Skyline of Paris, France, May 27, 2020 (Unsplash/Nicolas Jehly)
Two videos, two visions of France.
The first kicks off Éric Zemmour’s presidential campaign. (Version with English subtitles here.) It’s a France where gangs of dark-skinned men rob elderly women and liberal elites call true patriots racists and xenophobes.
The second comes from the Elysée Palace and celebrates the “pantheonization” of American-born singer and French Resistance fighter Josephine Baker. It appeals to the best of France: brave, cultured, multiethnic, republican. It’s a vision Emmanuel Macron will want to make his own. (more…)
Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy looks out the window of a cable car in Sóller, Majorca, June 22, 2016 (PP)
Center-right leaders in Britain, Spain and the United States have put the interests of their parties ahead of the good of their countries. Both their parties and their countries have suffered as a result. (more…)
Presidents Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey and Donald Trump of the United States meet in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington DC, May 16, 2017 (Presidency of the Republic of Turkey)
Nationalism may be down, but it’s not out, reports The Wall Street Journal.
The nationalist insurgency is both growing and metamorphosing. It is not just eating away at relations between countries on issues such as free trade; it is also eroding the institutions and norms that prevail within countries.
With economies growing on both sides of the Atlantic, populists now draw on cultural grievances to undermine the stable, rules-based environment businesses crave. (more…)
Dalibor Rohac of the American Enterprise Institute argues in The American Interest that two intolerant communities have emerged in Western democracies:
A nationalist right, whose overarching ambition is to return ethnic homogeneity and reverse the decline of status enjoyed by whites.
An identitarian left, whose goal is to rectify the injustices caused by the historic domination of white heterosexual men.
We don’t have to accept a moral equivalence between the two to see that they have things in common.
Nor does either side need to be in the majority (neither is) to pose a danger to our democracy. (more…)
Donald Trump gives a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, February 27, 2015 (Gage Skidmore)
The votes for Brexit, European populism and Donald Trump weren’t working-class revolts.
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Adam Serwer have argued that mostly-white elites are drawn to the “economic anxiety” thesis because it absolves them of responsibility for more intractable problems, like racism, xenophobia and self-delusions about both.
If nativists are motivated by stagnating wages, then there are policy solutions for bringing them back into the mainstream.
But what if their grievances aren’t so concrete? (more…)
Remi Adekoya explains in Foreign Affairs how Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party has been able to remain popular despite truncating democratic norms and institutions and antagonizing the EU:
It has raised social spending, specifically for poor rural families with children.
It portrays its domestic opponents as corrupt elites fighting to preserve their influence.
It portrays its European critics as fanatical multiculturalists and militant secularists who are so obsessed with political correctness they have lost all sense of self-preservation. (more…)
View of the Palau Nacional from downtown Barcelona, Spain, December 29, 2013 (CucombreLibre)
Both the Catalans and Iraq’s Kurds have announced independence referendums this week over the objections of their central governments.
The two might seem a world away. Catalans have virtually no security concerns. The Kurds are waging a war on two fronts: one against Turkey to the north and another against the self-proclaimed Islamic State to the south.
Yet they have things in common.
Both are economic success stories. Catalonia has only 16 percent of Spain’s population yet accounts for a fifth of its economic output, giving it an economy the size of Denmark’s. Kurdistan has Iraq’s lowest poverty rates and, thanks to its oil reserves, is increasingly self-reliant.
Both have desired more autonomy for years and both have been rebuffed by their national authorities, leaving them with little choice but to press for unrecognized votes on independence. (more…)
French party leader Marine Le Pen makes her way to a news conference in Strasbourg, May 11, 2016 (European Parliament/Fred Marvaux)
France’s National Front will have to reinvent itself after a disappointing election result on Sunday.
The nationalists were hoping to get 40 percent support or more in the presidential runoff, but Marine Le Pen got stuck at 34 percent. Still double her father’s performance when he qualified for the second voting round in 2002, but a letdown nonetheless.
In her concession speech, Le Pen promised voters “profound reform” of her party in order to create “a new political force” for all French “patriots” who oppose the globalism of Emmanuel Macron, the incoming president.
Whether this means starting a new party or rebranding the National Front remains to be seen, but change is in the air. With it could come a struggle for the movement’s identity. (more…)
View of Paris, France from Montmartre, October 2, 2016 (Unsplash/Colin Maynard)
And why is it so critical? Nothing less than the European Union is at stake — and with it, the geopolitical contract that has bound Germany and France together since World War II.
After the defeat of anti-Islam populist Geert Wilders early this month in the Netherlands, it is reasonable to ask if populism as shaped by the alt-right has hit its limit. Europeans have watched the confusion in Britain over Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump. Now they are revisiting both their Euroskepticism and their willingness to gamble on ideologies not yet fully tested.
Yet France is subject to powerful forces quite different than the Netherlands, which has only a fraction of its population and international obligations. A large, unassimilated Muslim and African population simmers; an aging, conservative voter base roils; a discredited, weakened left wavers; and nobody knows what to do with the neoliberal threads that hold together the European Union yet impoverish just about anyone not in the upper classes.
All these factors make France a combustible mix of alt-right populism, weakened mainstream parties, terror cells, angry youth and dithering establishment elites. If we were shocked by Brexit, we should be less shocked by whatever happens next month as the French go to vote. France is as upended as everyone else. 2017 compares to the turmoil of the collapse of the Fourth Republic in 1958. (more…)
Far-right party leaders Matteo Salvini of Italy, Marine Le Pen of France, Harald Vilimsky of Austria and Michał Marusik of Poland give a news conference in Strasbourg, May 11, 2016 (European Parliament/Fred Marvaux)
When I was a teenager, I had to drive my older brother to downtown Phoenix. He couldn’t drive himself; he’d made a series of poor life choices, so it fell to me, the relatively responsible one, to ferry him about.
As we drove, he ranted to me about blacks, Mexicans and Jews, using all the tried and true tropes of the traditional white-supremacist right — tossing in, for my “education,” that the Bible had given blacks over to whites as slave-animals. When we pulled up to our destination, a Mexican guy was hanging out on the Phoenix equivalent of a stoop; my brother would have to pass by the guy. I asked him, in that teenaged point-blank manner, what he thought of the man.
“Oh no,” my brother replied. “He’s one of the good ones.” Switching off from racist extraordinaire, he proceeded to carry out his errand and have a light, polite chat with the very man whose race he’d spent much of our journey together trashing.
It was my first encounter with the doublethink that would swirl to become the alt-right. (more…)
Daniel Berman, who occasionally writes for the Atlantic Sentinel, poses an interesting question at his blog, The Restless Realist: Why not break up Bosnia?
The current situation seems untenable. Bosnia is divided in two: an autonomous Republika Srpska for the (mostly Orthodox Christian) ethnic Serbs and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina for the (Muslim) Bosniaks and (Catholic) Bosnian Croats.
The federation is itself divided into ten autonomous cantons, five of which are Bosniak-ruled, three Croat and two mixed.
This division, which emerged from the 1995 Dayton Agreement that ended the Bosnian War, has kept the peace but entrenched ethnic divisions. Parties are organized along ethnic lines. Every political appointment must be considered within the context of ethnic politics. Serb nationalists perennially demand more autonomy from a central government that is already one of the weakest in the world. Some dream of one day joining neighboring Serbia, where their nationalist counterparts would be glad to annex the Bosnian enclaves as compensation for giving up ethnic-Albanian Kosovo.
These political obsessions have left Bosnia’s economy in a sorry state. Nearly half the population is officially unemployed. 40 percent lives below the poverty line.
So why not give everybody what they want: states of their own? (more…)
American president Donald Trump and his wife, Melania, bid farewell to Barack and Michelle Obama in Washington DC, January 20 (DoD/Marianique Santos)
Donald Trump has given the world a chilling preview of his foreign policy.
In his inaugural address as president, the businessman promised to break with decades of international trade policy and “put America first”.
Trump said he would protect the United States “from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs.”
“Protection,” he maintained, “will lead to great prosperity and strength.”
That is not what the last century has taught us. (more…)
Donald Trump’s unexpected presidential election in the United States has delighted his ideological counterparts in Europe. Brexiteers in the United Kingdom think he will give them a better deal than Hillary Clinton. Populists in France and the Netherlands have responded to Trump’s victory with glee. So have ultraconservatives in Central Europe.
They should think again. Trump may be a kindred spirit. His triumph is a setback for the liberal consensus that nationalists in Europe and North America are trying to tear down. But he is no friend of European nations. (more…)
