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Friday, October 04, 2024
Nazis back in Europe?
In 1933 the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), or Nazis for short, took control of Germany after winning an election there. They dismantled democracy, started a world war, conquered half of Europe, and started a genocide on Jews. Unsurprisingly, Germany and the surrounding European countries are somewhat wary of history repeating itself. So you might have read news over the past few years looking worriedly at the rise of extreme right populist parties pretty much everywhere in Europe. In Italy and the Netherlands these parties are already in power. In Germany they won state elections with the highest share of votes, but are getting kept from power by an alliance of everybody else against them. In France a similar arrangement is keeping them out of government too, in spite of them having won the biggest share of votes in the election with 33% in the first round, and 37% in the second.
Now populist parties are generally bad news for democracies. They tend to latch onto protest movements, promising simplistic solutions to complicated problems. But if you believe that the Nazis are back in Europe and about to take control, you fell for a classic political misinformation maneuver: Political enemies tend to exaggerate the position of their opponents, trying to make them seem more extreme than they actually are. Thus Trump calls Kamala Harris a marxist, which is probably an endless source of amusement for actual communists and marxists.
The current success of right wing populist parties is solely due to their anti-migration stance. Giorgia Meloni, the right wing populist prime minister of Italy, has the exact same "stop the boats" at the heart of her political program that the UK conservative party had, which is essentially the same as the "build the wall" policy of Trump Republicans. If you look at the more detailed political programs of all these European right wing populist parties, they are all well to the left of US Republicans and Trump. Like Trump they want to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine with Putin, keep fossil fuels, and keep migrants out of their country; unlike Trump they don't want to lower taxes on the rich or decrease welfare payments. These are populist parties, and decreasing welfare isn't popular at all in Europe.
I think it is clear to everybody that if Trump gets elected in November, it will cause measurable damage to the United States of America and the world. The same thing is true for the European right wing populist parties: They could cause some real harm, for example by massively delaying policies against climate change. That doesn't mean that Europe is likely to soon all wear brown shirts and march in goose step towards World War III. While populist right wing parties certainly give a home to people with neo-Nazi beliefs, none of these parties is actually calling for the reconstruction of gas chambers. Their harshest proposed policies usually revolve around not letting any asylum seekers into their countries, and getting rid of some of those that are already in. Which again is very similar to Trump's proposed mass deportations.
The popularity of these right wing populist parties is based on the fact that the more mainstream political parties don't have good answers to the migration crisis. It is obvious to a large majority of Europeans that a large percentage of people coming into their countries "seeking asylum" aren't actually politically persecuted in their home countries, but are coming out of economic reasons. But as nobody knows how to sort them out, there is only a bad choice between accepting "false negatives" or accepting "false positives". Nobody really has a good solution, but the populist "close the borders" policy to many citizens sounds more reasonable than letting everybody in who asks for asylum. It is predictable that the political pressure will over the next decade globally lead to a diminishment of asylum rights, which is bad news for people actually persecuted. That doesn't mean that the people asking for this are equivalent to the Nazis.
In the local primaries to the US elections, one pro-Palestinian candidate lost against a pro-Israel candidate and promptly evoked a "threat to democracy", despite both candidates being Democrats. There is an inflation of rhetoric everywhere, and the consequence is that words become increasingly meaningless. Even Trump isn't Hitler, and the damage he did to democratic institutions during his presidency was rather limited, and would still be limited if he won again. It would of course be better for everybody if neither Trump nor the European right wing populist parties won. But if the only idea that left and mainstream parties have to achieve that is scare-mongering, they won't succeed. Migration needs better political solutions. Fighting climate change needs better political solutions that don't impoverish low- and medium-income earners. It is the absence of answers from the left and center that makes the right strong.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:00 PM Permanent Link
