What Happened In Europe
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Matt Steinglass attacks other foolish misreadings of election results. In this case, he is discussing the recent European elections as seen from Finland:
What happened in the elections was two things. First, support shifted away from the social democrats, and towards the Christian democrats. And second, a small right-wing party that’s descended from the 1950s-era agrarian/farmers party, whose main platform is anti-immigrant and anti-Europe, picked up a lot of votes, and in fact that party’s charismatic leader was the single largest vote-getter in the elections, pulling about 130,000 votes (which is huge in 5-million-strong Finland). But that party still isn’t actually in the government, and it has no positive governing agenda. And even if it did, that governing agenda would almost certainly have nothing to do with free-market economics.
This is an important point. With the exception of perhaps Vlaams Belang in Belgium, most anti-immigration, anti-Europe and “far-right” parties in Europe are not economically liberal, and the economically liberal parties are not anti-immigration or anti-Europe. Across much of Europe, as in this Finnish example, artisanal populist, peasants’ or farmers’ parties have tended to be equally skeptical of market liberals and the transnational European political project. Our populists, such as they are, tend to be wedded to our peculiarly continental nationalism, which in the European context would make them pro-Europe “federalists,” which is why it may be less surprising, if not less irrational, for most of our populists, especially on the right, to embrace market liberalism, while it is left to the fairly marginal decentralists, both right and left, to argue against political and economic consolidation.
There is some evidence that market liberals had some success in the European elections, but this is mostly because those parties also benefited from anti-incumbency sentiment. In Germany, for example, the Free Democrats almost doubled their share of the vote over the previous election, but this was, like so many other gains by smaller parties in the EP, a product of discontent with the CDU-SPD coalition government. Unlike the Finnish example, German voters interested in protesting against the government could not vote for either major party and many of them settled for one of the main opposition groups. It seems that most of the support that the Union lost went straight to the Free Democrats, but this does not exactly herald a massive rejection of Christian Democratic ideas about social solidarity.
Filed under: Europe, foreign policy
This makes my head spin. How in the world do you write this blog, be a student, and follow European politics close enough to write the above and still do anything else at all, including sleep?
Much of the above comes from what I have accumulated over months and years of following European politics. That comes with the territory of writing on politics and foreign affairs. Also, I finished my degree a few months ago, so the workload from school is considerably lighter.
I grew up not far from a steel mill town in Finland. The steelworkers were mostly Social Democrats or Communists. Union members to a man.
Politics for them was a means of getting improved working conditions and salaries, and trying to get something better for their children. For some, there was also an element of class struggle, against factory owners and capitalists worldwide.
In family life and community matters, however, they were quite conservative. In private they were not liberal in any sense of the word.
People like these have been left out in the cold by the new and improved, globalist left parties. Parties like the recently successful “True Finns” cater to these discontents. They are more left wing than right wing, but their nationalist agenda fools the eye. Probably this is true of many so-called right-wing parties all over Europe.
It certainly varies very much. The anti-federalist, anti-immigrant populists in Europe are a strange breed, and in any case the European Union is structured so that populists left and right would have minimal influence upon its workings.
Take for example the ECB, which at German insistence was insulated from populist pressure. I personally lean toward the Free Democrats in terms of inclinations, and I am happy that classical liberalism/economic conservatism is still getting a hearing in Europe.
The great problem for the European right is really the soft-left. The hard-left tends toward the farcical, especially in the post-Soviet era (cf. Die Linke, the Anti-Capitalist Party, French Trotskyists), but the soft-left has always been very deleterious. Once the left is broken up, space would probably open up for a resurgence of full-blow conservatism to counter the hard-left.
Part of the appeal of the Free Democrats, I suspect, is their being diametrical opposites to Die Linke, and same for UKIP viz. Labour.
The great difficulty of understanding European politics, I think, is that they really don’t fit very well on the American paradigm. One of the strange things of post-war European politics is how “American” it has been; marked by the total absence of traditional, hierarchical, unshakable conservatism of the de Maistre ilk, which exerted a heavy, if at times brusque, presence on the polity before the war.
Will we get a shift back toward the status quo ante? For if we do, then the world is in for quite a shock, comparable at least to the dissolution of the Soviet power.