Munich played host at the weekend to its annual landmark security conference with a first class international line-up, including US Vice-President Mike Pence, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russia Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. A key theme of the landmark event, unusually, was as much domestic policy as international relations-focused, with debate centred on growing concern that, especially with Donald Trump’s election, “the world is facing an illiberal moment...across the West and beyond” and a “post-truth age”.
With populist groups now part of government in around a dozen western democracies, this theme was a fitting one for such an important European event given that the continent, in 2017, will be the primary test bed for whether anti-establishment forces will continue to make political ground. Starting with the Netherlands next month, where polls indicate the far-right Freedom Party will emerge as the largest single party, mainstream politicians are under pressure from insurgents championing Euro-sceptical, anti-immigrant platforms.
However, while it is left and centrist parties that are taking the brunt of this battering, the Munich conference highlighted that a key political dividing line is increasingly “less between left and right but between a liberal cosmopolitan pole and a populist (or even xenophobic authoritarian) one”. In this dichotomy, it is populist parties making the running by dismissing pluralism, liberalism and cultural modernisation, and revolting against what they perceive as threats to the nation state, including international institutions such as Nato and the EU.
A good case in point is National Front leader Marine Le Pen in France, currently leading the polls there, who has questioned need for Nato in the Twenty First Century, asserting that it now exists to serve “Washington’s objectives in Europe”, and called instead for closer ties with Russia. She has also called for a French referendum on the country’s EU membership and if she pulls off an upset victory this Spring, it would be a more savage blow to the bloc than Brexit, not least given France’s Eurozone membership.
The conference also highlighted that even those populists with only a relatively small share of the vote are sometimes exerting a defining influence by shifting debate or pressuring mainstream parties to adopt different policy agendas. This is exemplified by Germany where incumbent Angela Merkel is presently tipped to win power again, but is facing her toughest ever election fight, and could yet lose out. This is, partly, because of growing support for the far-right Alternative for Germany, a group founded less than a half decade ago as an anti-euro body which has, since then, led opposition toward her immigration policies, and is polling around 15 per cent, nationally, with seats in more than half of state legislatures.
However, there does appear to be limits to the spread of this conservative breed of anti-establishment politics. For instance, December’s presidential election in Austria saw the convincing defeat of the Freedom Party leader, Norbert Hofer, who would have become Europe’s first far-right head of state since 1945.
Meanwhile in France, support is currently rising for an insurgent, albeit of a liberal centrist stripe, in presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron who is now second in polls behind Le Pen. Macron — whose top aides complained this week that he is being targeted by negative, fake news reports spread by Russian state-controlled media — is a 39 year former cabinet minister, who is pro-EU, and running as an independent.
His rise, partly, reflects a vacuum of power in the political centre ground created by scandals surrounding centre-right Francois Fillon’s candidacy, and also the fact that Socialists have chosen far left contender Benoit Hamon. Should Macron get through to the run-off election in May (in which the two candidates with the largest votes from the first round in April go head-to-head), polls indicate he could win handsomely if the other candidate is Le Pen. One survey last week suggested most voters would rally around him and that he could win as much as 63 per cent, although such polls should be taken with caution at this stage of the race.
Benefits of forward-looking vision
The next few weeks will tell if the ‘Macron bubble’, as some critics point to, has staying power. However, for now at least, he is proving a foil to far-right populists by positioning himself against the old left and right, and rejecting traditional “class politics”, through his new ‘En Marche’ political movement.
What Macron’s success also appears to underline is that politicians of the centre ground benefit from having an optimistic, forward-looking vision for tackling complex, long-term policy challenges like tackling stagnant living standards, and re-engaging people with the political process, to help build public consensus and confidence around solutions to them. Tackling these tough-to-solve, first order challenges is a significant hurdle that centrist politicians across much of the world are widely perceived to have failed on, helping give rise to perceptions of a broken process and that democracy itself is failing.
This has fuelled the rise of more extreme populist politicians with the often half-baked, damaging agendas they champion. Contrary to what some of this ilk assert, there is no ‘silver bullet’ agenda that can address, overnight, challenges such as stagnant living standards.
Instead, long-term, concerted efforts are needed to better address these issues through a range of educational, home affairs, economic and other policies. Collectively, as Macron appears to appreciate, such an agenda can move towards demonstrating more effectively how a fair, inclusive democratic politics can help overcome or ameliorate the multiple challenges that many people are experiencing in a world changing fast in the face of globalisation.
Taken overall, forthcoming European elections will test the limits to which there are still buffers to the spread of far-right anti-establishment politics in western democracies and beyond.
The key race to watch will be in France where an insurgency victory by Macron would be a fillip to liberal, centrist politics despite his rejection of the political establishment in the country.
— Andrew Hammond is an Associate at LSE IDEAS (the Centre for International Affairs, Diplomacy and Strategy) at the London School of Economics
