Why is right-wing populism outmatching left-wing populism across the Globe?
It’s so much easier to make people feel afraid than it is to make them feel hopeful or safe or supported. Right wing populism preys on people’s fears and stokes pre-existing anxieties, while also providing an individual “strongman” that people can look to for resolution. Simple and effective.
If we look at left-wing policies or general ideological talking points, they require both:
an inherent empathy/sympathy for strangers and community alike
a strong persistence to work against pre-existing institutions/structures to achieve that which isn’t often simple
It requires more effort, more funding, and occasionally can’t be simplified into layman’s terms, which ostracizes those who can’t reach higher education. This, above all else, is what makes right-wing populist rhetoric so effective - it’s approachable. It doesn’t ask you to care for others (quite the opposite) outside of your own interests. It’s comforting to have a powerful leader who “isn’t afraid to speak the truth” or “tell it like it is”, when the preceding leaders have all spoken outside your comprehension and made you feel isolated from your country in their education, class, and/or status.
Really, right-wing populism is in vogue because it’s so much easier to understand and so much easier to exercise. It doesn’t ask for much - it certainly doesn’t ask for us to follow rules or facts. It’s chameleon, and its rhetoric shapes to what would reach the most people regardless of how plausible, reasonable, or respectable it is.
Tucker Carlson, of Fox News fame, recently met with Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic in Budapest, Hungary. The journalist pointed out that the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline has put a serious strain on the European Union’s economy and mentioned that the world was “resetting” in reaction to the conflict in Ukraine and the West’s pledged support for Kiev.
Carlson raises some good issues, and an important one to expand upon is the fact that the EU economy is lagging significantly since the outbreak of the war last year. A June piece by the Financial Times titled ‘Europe has fallen behind America and the gap is growing’ details how the EU is now considerably dependent on the US for its technological, security, and economic needs.
In terms of hard numbers, Jeremy Shapiro and Jana Puglierin of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) think tank have stated: “In 2008, the EU’s economy was somewhat larger than America’s: $16.2tn versus $14.7tn. By 2022, the US economy had grown to $25tn, whereas the EU and the UK together had only reached $19.8tn. America’s economy is now nearly one-third bigger. It is more than 50 per cent larger than the EU without the UK.”
The article goes on to describe a European Union that is dragging far behind the US and China in terms of quality universities, a less-than-pristine start-up environment, and lacking key benefits from its transatlantic peer – namely cheap energy. The Ukraine conflict has impacted the latter to the point that EU companies are paying three or four times what their American competitors are, with Washington being energy-independent and enjoying great domestic supplies. Meanwhile, energy from Russia is waning, European factories are closing in droves, and industry leaders are worried about the region’s future competitiveness.
The ECFR issued its own report on the matter in April, which is far blunter in describing the situation as a kind of “vassalization.” The summary of that report notes that the Ukraine war has exposed the EU’s key dependencies on the US, that over the course of a decade, the bloc has fallen behind the US in virtually every key metric, that it is deadlocked in disagreement and is looking to Washington for leadership.
The ECFR noted two causes for this situation. Firstly, despite the widely understood decline of the US compared to the rise of China, the transatlantic relationship has been unbalanced in Washington’s favor over the last 15 years since the 2008 financial crisis. The Biden administration is keen to exploit this and assert itself in the face of a disjointed Europe. Secondly, no one in the EU knows what greater strategic autonomy could look like – let alone agree on it if they did. There exists no process to decide the EU’s future in an autonomous way given the current status quo, which means US leadership is necessary.
This paints quite an interesting picture. Many commentators, including myself, have long documented the decline of the US and attributed it to a number of factors: less of an attractive environment for foreign direct investment (FDI), financial instability, corruption, and internal political turmoil. This is, of course, relativized to China, which has seen immense economic growth since the founding of the People’s Republic and particularly over the past four decades. But under the smoke screen of a fumbling America and a growing China, the EU has likewise fallen in stature.
The Western Establishment just gave itself a ‘World Peace and Liberty’ Award! Ursula von der Leyen received the ‘Judicial Equivalent’. The Western Establishment just gave itself a ‘World Peace and Liberty’ Award. Ursula von der Leyen received the ‘Judicial Equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize’ from Justin Trudeau in a perfect self-congratulatory orgy
As for the two causes noted by the ECFR, they seem to be intertwined. Many of the key issues that have faced the EU, from migration to the banking crisis to Covid-19, have stemmed directly from the non-federal nature of the EU. And the current political crises are a result of Euroskepticism, i.e. a backlash against what is perceived as an overreach from Brussels by some political organizations within the bloc. The EU is a complicated and sometimes cumbersome bureaucracy that is cherished by some, reviled by others, and, under these assumptions, is an impediment to strategic autonomy.
The ECFR essentially argues for the EU and Western European capitals to lean into the transatlantic partnership, but on terms favorable to themselves. This includes creating an independent security architecture within and complimentary to NATO, creating an economic NATO of sorts and even pursuing a European nuclear weapons program. At least the former two are acceptable, as abandoning the US outright would be politically foolish for the EU at this juncture. It certainly needs to develop a transatlantic free-trade agreement that puts an end to American trade protectionism.
However, the obvious point to help diversify the Western European economic portfolio, reduce genuinely problematic dependencies, and fuel growth is for the EU to develop peer-to-peer relations with the Global South. For one, the EU Parliament could right now ratify the China-EU Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) to help their companies gain market access in China and tap into one of the world’s largest consumer bases. I would also argue, as I’ve done in the past, that the EU and China could cooperate – rather than compete – on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in the Global South because of Europe’s historical connections, due to its colonialist past.
What is clear is that the EU needs to diversify and back off from the transatlantic relationship. With much talk about ‘de-risking’, or even ‘de-coupling’, from China, Western Europe has actually gotten into the position where it is strategically dependent on Washington to the point of being outright vassalized. This is a bleak situation for the EU’s growth model and its hopes for strategic autonomy.
— Bradley Blankenship is an American Journalist, Columnist and Political Commentator. He has a syndicated column at CGTN and is a freelance reporter for international news agencies.
According to first wave exit polls published in Greece on Sunday evening, a Euroskeptic political newcomer may pass the 3 percent legal threshold needed to secure a place in European Parliament. The far-right, pro-Russian, Christian nationalist party Greek Solution (Elliniki Lisi) is projected to gain between 2.5 and 4.5 percent of the total vote, possibly squeezing into the next assembly with one seat.
The party was founded on June 28, 2016, by Kyriakos Velopoulos, a journalist and former MP of the nationalist populist Popular Orthodox Rally party. According to the party’s official website, it seeks to establish stronger relations with Russia, it is strongly opposed to the use of the word “Macedonia” in the name of the neighboring Republic of North Macedonia, and seeks to revive Greece’s heavy industry and reorient the educational system with an emphasis on nationalism and Orthodoxy.
In 2017, the party was close to recruiting Nikos Michos, an independent MP who was formerly affiliated with neo-fascist Golden Dawn. Michos eventually decided to not join Greek Solution, accusing Velopoulos of being unable to “distinguish politics from business.”
Dogs paid to demonstrate against the government. A deadly nightclub fire ordered by an American billionaire.
So-called “#fakenews” is prospering in #Romania, fueling #euroskepticism in the former communist country.
The Social Democrat government’s attempt in January to weaken anticorruption legislation unleashed a huge wave of protests that eventually forced an about-turn by Prime Minister Sorin Grindeanu.
But it also unleashed a wave of truth-stretching reports by progovernment broadcasters.
The first major incidence of “fake news” was spotted in December—just two days before a parliamentary election—with privately owned Romania TV reporting that the US business tycoon George Soros, a popular target of antiglobalists, had somehow “financed” a nightclub fire that killed 64 people in 2015.
Outrage over the blaze led to the toppling of the then Social Democratic government and a follow-up investigation found that failure to respect safety regulations—rather than any foreign plot—was the cause of the tragedy.
Nonetheless, in a country where the national media industry is dominated by five privately owned 24-hour news channels, rival broadcasters were quick to jump onto the story and into the “fake news” fray.
‘War on the streets’
When as many as 500,000 people marched in peaceful demonstrations earlier this year to defend the anticorruption drive, some media reported a “war on the streets” or a “coup.”
Multinational companies, those reports claimed, were forcing their staff to join in the protests. Romania TV said some employees and their pets were being given money to protest.
“Adults were paid 100 lei (22 euros, $24), children earned 50 lei and dogs were paid 30 lei,” the broadcaster reported.
But anger at fake news also surged among viewers in the former Soviet satellite state, where memories of communist authoritarianism remain strong.
The National Audiovisual Council of Romania received over 2,000 complaints in January and February alone, nearly 10 times the number in the same period last year, according to council member Dorina Rusu.
The regulator fined Romania TV more than 6,000 euros ($6,400) for making claims about Soros and 11,000 euros for broadcasting “fake information” about the “paid” demonstrators.
Press freedom organization ActiveWatch and a group of Romanian advertisers called the Art Directors Club also criticized what they labeled biased reporting.
Two of the broadcasters, Romania TV and Antena 3, temporarily lost two-thirds of their advertisers in February, according to industry observer IQads.
Tainted media moguls
Romania’s media industry is vulnerable as it is largely under the control of moguls who “face corruption charges, have already been imprisoned, or harbor obvious political leanings,” said Petrisor Obae of the media watchdog Pagina de Media.
Dan Voiculescu, founder of the channel Antena 3 and former president of a small party aligned with the Social Democrats, is serving a 10-year prison sentence for money laundering.
The head of Romania TV, former Social Democrat deputy Sebastian Ghita, faces four counts of corruption, money laundering and tax evasion, and has been on the run since December.
Romania’s anticorruption drive, which has also targeted politicians and other oligarchs, has been met with press reports so negative they were denounced by the European Commission as “major media attacks” on the judicial branch.
In one Antena 3 report, the country’s chief anticorruption prosecutor, Laura Codruta Kovesi, was accused of having received one million euros from a local mobster to cover up charges against him. She pressed charges against the journalists and a trial is under way.
Over the past year, Kovesi has lodged 15 complaints with the audiovisual council for insults and defamation.
‘Russian propaganda’
As in other countries formerly under Soviet influence, Moscow is seen by some as an invisible hand in the spread of false information—in particular on issues concerning the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato).
“The goal is to weaken confidence in the EU and Nato and weaken Romania’s international position,” said Corina Rebegea of the US-based Center for European Policy Analysis.
Romania, one of the EU’s poorest countries which has received 26 billion euros from the bloc since joining in 2007, has been falsely described by some journalists as a net contributor to the bloc.
Another story making the rounds claimed, falsely, that foreigners controlled 70 percent of the country’s farmland.
Euroskeptic discourse was given a further boost last summer when Romania TV owner Ghita joined a small nationalist party and his channel began inviting in politicians with similar views. —AFP
plastering Nigel Farage’s face all over every piece of Brexit coverage serves two functions
>delegitimizing Brexit for foreign audiences i.e. other countries expressing renewed skepticism about global financial integration, UK prior to referendum
>legitimizing and endorsing UKIP style ethnonationalism for UK audiences post Brexit, faced with array of alternatives to globalized neoliberalism, including a resurgent left
2013: In Europe, some sunshine but spreading euroskepticism
By Sara Miller Llana, CS Monitor, December 31, 2013
Paris--If Europe in 2012 was the year of "existential crisis," as leaders faced a near demise of the euro, Europe in 2013 was in a sunnier mood. One could argue that the year played out as a prolonged, 365-day lull.
Few Europeans may be speculating about a switch from the euro back to francs or deutsche marks in the wake of the European Union's sovereign debt crisis. But many may wish they could leave the EU's common currency behind, as it binds members' economies closely to each other. Few worried about waking up this year and no longer counting Greece as part of the EU, as they did for much of 2012. But many wished that they themselves could be counted out of Europe's defining postwar project, the EU.
The mood was best captured in a Pew Research Global Attitudes Poll in May titled "The New Sick Man of Europe: the European Union." It showed a whopping 15-point decline in the favorability of the EU from 2012 to 2013.
In mid-2012, when Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, said that the bank would do "all it takes" to save the euro, most Europeans cheered. Sixty percent then, according to Pew, viewed the EU favorably. A year later, the EU has lost majority appeal: Its favorability has dropped to 45 percent.
Pessimism varies across the Continent, depending largely on whether countries sit on the debtor or creditor side of the crisis. Favorability has remained fairly high in countries such as Germany that have fared well, though its citizens may resent paying for the "mistakes" of others. In Spain, however, support fell from 60 percent to 46 percent, while in France it dropped from 60 percent to 41 percent. Britain is seriously debating whether it wants to be part of the EU at all.
What that's meant is a continued rise in the appeal of Europe's political extremes. That was underscored in November when France's popular National Front leader, Marine Le Pen, joined forces with Dutch politician Geert Wilders to launch a "historic" alliance of the far right. Europe is holding its breath to see how the forces of euroskepticism emerge in EU parliamentary elections in May.
Perhaps the most significant nod to Europe came from outside the EU's borders: Ukraine. The former Soviet satellite was gripped by intensifying protests in November and December after its president abruptly scrapped a deal with the EU, bowing to pressure from Russia. Thousands have flooded the streets of Kiev, the capital, waving the EU flag and saying their fate is with Western Europe, not Moscow.
Ian Traynor, The Guardian, 24 April 2013
Public confidence in the European Union has fallen to historically low levels in the six biggest EU countries, raising fundamental questions about its democratic legitimacy more than three years into the union's worst ever crisis, new data shows.
After financial, currency and debt crises, wrenching budget and spending cuts, rich nations' bailouts of the poor, and surrenders of sovereign powers over policymaking to international technocrats, Euroscepticism is soaring to a degree that is likely to feed populist anti-EU politics and frustrate European leaders' efforts to arrest the collapse in support for their project.
Figures from Eurobarometer, the EU's polling organisation, analysed by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), a thinktank, show a vertiginous decline in trust in the EU in countries such as Spain, Germany and Italy that are historically very pro-European.
The six countries surveyed--Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Spain, and Poland--are the EU's biggest, jointly making up more than two out of three EU citizens or around 350 million of the EU's 500 million population.
The findings, published exclusively in the Guardian in Britain and in collaboration with other leading newspapers in the other five countries, represent a nightmare for Europe's leaders, whether in the wealthy north or in the bailout-battered south, suggesting a much bigger crisis of political and democratic legitimacy.
"The damage is so deep that it does not matter whether you come from a creditor, debtor country, euro would-be member or the UK: everybody is worse off," said José Ignacio Torreblanca, head of the ECFR's Madrid office. "Citizens now think that their national democracy is being subverted by the way the euro crisis is conducted."
EU leaders are aware of the problem, utterly at odds over what to do about it, and have yet to come up with any coherent policy proposals addressing the mismatch between the pooling of economic and fiscal powers and the democratic mandate deemed necessary to underpin such radical policy shifts.
José Manuel Barroso, the European commission president, said on Tuesday this week the European "dream" was under threat from a "resurgence of populism and nationalism" across the EU. "At a time when so many Europeans are faced with unemployment, uncertainty and growing inequality, a sort of 'European fatigue' has set in, coupled with a lack of understanding. Who does what, who decides what, who controls whom and what? And where are we heading to?"
In five of the six countries, including Britain, mistrust prevailed over trust by sizeable margins, whereas in 2007--with the exception of the UK--the opposite was the case.
Five years ago, 56% of Germans "tended to trust" the EU, whereas 59% now "tend to mistrust". In France, mistrust has risen from 41% to 56%. In Italy, where public confidence in Europe has traditionally been higher than in the national political class, mistrust of the EU has almost doubled from 28% to 53%.
Even in Poland, which enthusiastically joined the EU less than a decade ago and is the single biggest beneficiary from the transfers of tens of billions of euros from Brussels, support has plummeted from 68% to 48%, although it remains the sole country surveyed where more people trust than mistrust the union.
A separate, more detailed study published this week on the impact of the currency and debt crisis and the austerity policies that have followed also found steep falls across the EU in faith in democracy and national political elites.
The study for the Cabinet Office by the European Social Survey, linking university researchers across the EU, found that soaring unemployment, anxiety and insecurity had eroded faith in politics.
"Overall levels of political trust and satisfaction with democracy [declined] across much of Europe, but this varied markedly between countries. It was significant in Britain, Belgium, Denmark and Finland, particularly notable in France, Ireland, Slovenia and Spain, and reached truly alarming proportions in the case of Greece," it said.
The financial crisis "not only eroded the objective economic conditions of many citizens, but also created widespread anxiety about a country's future even among those who did not experience hardship directly".
