such a strategy, wittingly or not, Orbán is following the Kremlin playbook. Russian President Vladimir Putin has long wanted to undercut European unity as part of an effort to divide the West. With that in mind, he forged alliances with far-right political parties like Italy’s Lega and Austria’s Freedom Party to sow havoc in European politics. His careful cultivation of Orbán has made Hungary functionally his country’s European proxy.
Not all of Europe has jumped on the far-right bandwagon. Voters in Poland last year even kicked out the right-wing Law and Justice party, while the far right lost big in the latest Spanish elections. Also, far-right parties are notoriously hard to herd and forging a consensus among them will undoubtedly prove difficult on issues like NATO, LGBTQ rights, and economic policy.
Still, on one key issue they’re now converging. They used to disagree on whether to support leaving the EU, Brexit-style, or staying to fight. Now, they largely favor a take-over-from-within strategy. And to make that happen, they’ve coalesced around two key issues: the strengthening of “Fortress Europe” to keep out those fleeing the Global South and frontally assaulting that cornerstone of recent EU policy, the Green energy transition.
The Fate of the Green New Deal
In Germany, the far right has gone after, of all things, the heat pump. The Alternative fur Deutschland’s campaign against a bill last year to replace fossil-fuel heating systems with electrical heat pumps propelled the party into second place in the polls (thanks to an exaggeration of the cost of such pumps). The French far right is also on the political rise, fueled in part by its opposition to what its leader Marine Le Pen, in a manifesto issued in 2022, called “an ecology that has been hijacked by climate terrorism, which endangers the planet, national independence and, more importantly, the living standards of the French people.” In the Netherlands, Wilders and the far right have similarly benefited from a farmer backlash against proposals to reduce nitrogen pollution.
A report from the Center for American Progress concludes that European far-right groups “frame environmental policies as elitist while stoking economic anxiety and nationalism, which erodes trust in democratic institutions and further distracts from genuine environmental concerns.” Researchers from the University of Bergen in Norway are even more pointed: “Populist far-right parties portray fossil fuel phase-out as a threat to traditional family values, regional identity, and national sovereignty.”
The European far right, in other words, is mobilizing behind a second Great Replacement theory. According to the initial version of that conspiracy theory, which helped a first wave of right-wing populists take power a few years ago, immigrants were plotting to replace indigenous, mostly white populations in Europe. Now, extremists argue that clean green energy is fast replacing the fossil fuels that anchor traditional (read: white Christian) European communities. This “fossil fascism,” as Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective have labeled it, marries extractivism to ethnonationalism, with right-wing whites clinging to oil and coal as tightly as Barack Obama once accused their American counterparts of clinging to guns and religion.
Believers in this second Great Replacement theory have demonized the European Green Deal, which is dedicated to reducing carbon emissions 55% by 2030. The overall deal is a sophisticated industrial policy designed to create jobs in the clean energy sector that will replace those lost by miners, oil riggers, and pipeline workers. However urgently needed, the Deal doesn’t come cheap and so is vulnerable to charges of “elitism.”
Worse yet, the backlash against Europe’s Green turn has expanded to efforts in the European Parliament to block pesticide reduction and weaken legislation on the reduction of packaging. As a result of this backlash, Politiconotes, “The Green Deal now limps on, with several key policies on the scrapheap.” A rightward shift in the European Parliament would knock the Green Deal to the ground (and even kick it while down), ensuring a further disastrous heating of this planet.
The War of Ideas
The war in Ukraine seems to be about the territory Russia has occupied, the fight over the European Green Deal about politics and the far right’s search for an issue as effective as immigrant-bashing to rally voters. At the center of both struggles, however, is something far more significant. From Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin to Marine Le Pen at the reactionary barricades in Paris, the far right is fighting over the very future of European ideals.
Narrowly, that debate is just the latest iteration of a longstanding question about whether Europe should emphasize expanding its membership or the deeper integration of the present EU. Until now, the compromise has been to set a distinctly high bar for EU membership but provide generous subsidies to the lucky few countries that make it into the club. By turning a cold shoulder to a neighbor in need, after having benefitted enormously from EU largesse since the 1990s, Hungary is challenging that core principle of solidarity.
But Orbán and his allies have a far more radical mission in mind: to transform European identity. Right now, Europe stands for extensive social programs that even right-wing parties are reluctant to consider dismantling. The European Union has also advanced the world’s most consequential collective program on a green energy transition. And despite some backlash, it remains a welcoming space for the LGBTQ community.
In other words, the EU is still a beacon for progressives around the world (notwithstanding the neoliberal reforms that are regressively remaking its economic space). It remains an aspirational space for the countries on Europe’s borders that yearn to escape autocracy and relative poverty. It’s similarly so for people in distant lands who imagine Europe as an ark of salvation in an increasingly illiberal world, and even for U.S. progressives who are envious of European health care and industrial policies, as well as its environmental regulations. That the EU’s policies are also the product of vigorous transnational politicking has also been inspirational for internationalists who want stronger cross-border cooperation to help solve global problems.
In the late 1980s, as the Warsaw Pact disintegrated and the Soviet Union began to fall apart, political scientist Francis Fukuyama imagined an “end of history.” The hybrid of market democracy, he argued, would be the answer to all ideological debates and the European Union would serve as the boring, bureaucratic endpoint of global political evolution. Since the invasion of Ukraine, however, history is not only back, but seems to be going backward.
The far right is at the forefront of that retreat. Even as the EU contemplates expansion eastward, a revolt from within threatens to bring about the end of Europe itself — the end, that is, of the liberal and tolerant social welfare state, of a collective commitment to economic solidarity, and of its leading role in addressing climate change. The battle between a democratic Ukraine and the autocratic Russian petrostate is, in other words, intimately connected to the conflicts being waged in Brussels.
Without a vibrant, democratic Ukraine, the eastern frontier of Europe abutting Russia is likely to become a zone of fragile, divided, incoherent “nation states,” hard-pressed to qualify for EU membership. Without a powerful left defending Europe’s gold-standard social safety nets, libertarians are likely to advance their attempts to eat away at or eliminate the regulatory state. Without Europe’s lead, global efforts to address climate change will grow dangerously more diffuse.
Sound familiar? That’s also the agenda of the far-right in the United States, led by Donald Trump. His MAGA boosters, like media personalities Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon, have been pulling for Viktor Orbán, Geert Wilders, and Vladimir Putin to send Europe spiraling backward into fascism.
Short on resources and political power, progressives have always possessed one commodity in bulk: hope. The arc of the moral universe is long, Martin Luther King, Jr., prophesied so many years ago, but it bends toward justice. Or maybe it doesn’t. Take away the European ideal and no matter what happens in the American presidential election this year, 2024 will be the year that hope dies last.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Milei’s and Wilders’ Wins Suggest We Haven’t Reached Peak Right-Wing Populism
Instead of supporting candidates who promise truly transformational change, voters are backing fast-food populists who advertise options that are even unhealthier than what’s currently on offer.
Dec 03, 2023
Panic does not produce prudent politics. Panic produces provocative populists. And it reduces pundits to Seussian spluttering.
How can voters choose such… panic-peddling panderers?!
The defeats of Donald Trump in the U.S. elections in 2020 and Jair Bolsonaro in the Brazilian elections in 2022 were supposed to prove that the wave of right-wing politicians had crested worldwide. Brazilians wisely barred Bolsonaro from running again for office until 2030.
The far right sees 2024 as its greatest opportunity since the 1930s to push the needle toward fascism.
Trump, on the other hand, is on the rebound and leading the polls in the lead-up to the presidential elections in the United States next year. Even more troubling, the recent electoral victories of Javier Milei in Argentina and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands suggest that the world has not yet reached peak populism.
Brace yourself for the next potential tsunami. In 2024, elections will take place in 50 countries and engage up to 2 billion people. The Economistcalls it the “biggest election year in history.” Voters will go to the polls in the United States, Russia, Mexico, South Africa, Indonesia, and the European Union, among other countries.
The far right sees 2024 as its greatest opportunity since the 1930s to push the needle toward fascism. If the recent victories of Milei and Wilders are any indication, they ain’t just whistling Dixie.
Something Different?
When I was studying Russian in Moscow in 1985, my fellow students complained about the food. It was your basic Soviet fare of meat and potatoes. It was rather monotonous, to be frank, but it was filling and plentiful.
After the semester was over, we all took the train to Helsinki. After checking in at the hotel, I went down to the city’s famous Harbor Market to buy fresh fruit and vegetables, which had been in short supply in Moscow. I had difficulty persuading my fellow students to come with me. A large number of them couldn’t wait to have their first, post-Soviet dinner at McDonald’s. That’s right: After all those Moscow meals of meat and potatoes, they immediately went to the Golden Arches to have… meat and potatoes.
“But it’s different!” they said, salivating over a Big Mac and French fries.
Voters in democracies across the world are tired of what’s on the political menu. They’re rejecting the “same old, same old” policies of Joe Biden even though the U.S. economy, by all standard measures, is doing pretty well. They’re souring on the European Green Deal of the Socialists and Greens even though the continent is at the forefront of addressing climate change.
Instead of supporting candidates who promise truly transformational change, voters are backing fast-food populists who advertise options that are even unhealthier than what’s currently on offer.
The desire for profound change is surely understandable. The conditions that generated victories for the far right that I describe in my 2021 book Right Around the World have not changed in any substantial way. Economic globalization, after all, continues to benefit the few and burden the many. As Zia Qureshi writes at Brookings:
Over the past four decades, there has been a broad trend of rising income inequality across countries. Income inequality has risen in most advanced economies and major emerging economies, which together account for about two-thirds of the world’s population and 85% of global GDP. The increase has been particularly large in the United States, among advanced economies, and in China, India, and Russia, among major emerging economies.
Note that the far right has prospered in precisely the countries that have experienced this rising income inequality: Donald Trump in the United States, Narendra Modi in India, and Vladimir Putin in Russia, as well as Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and now Geert Wilders in the Netherlands.
Voters have been disgusted by how parties of the center-right and center-left have done little to address this inequality. And they’re worried that an influx of immigrants, the very embodiment of globalization, will only make matters worse (and there’s evidence that immigrants do indeed exert a downward pressure on wages).
This is the triple whammy that helps the far right: increased economic inequality, increased disgust with conventional parties, and increased fear of immigration. It’s also the perfect storm that has put Geert Wilders so close to becoming the next Dutch prime minister.
Have the Dutch Gone Crazy?
Geert Wilders has been a platinum-haired presence on the Dutch political scene for two decades, chiefly as a mischief-maker on the margins. But in elections this month, his party won 37 seats in parliament, the most of any party and 20 more than in the last election.
If these were ordinary times, the informal prohibition of mainstream parties in Europe against working in coalition with the far right would hold and Wilders would remain in the wilderness. The former ruling party led by outgoing prime minister Mark Rutte has indeed refused to partner with Wilders’ Party for Freedom. So, too, have the coalition of socialists and Greens led by former European Commissioner Frans Timmermans and the center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy.
Only the centrist New Social Contract party and some minor parties are available for the wooing. But cobbling together a coalition out of these disparate elements will not be easy. Indeed, the first negotiator to attempt this sausage-making on behalf of Wilders resigned in the wake of charges that he engaged in bribery and fraud in his previous job as director of Utrecht Holdings.
Let’s not overstate Wilders’ surprise victory. He won less than a quarter of the votes.
The real sticking point, however, will be Wilders himself and his wilder-than-wild political proposals. Most potentially destabilizing has been his support for Nexit, a withdrawal of the Netherlands from the European Union, about which he has promised to hold a referendum. This is as impractical as it is unpopular. According to the last major poll, the leavers could count on only 25% support. Dutch voters are well aware of what a mess the U.K. stepped in after voting for Brexit. According to one estimate, leaving the E.U. has cost the U.K. $100 billion a year in lost output.
Then there’s Wilders’ enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin and his channeling of Kremlin propaganda (such as his noxious notion that Ukraine is led by “National-Socialists, Jew-haters, and other anti-democrats”). Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reduced some of his fawning, but Wilders will undoubtedly try to cut back on Dutch aid for Kyiv.
On immigration, Wilders calls for “borders closed” and “zero asylum seekers.” The first is going to be hard to push in a Europe of open (internal) borders—thus his support for Nexit—while the second would violate international law. On Islam, he wants to ban the Quran, Islamic schools, and mosques. Ever the political opportunist, however, Wilders has offered to put those bans on hold in order to achieve his cherished dream of leading the country.
Finally, on the economy, Wilders has no patience for Green policies. His party backs the traditional, meat-and-potatoes positions of more drilling for oil and gas, no solar or wind farms, and a withdrawal from the Paris accord on climate change. Add to that the restriction of government assistance to immigrants and the far right promises to take the Netherlands one giant step backward.
The Dutch live in one of the richest per-capita countries in the world. But poverty has been projected to increase substantially from 4.7% of the population in 2023 to 5.8% in 2024. “Fear of falling” can easily slip into fear of immigrants.
Then there’s the rural-urban divide that has fueled the rise of the right in so many countries: Poland A versus Poland B, red state versus blue state in America, and countryside versus prosperous cities in the Netherlands as well. The industrial-strength nostalgia that the far right sells has appeal for farmers, unskilled laborers in rural factories, and pensioners in deserted villages. The past might not have been a golden age, but many things really were better back then for folks outside the big cities.
But let’s not overstate Wilders’ surprise victory. He won less than a quarter of the votes. The party of the even crazier Thierry Baudet—yes, as in Russia, there are even worse options lurking on the margins—actually lost more than half its seats in parliament. And the toxicity of Wilders’ persona and positions may well make him coalition-proof. Dutch common sense—on display in the expression meten is weten (measuring things brings knowledge)—may prove too large an obstacle for Wilders to overcome.
Meanwhile in Argentina
Unlike the Netherlands, Argentina truly is an economic mess. Annual inflation is more than 120%. The peso has given way to the dollar as the everyday currency. The government is perpetually at risk of debt default.
Economic polarization in Argentina is severe. The richest families have concentrated the wealth of the country into their hands, and this inequality only deepened during the Covid-19 pandemic. Seven Argentinians are on the Forbes list of richest entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, more than 40% of Argentinians live in poverty.
Then along comes economist Javier Milei who promises to fix everything. As a newcomer to politics, he has no track record to criticize and can safely rail against corrupt insiders. As an economist, his off-the-wall proposals have a veneer of credibility. Anyone else who would propose to eliminate the central bank, replace the peso with the U.S. dollar, and whittle the government down to the merest nub would be dismissed as insane within the Argentine context. But the average voter can easily be fooled into thinking that this “anarcho-capitalist” must know what he’s talking about.
Whether they succeed or not, Milei’s team will push through painful reforms that will eventually get them voted out of office.
He doesn’t. Get rid of the central bank and Argentina would no longer have any control over its own economy. Even though the dollar has become the de facto currency, making it the official one would require the government to have sufficient dollars at its disposal (it doesn’t). And taking an axe to the government would effectively take an axe to the poorest of the poor, who need government assistance.
Milei is globalization on steroids. He liked to campaign with a chainsaw in hand. And now he’s on the verge of turning the Argentina Chain Saw Massacre into reality.
However, as with Wilders, Milei doesn’t really have the political support to govern as he pleases. True, he won the presidential run-off by a convincing margin of 11 percentage points. But his party won less than a quarter of the legislature, leaving it in a distinct minority. It won’t be easy for Milei to push through his most radical suggestions.
Here’s what’s more likely to happen. Milei has already sent his “shock therapy” plan to an emergency session of the Argentine Congress, which is set to convene shortly after he takes office next month. The stabilization, which consists of rather conventional fixes to reduce inflation and government spending, has already won Milei favor in international financial circles.
“Our approach is fiscal and monetary shock from day one,” says Luis Caputo, the head of Milei’s economic team and likely to be the new economy minister. “The roadmap is orthodox and without crazy things.”
Whether they succeed or not, Milei’s team will push through painful reforms that will eventually get them voted out of office, just like the political victims of “shock therapy” in Eastern Europe in the 1990s. In other words, the so-called populist will ultimately be tripped up by the very unpopularity of his economic plans. Unless, of course, he manages to fix one thing in Argentina: elections.
The Institutionalization of the Far Right
The far right is able to stay in power only when it games the system. It does so not so much by outright vote-stealing but by restructuring government in its favor. Vladimir Putin turned the chaotic and ineffectual democracy of Boris Yeltsin into a petro-oligarchy. Viktor Orbán created a powerful patronage system that privileged members of his Fidesz party. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan pushed through a referendum that concentrated power in the hands of the executive. Putin has been in charge since 1999, Erdoğan since 2003, and Orbán since 2010.
That’s the model that Donald Trump wants to emulate. He didn’t want to leave office in 2020 but hadn’t prepared sufficient institutional power to launch a coup at that time. If he returns to office in 2024, he is determined to remake American politics so that his MAGA project will outlive him. To do this, he will depend on Project 2025—a plan hatched by right-wing thinktanks in Washington—to seek out and destroy opponents. He will attempt to use the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against domestic opposition. And he will not bother, in a second go-around, to appease his critics by appointing “compromise” figures in his administration. He wants nothing less than an all-out power grab.
Neither Wilders nor Milei will likely achieve such lasting influence. They will be undone by the very populist politics that have brought them to the top. Ruthless populists know that the very People that they laud are ultimately fickle; they manage to safeguard their positions from the winds of politics by cutting the People out of the loop and turning elections into farces.
That’s what separates the men from the monsters in the world of the far right. Unfortunately, on a planet in panic mode during an election year that will function as a stress test for global democracy, much damage will be done by men and monsters alike.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular