Populists Don’t Need to Run Europe to Ruin It

Contrary to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s boldest dreams, illiberal national populists will not run Europe anytime soon. In many countries, the shrinking center still just about holds. But this should provide little comfort. Populists don’t need to run Europe to ruin it. Of course, the poison works best in countries where authoritarian populists control the government. The proudly illiberal regimes of Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice Party, would fail to meet the Copenhagen criteria for acceding EU states.

But populists do not need to control the government to feed on and fuel a new age of fear in Europe: fear of the Other (especially Muslims) and fear of global competition. Populists’ seemingly easy answers — pull up the national drawbridge to keep Muslims and competition out — put pressure on terrified establishment elites and drag political culture to previously unseen lows, depriving policymaking of the oxygen of reason.

This trend is now also threatening to engulf Germany, so far one of the last islands of liberal democratic normalcy. If you want to know what a neurotic Germany feels like, take Bavarian Minister President Horst Seehofer as a harbinger of things to come. Not a pretty prospect for the dream of a self-confident liberal Europe in the twenty-first century.

…

This commentary was originally published on Carnegie Europe’s Strategic Europe blog on March 9, 2016.