When the voters of the Netherlands went to the polls on March 15, the general election result was viewed as a nail in the coffin of the far-right movement that had swept across Europe.
Geert Wilders, the Dutch demagogue who views Islam as a disease rather than a region, was mostly sidelined, even though his Party for Freedom won five more seats in The Hague’s parliament.
Similarly, in France, the resounding victory of centrist Emmanuel Macron over Marine Le Pen of the National Front in the presidential election gave a new impetus to pan-European liberalism, and also put paid to the popularity of the Right gaining ground in western Europe.
In Germany, the most recent opinion polls have Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party at 40 per cent support. That’s a remarkable comeback for the Christian Democrats, a party that seemed destined to electoral defeat just six months ago. A wave of anti-refugee sentiment, stoked by a series of terrorist and lone-wolf attacks in Munich and Berlin, boosted support for the far-right Alternative for Germany party. With Merkel having opened Germany’s doors to more than a million refugees from Syria and Iraq in the summer of 2015, it seemed as if her party would be paying the price come this September’s general election. According to an opinion poll conducted this week for German media, 52 per cent of those surveyed would back Merkel for a fourth term if the chancellor were elected directly, a drop of 1 percentage point, compared with an unchanged 22 per cent who would back Martin Schulz, the former president of the European Parliament, who leads Germany’s Social Democrats.
Merkel’s conservatives were at their highest level of support since September 2015, with the Social Democrats unchanged at 23 per cent, while the pro-environment Greens gained 1 percentage point to 9 per cent and the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party unchanged at 7 per cent.
So why the sea change?
Six months ago, the political obituaries were being prepared for the three-time chancellor who looked as if she would be spending her retirement watching football and joining the after-dinner speech circuit.
It’s the economy, stupid — as former United States president Bill Clinton so aptly put it.
Germany is humming along very nicely and is the second-best performing nation in the 28 members of the European Union (EU).
In the first quarter of 2017, the German economy grew by 0.6 per cent, and that’s on top of the 0.4 per cent expansion in the last quarter of 2016. So much for the dire warnings of the far-right that the nation of 80 million could not absorb the one million refugees. Clearly it has — and clearly they are wrong. Business investment led the way, but so too did the need for those refugees to buy everything they needed to start a new life in peace — with consumer prosperity and confidence also fuelling the growth.
In the first quarter of 2017, Germany outperformed both a United Kingdom that was trying to figure out exactly what Brexit meant and a France debating on whether it would be in or out of the euro or taking a Left, Right or straight ahead centrist course.
Only the Irish economy grew at a faster rate in the 28 members of the EU in the first part of this year.
Simply put, Germans trust Merkel when it comes to the economy. If that’s the case, you’d imagine she’d be pretty confident heading into the general election for late September. But that’s not the case, and there is an Achilles heel when it comes to the economy. Germans pay a lot of taxes. Last year, a single German worker saw 49.4 per cent of his paycheque disappear in income taxes and social security contributions that pay for health and unemployment benefits, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Only an unmarried worker across the border with neighbouring Belgium saw more of their pay vanish into taxes and social security payments. The OECD says 54 per cent of the Belgian’s salary was gone before he put cashed the cheque in the bank. For a German married with two children and with one source of income coming into the household, the OECD says 34 per cent of the paycheque goes to fund the state.
Schulz, the Social Democrats leader, is hoping to make this high level of taxation a key issue in the weeks ahead. There’s also an acknowledgement within Merkel’s own party that something needs to change, and tax reform will likely be a central plank in its campaign manifesto when the real electioneering gets underway.
But things are not so simple across another of Germany’s borders.
In the Netherlands, Wilders was seen to be the main loser in the March elections. Voters returned a smorgasbord of political parties, backing the centre-right Liberals of Prime Minister Mark Rutte as the largest group in The Hague parliament. His party holds 33 of the 150 seats and needs to cobble together cross-party support to get a working majority of 76. Things haven’t gone well for Rutte. A series of talks between four coalition partners have so far failed to reach any deal on governing the nation of 17 million and Rutte is heading a caretaker administration that’s unable to pass new measures or legislation. The Dutch economy is also starting to stall, down 0.2 percentage points, from a 0.6 growth rate in the last quarter of 2016 to 0.4 per cent in the first part of this year. Consumer confidence is a drag on growth.
The only consensus is that Wilders and his party of 20 far-right deputies must be shut out of government.
Shut out is one thing, shutting up another. Only this week, Wilders said that any Muslim suspected by the Dutch intelligence service of extremist tendencies must be locked up indefinitely without trial. If political talks falter and the Dutch economy continues to decline, Wilders and his anti-Muslim hatemongers will continue to be a pain.
