Panic
does not produce prudent politics. Panic
produces provocative populists. And it reduces
pundits to Seussian spluttering.
How
can voters choose such…panic-peddling
panderers?!
The
defeats of Donald Trump in the U.S. elections
in 2020 and Jair Bolsonaro in the Brazilian
elections in 2022 were supposed to prove that
the wave of right-wing politicians had crested
worldwide. Brazilians wisely barred
Bolsonaro from
running again for office until 2030.
Trump,
on the other hand, is on the rebound and
leading the polls in the lead-up to the
presidential elections in the United States
next year. Even more troubling, the recent
electoral victories of Javier Milei in
Argentina and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands
suggest that the world has not yet reached
peak populism.
Brace
yourself for the next potential tsunami. In
2024, elections will take place in
50 countries and
engage up to 2 billion people. The
Economist calls
it the
“biggest election year in history.” Voters
will go to the polls in the United States,
Russia, Mexico, South Africa, Indonesia, and
the European Union, among other countries.
The
far right sees 2024 as its greatest
opportunity since the 1930s to push the needle
toward fascism. If the recent victories of
Milei and Wilders are any indication, they
ain’t just whistling Dixie.
Something
Different?
When
I was studying Russian in Moscow in 1985, my
fellow students complained about the food. It
was your basic Soviet fare of meat and
potatoes. It was rather monotonous, to be
frank, but it was filling and plentiful.
After
the semester was over, we all took the train
to Helsinki. After checking in at the hotel, I
went down to the city’s famous Harbor Market
to buy fresh fruit and vegetables, which had
been in short supply in Moscow. I had
difficulty persuading my fellow students to
come with me. A large number of them couldn’t
wait to have their first, post-Soviet dinner
at McDonald’s. That’s right: after all those
Moscow meals of meat and potatoes, they
immediately went to the Golden Arches to
have…meat and potatoes.
“But it’s different!” they
said, salivating over a Big Mac and French
fries.
Voters
in democracies across the world are tired of
what’s on the political menu. They’re rejecting the
“same old, same old” policies of Joe Biden
even though the U.S. economy, by all standard
measures, is doing pretty well. They’re souring on
the European Green Deal of the Socialists and
Greens even though the continent is at the
forefront of addressing climate change.
Instead
of supporting candidates who promise truly
transformational change, voters are backing
fast-food populists who advertise options that
are even unhealthier than what’s currently on
offer.
The
desire for profound change is surely
understandable. The conditions that generated
victories for the far right that I describe in
my 2021 book Right
Around the World have
not changed in any substantial way. Economic
globalization, after all, continues to benefit
the few and burden the many. As Zia
Qureshi writes at
Brookings:
Over
the past four decades, there has been a
broad trend of rising income inequality
across countries. Income inequality has
risen in most advanced economies and major
emerging economies, which together account
for about two-thirds of the world’s
population and 85 percent of global GDP. The
increase has been particularly large in the
United States, among advanced economies, and
in China, India, and Russia, among major
emerging economies.
Note
that the far right has prospered in precisely
the countries that have experienced this
rising income inequality: Donald Trump in the
United States, Narendra Modi in India, and
Vladimir Putin in Russia, as well as Giorgia
Meloni in Italy, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and
now Geert Wilders in the Netherlands.
Voters
have been disgusted by how parties of the
center-right and center-left have done little
to address this inequality. And they’re
worried that an influx of immigrants, the very
embodiment of globalization, will only make
matters worse (and there’s evidence that
immigrants do indeed exert a downward
pressure on wages).
This
is the triple whammy that helps the far right:
increased economic inequality, increased
disgust with conventional parties, and
increased fear of immigration. It’s also the
perfect storm that has put Geert Wilders so
close to becoming the next Dutch prime
minister.
Have
the Dutch Gone Crazy?
Geert
Wilders has been a platinum-haired presence on
the Dutch political scene for two decades,
chiefly as a mischief-maker on the margins.
But in elections this month, his party won 37
seats in parliament, the most of any party and
20 more than in the last election.
If
these were ordinary times, the informal
prohibition of mainstream parties in Europe
against working in coalition with the far
right would hold and Wilders would remain in
the wilderness. The former ruling party led by
outgoing prime minister Mark Rutte has indeed
refused to partner with Wilders’s Party for
Freedom. So, too, have the coalition of
socialists and Greens led by former European
Commissioner Frans Timmermans and the
center-right People’s Party for Freedom and
Democracy.
Only
the centrist New Social Contract party and
some minor parties are available for the
wooing. But cobbling together a coalition out
of these disparate elements will not be easy.
Indeed, the first negotiator to attempt this
sausage-making on behalf of Wilders resigned
in the wake
of charges that
he engaged in bribery and fraud in his
previous job as director of Utrecht Holdings.
The
real sticking point, however, will be Wilders
himself and his wilder-than-wild political
proposals. Most potentially destabilizing has
been his support for Nexit, a withdrawal of
the Netherlands from the European Union, about
which he has promised to hold a referendum.
This is as impractical as it is unpopular.
According to the last major poll, the leavers
could count on only 25
percent support.
Dutch voters are well aware of what a mess the
UK stepped in after voting for Brexit.
According to one estimate, leaving the EU has
cost the UK $100
billion a year in
lost output.
Then
there’s Wilders’s enthusiasm for Vladimir
Putin and his chSanneling
of Kremlin propaganda (such as his
noxious notion that
Ukraine is led by “National-Socialists,
Jew-haters and other anti-democrats”).
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reduced some of
his fawning, but Wilders will undoubtedly try
to cut back on Dutch aid for Kyiv.
On
immigration, Wilders calls
for “borders
closed” and “zero asylum seekers.” The first
is going to be hard to push in a Europe of
open (internal) borders—thus his support for
Nexit—while the second would violate
international law. On Islam, he wants to ban
the Quran, Islamic schools, and mosques. Ever
the political opportunist, however, Wilders
has offered to put those bans on hold in order
to achieve his cherished dream of leading the
country.
Finally,
on the economy, Wilders has no patience for
Green policies. His party backs the
traditional, meat-and-potatoes positions
of more
drilling for oil and gas,
no solar or wind farms, and a withdrawal from
the Paris accord on climate change. Add to
that the restriction of government assistance
to immigrants and the far right promises to
take the Netherlands one giant step backward.
The
Dutch live in one of the richest
per-capita countries in
the world. But poverty has been projected
to increase substantially
from 4.7 percent of the population in 2023 to
5.8 percent in 2024. “Fear of falling” can
easily slip into fear of immigrants.
Then
there’s the rural-urban divide that has fueled
the rise of the right in so many
countries: Poland
A versus Poland B,
red state versus blue state in America,
and countryside
versus prosperous cities in
the Netherlands as well. The
industrial-strength nostalgia that the far
right sells has appeal for farmers, unskilled
laborers in rural factories, and pensioners in
deserted villages.
The
past might not have been a golden age, but
many things really were better back then for
folks outside the big cities.
But
let’s not overstate Wilders’s surprise
victory. He won less than a quarter of the
votes. The party of the even
crazier Thierry Baudet—yes, as in Russia, there are
even worse options lurking on the
margins—actually lost more than half its
seats in parliament. And the toxicity of
Wilders’s persona and positions may well
make him coalition-proof. Dutch common
sense—on display in the expression meten
is weten (measuring
things brings knowledge)—may prove too large
an obstacle for Wilders to overcome.
Meanwhile
in Argentina
Unlike
the Netherlands, Argentina truly is an
economic mess. Annual inflation is more
than 120 percent.
The peso has given way to the dollar as the
everyday currency. The government is
perpetually at risk of debt default.
Economic
polarization in Argentina is severe. The
richest families have concentrated
the wealth of
the country into their hands, and this
inequality only deepened during the COVID
pandemic. Seven
Argentinians are
on the Forbes list of richest entrepreneurs.
Meanwhile, more
than 40 percent of
Argentinians live in poverty.
Then
along comes economist Javier Milei who
promises to fix everything. As a newcomer to
politics, he has no track record to criticize
and can safely rail against corrupt insiders.
As
an economist, his off-the-wall proposals have
a veneer of credibility. Anyone else who would
propose to eliminate the central bank, replace
the peso with the U.S. dollar, and whittle the
government down to the merest nub would be
dismissed as insane within the Argentine
context. But the average voter can easily be
fooled into thinking that this
“anarcho-capitalist” must know what he’s
talking about.
He
doesn’t. Get rid of the central bank and
Argentina would no longer have any control
over its own economy. Even though the dollar
has become the de
facto currency,
making it the official one would require the
government to have sufficient dollars at its
disposal (it doesn’t).
And taking an axe to the government would
effectively take an axe to the poorest of the
poor, who need government assistance.
Milei
is globalization on steroids. He liked to
campaign with a chainsaw in hand. And now he’s
on the verge of turning the Argentina
Chain Saw Massacre into
reality.
However,
as with Wilders, Milei doesn’t really have the
political support to govern as he pleases.
True, he won the presidential run-off by a
convincing margin of 11 percentage points. But
his party won less than a quarter of the
legislature, leaving it in a distinct
minority. It won’t be easy for Milei to push
through his most radical suggestions.
Here’s
what’s more likely to happen. Milei has
already sent his “shock therapy” plan to an
emergency session of the Argentine Congress,
which is set to convene shortly after he takes
office next month. The stabilization, which
consists of rather conventional fixes to
reduce inflation and government spending, has
already won Milei favor in international
financial circles.
“Our approach is fiscal and
monetary shock from day one,” says
Luis Caputo,
the head of Milei’s economic team and likely
to be the new economy minister. “The roadmap
is orthodox and without crazy things.”
Whether
they succeed or not, Milei’s team will push
through painful reforms that will eventually
get them voted out of office, just like the
political victims of “shock therapy” in
Eastern Europe in the 1990s. In other words,
the so-called populist will ultimately be
tripped up by the very unpopularity of his
economic plans. Unless, of course, he manages
to fix one thing in Argentina: elections.
The
Institutionalization of the Far Right
The
far right is able to stay in power only when
it games the system. It does so not so much by
outright vote-stealing but by restructuring
government in its favor. Vladimir Putin turned
the chaotic and ineffectual democracy of Boris
Yeltsin into a petro-oligarchy. Viktor Orbán
created a powerful patronage system that
privileged members of his Fidesz party. Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan pushed through a referendum
that concentrated power in the hands of the
executive. Putin has been in charge since
1999, Erdoğan since 2003, and Orbán since
2010.
That’s
the model that Donald Trump wants to emulate.
He didn’t want to leave office in 2020 but
hadn’t prepared sufficient institutional power
to launch a coup at that time. If he returns
to office in 2024, he is determined to remake
American politics so that his MAGA project
will outlive him. To do this, he will depend
on Project 2025—a plan hatched by right-wing
thinktanks in Washington—to seek out and
destroy opponents. He will attempt to use
the Insurrection Act to deploy the military
against domestic opposition. And he will not
bother, in a second go-around, to appease
his critics by appointing “compromise”
figures in his administration. He wants
nothing less than an all-out power grab.
Neither
Wilders nor Milei will likely achieve such
lasting influence. They will be undone by the
very populist politics that have brought them
to the top. Ruthless populists know that the
very People that they laud are ultimately
fickle; they manage to safeguard their
positions from the winds of politics by
cutting the People out of the loop and turning
elections into farces
That’s
what separates the men from the
monsters
in the world of the far right.
Unfortunately,
on a planet in panic mode
during
an election year that will function
as
a stress test for global democracy,
much
damage will be done by men and
monsters
alike.