I see light in the darkness – a backlash against bigotry is under way
October 15, 2016
From Hillary’s resurgence to centrist fightbacks in Europe, there are signs that xenophobic populism is on the wane
Could national populism have reached its high-water mark in western politics. Perhaps globally? It may be too early to say, but some signs point to a pushback against rampant xenophobia, bigotry and the ruinous fascination with strongmen. The indications are fragile, but without doubt they are there.
Take the US, Germany and France. Donald Trump has had a more successful bid for the presidency than anyone could have imagined a year ago, but his campaign now seems on the wane, damaged by Republican defections and his ramblings on women. The political death of Angela Merkel has been pronounced many times since the 2015 refugee crisis but the chancellor, arguably Europe’s most forceful voice on inclusiveness, simply has no obvious challenger ahead of Germany’s 2017 election. As France heads towards primaries next month, it’s a centrist figure, Alain Juppé (not Nicolas Sarkozy, who has embraced far-right themes) who leads the polls. This makes it more likely that Marine Le Pen will be soundly beaten in the second round of next year’s presidential election (which she is all but guaranteed to reach).
Such signals have global significance. The US remains the single most powerful democracy in the world. A Hillary Clinton victory in November would mean an entirely different global environment to the one that would emerge if the US were to end up with a presidency of the type imagined in the 2004 Philip Roth novel, The Plot Against America, in which the pilot Charles Lindbergh defeats Roosevelt in the 1940 election.
Germany and France might form an unbalanced couple, but they stand at the heart of European politics: what happens in their elections will largely define what can be salvaged of the EU project – arguably much more than Brexit negotiations will do. Britain’s current political travails are a seen as a side show in Europe at the moment.
Elsewhere on the continent, there are yet more signs of pushback. In central Europe, often described as a hotbed of parochialism and intolerance, illiberal politicians aren’t entirely having their way. This month Poland’s nationalist, ultraconservative government had to backtrack on plans to curtail abortion rights after thousands of women protested on the streets. And Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, suffered a serious setback when his referendum on EU migrant quotas failed because of low voter turnout. The electorate snubbed him.
This may be dubbed the era of post-truth politics and cynical autocrats, but new forms of resistance to bigotry are also emerging. It may be that national populists have overreached (Trump’s racist and misogynist antics); or that memories of a dark past and the need to avert political catastrophe have come to the fore (Germans wanting to counter the far-right Alternative for Germany, French citizens worried about Le Pen). It may be that groups are rekindling the spirit of democratic mobilisation (Polish women and the anti-Jarosław Kaczyński grassroots, who are such keen demonstrators). It may be that voter apathy also sends a message about policies that stigmatise outsiders (Hungary).
Does this sound too optimistic? Precisely because there haven’t been many reasons for optimism recently, it’s important not to ignore what is potentially promising. Likewise, it’s important to see how the connections between international affairs and domestic politics may not all play out in the populists’ favour. Authoritarianism has thrown its weight around in recent years, but right now it’s going through a bad patch.
Take Russia. Whatever allowances some in the west might have sought to make for Putin in the past, the Syrian tragedy has made this much more difficult. To claim that Russia’s air assault on Aleppo’s population is no different from western interventions against Isis not only flies in the face of documented facts, it smacks of intellectual and moral disorientation.
Geopolitics feeds into politics. Which means there is cautious hope to be drawn from the fact that Putin’s Russia currently finds itself more isolated than it ever has been (only Venezuela’s autocratic regime voted alongside Russia in the UN recently). Russia has been an active backer of populists in Europe and in the US. Putin sympathisers now find themselves having to keep awkwardly silent over the scandal unfolding in Syria, or having to repeat a propaganda line that many citizens may find hard to swallow.
This is not to say that national populists or their authoritarian backers are about to be defeated or disempowered. The fuel that powers the far right has yet to be exhausted. But from Clinton’s lead to the surprising strength of Europe’s political centre-ground, and with the novelty of Russia being discredited on many fronts, the picture is not just doom and gloom for the democratically minded. If this is an interconnected world, then the pushback against national populism may be stronger than we think.
