Populism Wins and Losses
If you have tired of seeing the words “populist” and “populism” in your daily news, relief may be coming. In a single day in the first week of September, articles were published with the titles “Has Europe Reached Peak Populism?” and “Populism Isn’t So Popular After All.” Could the political pendulum be swinging so far so fast?
Measuring the political pulse is risky even in calm times, so drawing conclusions from day-to-day events may mislead. None-the-less, this is what two journalists observed on September 5th, 2019.
On the website Politico, Paul Taylor cited events and votes in Austria, Britain, the Czech Republic, France, Italy Slovakia and Spain, all of an anti-populist character. In The Atlantic David A. Graham wrote that many of the populist leaders may survive only with minority support. “A common denominator is that once in office, these politicians have found that charisma does not translate smoothly to power.”
In the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson attempted to suspend parliament before parliament could vote to oppose a no-deal Brexit, stopping, at least temporarily, what Taylor called Johnson’s “attempt to out-populist the populists.”
In France President Emmanuel Macron is “back in the saddle” as weekly demonstrations by the Yellow Jackets ended. Austria’s far-right Freedom Party was ejected from government following the exposure of its leader’s involvement in illicit activity. Spain’s socialist government gained ground on far left populists and the extreme right. A liberal democrat won election as president of Slovakia. Germany’s far-right AfD scored wins in regional elections in two eastern states but remain shut out of power nationally. And well into its third year, the U.S. administration hasn’t succeeded on some of its major campaign promises.
Then there is Italy. The far-right Northern League and anti-establishment Five Star Movement shared power in the first populist government in Western Europe. That ended when the Five Star Movement left the coalition to form a government with the center-left Democratic Party, removing the euroskeptic Northern League from power. By September 17th, that government was again shaken by the announcement that a former prime minister was leaving the Democratic Party to form a new centrist party.
Gideon Rachman, writing in the Financial Times, claimed to be a bit startled that Boris Johnson’s name can be added to the list of “strongman” leaders that includes Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Rodrigo Duterte and Viktor Orban. Observing that Johnson “used to argue that reverence for parliamentary democracy is what kept Britain safe from despotism,” Rachman now hears the Prime Minister “hinting that he is prepared to break the law, rather than obey parliament.”
Rachman calls Britain “a test case for strongman politics.” As the October 31st deadline for Brexit approaches, what will the rest of the world expect if British moderation succumbs to populism?