In or out of government, Europe’s rightwing populists are not having a good pandemic. One reason is their trademark scorn for expertise, which enthuses a minority of voters but unsettles many more who are worried about their health and livelihoods. But a deeper cause is the special talent that the populists display for embroiling themselves in unsavoury scandals and internal disputes.
The latest two examples concern the Netherlands and Estonia. Since the start of the year, the ruling coalitions in The Hague and Tallinn have collapsed in circumstances that do not reflect well on the countries’ mainstream political parties. Yet in neither capital are rightwing populists likely to be the beneficiaries.
The Dutch government resigned after it emerged that tax officials had falsely accused thousands of parents of defrauding the state to obtain child benefit payments. Perhaps the bleakest aspect of this affair was that some ministers in prime minister Mark Rutte’s government encouraged the Dutch bureaucracy’s hunt for phantom welfare cheats. In this way, they inverted the informal rule of 21st-century European politics: that large numbers of citizens distrust governments. They demonstrated that governments are more than capable of distrusting citizens.
However, the welfare scandal appears to be having little impact on the popularity of Mr Rutte’s VVD party, which enjoys a commanding lead in opinion polls ahead of parliamentary elections on March 17. Nor is it boosting the Dutch far right.
Four years ago, it was a different story. The shock of the UK’s Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s US election victory in 2016 caused mainstream politicians in Europe to fear an extreme rightwing upset in the Dutch election of March 2017, setting a dangerous precedent for France’s presidential contest and Germany’s Bundestag elections later that year.
Once the Dutch establishment dyke withstood the radical right’s onslaught in 2017, there was a palpable sense of relief in EU capitals. Today there is little anxiety about the upcoming Dutch election. To an extent, this is because of the spectacular implosion of Forum for Democracy, a far-right movement that burst on to the scene in 2016-2017 and was the big winner of the Dutch provincial elections of March 2019.
FvD is in turmoil partly because its members have always been prone to infighting, and partly because the Dutch media has recently exposed outrageous cases of racism and anti-Semitism in the party. In addition, Thierry Baudet, the party’s founder, has misjudged the public’s mood with petulant denunciations of the government’s lockdown measures during the pandemic.
True, FvD’s self-destruction clears space on the political spectrum for Geert Wilders, the veteran far-right campaigner, and his PVV party. But whereas in 2017 the PVV was top of most opinion polls two months before election day, now it trails Mr Rutte’s party by at least 10 percentage points. Mr Wilders’ anti-EU, Islamophobic message seems to be less effective at a time when the eurozone financial crisis and migrant emergency of 2010-2015 are receding in the memory.
Estonia’s government collapsed this month because of a corruption scandal related to a property development in Tallinn. A criminal investigation is focused partly on an associate of finance minister Martin Helme, the leader of Ekre, a far-right party that served in the ruling coalition. But the bigger problem for Ekre is that, since entering government in 2019, its behaviour has tarnished Estonia’s image as the poster child of liberal democracy in the post-communist Baltic region.
Some politicians in Ekre and many activists in Blue Awakening, the party’s youth movement, embrace white supremacist language and imagery with unabashed enthusiasm. As if this were not bad enough, Mart Helme, father of Ekre’s leader, resigned in November as Estonia’s interior minister after attacking then US president-elect Joe Biden as “corrupt”. Coming from a politician in one of Europe’s smallest countries, which borders Russia and depends on Nato and the US security guarantee for its defence, it was an extraordinarily irresponsible statement.
At the moment, Ekre lies third or fourth in opinion polls. However, mainstream Estonian politicians are likely to think twice before offering the far right a share of power again.
Austria may offer a parallel. The far-right Freedom party served in a coalition government in Vienna from 2017 to 2019 before ensnaring itself in a tawdry financial scandal. Voters punished the party in Austria’s subsequent election. It may be premature to write off the European far right altogether, but at present it is doing a perfectly good job of discrediting itself.
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January 24, 2021 at 07:00PM
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Europe’s far right is often its own worst enemy - Financial Times
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