Geert Wilders’s shock topping of the poll in November’s Netherlands general election follows Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy win last year. Polls suggest that if an election were held in France today, the far right Marine Le Pen would win the Presidency. Trump leads the polls in the US currently and in Argentina an extreme social conservative and economic libertarian has just become President. What’s going on?
Follow the money
Several factors are at work here. Money is undoubtedly one of them. The far right benefits from a disproportionately high level of funding. A few years ago, Britain’s own far right extremist Tommy Robinson, a man who enjoys negligible domestic backing, was reported to be the country’s best funded UK politician. A Guardian investigation exposed how he received “financial, political and moral support from a broad array of non-British groups and individuals, including US thinktanks, right wing Australians and Russian trolls.”
Right wing talking points, including anti-vax conspiracy theories and extreme socially conservative ideas are being disseminated as never before. The Light newspaper, which rolls a number of these themes together, prints at least 100,000 copies and is distributed free in dozens of towns across the country. The BBC reports that it “has shared hateful and violent rhetoric towards journalists, medics and MPs, as well as platforming far-right figures accused of antisemitism.”
Such a reach implies serious financial backing. Similar largesse is undoubtedly filling the coffers of the extreme right elsewhere.
The role of the mainstream media also helps explain the rise of the outside right. Nigel Farage, not even an MP, is one of the most frequent guests on the BBC politics panel show Question Time. Now he’s a performer on the reality TV show I’m a Celebrity Get me out of Here!
One analyst observed recently: “It should be obvious to anyone concerned about these politics and the threat they pose to democracy and certain communities, that humanising their leaders through fun reality TV shows or coverage of their hobbies rather than politics only serves to normalise them.”
He concluded: “The mainstreaming process has involved platforming, hyping and legitimising far-right ideas while seemingly opposing them and denying responsibility in the process.”
The ‘narrative trap’
This may go some way to explaining the Dutch election result which saw the Party for Freedom (PVV), led by Geert Wilders – whom a Labour government once banned from entering Britain – emerge as the largest political party.
“Geert Wilders won the Dutch Election because the Establishment indulged him,” suggests Jacobin’s Helmer Stoel. The normalization of the Dutch far right was facilitated by outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte whose centre-right VVD party increasingly renounced its own liberal values, and embraced the language of the far right, with Rutte speaking ever more about the “refugee crisis.”
“He played a significant role on the European stage this year when, together with Ursula von der Leyen and the ‘pragmatic’ Italian far-right leader Giorgia Meloni, he struck a refugee deal with Tunisia, where, according to human rights organizations, refugees are abandoned and left to fend for themselves in the desert. On X (formerly Twitter), Rutte triumphantly spoke of ‘a true milestone’.”
Professor Stijn van Kessel agrees. He says that Rutte’s VVD “legitimised Wilders’s agenda by making immigration a key issue in its campaign. Rutte’s motivation for instigating the collapse of his last cabinet related to party-political divisions over asylum, whereby his party advocated a stricter stance. The VVD’s 2023 manifesto urged the need to ‘regain control’ over migration. Research shows that when mainstream parties try to compete with far-right ones by moving closer to their positions, it is the far right that tends to benefit.”
Sociologist Hein de Haas has highlighted a “narrative trap” – “a growing disjuncture between rhetoric and reality, such as the claim that asylum is running out of hand, whereas there has been no increasing trend in asylum applications.”
He tweeted recently: “There has also been an increasing gap between politicians’ anti-immigration narratives and public opinion. It’s simply not true the public opinion has generally turned against immigration. In Nl [Netherlands], and across the West, there has rather been a trend towards more positive attitudes.”
He further criticised “the media treatment of the anti-constitutional PVV as a ‘normal’ party and the further normalization of the idea that immigration (purportedly supported by leftist elites) is the Mother of All Problems.”
Professor Rob Ford agrees that although migration is at record highs, the long term trend in public support for restricting migration is downwards. In Britain, “more British people now than ever before see migration as both economically and culturally beneficial.” True, it’s a concern for Conservative voters – “but it doesn’t animate current Labour voters at all.”
“The dramatic liberal shift in public opinion on immigration, “ says Ford, has been one “of the most remarkable, yet least remarked upon, changes in politics over the past decade.”
Yet you wouldn’t know this from the mainstream media’s and political elite’s framing of the issue. In the UK, that’s partly due to Keir Starmer’s attempts to play catch-up with the Tories’ ruthless, anti-humanitarian agenda. He should be careful: as noted above, if he wants to make the next general election all about who is tougher on immigration, most voters will prefer the ‘real thing’ to the pale imitation.
That’s additional reason – to all the others that have been given in the last couple of days – as to why Starmer’s recent praise of Margaret Thatcher was so misjudged. As even a hardened Blairite like John McTernan grasped: “It happened because Starmer is listening to focus groups of swing voters. But the brutal truth is that there are no swing voters left – when support for the Tory party has fallen to 25%, there is no longer a pond to fish in. You’re convening groups of voters who are undecided whether to vote Tory, stay at home or opt for Nigel Farage and the Reform party.”
He concluded with a warning: “The most dangerous complacency of all is to take your own voters for granted. None of the voters who are currently supporting Labour are wavering because they are worried that Starmer is insufficiently respectful of Margaret Thatcher.”
A similar sequence around immigration may be unfolding in Germany. Chancellor Olaf Scholz, speaking of asylum numbers, has said “we must finally deport on a large scale”. He’s fearful of the virulently anti-migrant AfD which has been polling at 21% lately. Friedrich Merz, the leader of the Christian Democrats, has made curbing migration a priority, with remarks about Berlin suburbs not being sufficiently German. Again, this rhetoric normalizes the far right’s agenda and makes their advance all the more likely.
Declining empathy
The far right are very good at peddling simplistic solutions to perceived problems. They are even better at ‘scapegoating’ – and the current Conservative government can be included in this. It’s not just immigrants or Muslims – it’s also the disabled, targeted in the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement and, like LGBTQ plus and trans people, increasingly likely to face physical attacks as they are demonised by politicians and in the media.
Race and ethnicity have been particularly toxic issues because it has for so long been ‘normal’ to treat people of different ethnicities according to different criteria. This ‘othering’ is particularly widespread in the media at the moment in relation to Israel and Palestine. Few mainstream politicians in the western world can bring themselves to call for an end to the indiscriminate bombing of civilians, hospitals, schools and residential blocks in Gaza. It’s a stain on any society that claims to call itself civilised. Meanwhile, those who want a universal standard to apply – universal human rights, for example – have to justify themselves in every media interview as not being supporters of terrorism.
But this ‘othering’ goes deeper. Increasingly, the poor generally are being scapegoated for the government’s problems. What kind of a world do politicians inhabit where they tell their opponents that they represent “a shithole”?
So much for being told that “we are all in this together”. In fact, this ‘othering’ is facilitated by the rising social inequality of recent years. As well as reducing most people’s living standards, cutting life expectancy, making a million children destitute, increasing exploitation and a range of other evils, rising social inequality also drastically discourages empathy on the part of the elite towards the less well off. Simply put, wealthier people believe that having more money than other people makes them different from or better than someone else.
“This empathy gap,” observed one recent analysis, “allows people like Neil Couling, Work Services Director at the DWP to say that ‘many benefit recipients welcome the jolt that a sanction can give them’. If Mr Couling had considered for a moment what he was stating, and regarded those he was targeting as human beings like himself, he might have thought differently.”
So falling levels of empathy correspond to rising social inequality. But inequality has been rising for a while – since the Thatcher years in fact. New Labour did nothing to tackle it, reassuring the wealthy that they were relaxed about people being filthy rich, while addressing poverty as a social problem seemingly unconnected to mounting inequality.
It’s clear that rising inequality is a consequence of neoliberal economic policies, consistently pursued in the UK over the last forty years. The rich were allowed to prosper, paying less tax, and the less well off were targeted with benefit cuts. From 2010 on, poverty was defined as a ‘lifestyle choice’. Today the former Home Secretary Suella Braverman defines rough sleeping in the same way. How’s that for a lack of empathy?
As previously reported on Labour Hub, “Claimants are increasingly sanctioned for a range of ‘offences’. Between 2010 and 2018, a total of five million sanctions were issued and at its peak the Department for Work and Pensions was levying more fines through local jobcentres than the mainstream justice system.”
For the extreme right – and in Britain that must now include a significant section of the Conservative Party – such punitive measures do not go nearly far enough. The poor must be further targeted, scapegoated, ‘othered’, along with migrants, Muslims and many other sections of society.
The standard response to such far right narratives is to call for a broad alliance of the left and centre against them. But it’s the economics of the extreme centre – including, in Britain, New Labour, and then the Liberal Democrats in coalition 2010 to 2015 – that produced the breakdown in social solidarity and mutual support which have fuelled the rise of the far right in the first place.
As Hein de Haas tweeted on the Netherlands election: “Many ‘progressive’ parties are co-responsible for creating the climate of discontent leading to Wilders’ victory as they abandoned the working classes through their decades-long support for policies leading to marketization of care and social housing, student debt and wage stagnation.”
Ewald Engelen, a professor of financial geography at the University of Amsterdam, agrees:
“Since 2010, the Dutch government has pursued relentless austerity drives. The result was the longest recession in the history of the Netherlands… Moreover, these long austerity years came hard on the heels of one of the most thorough neoliberal makeovers in Europe. From a welfare state with a level of public expenditure in the early 1970s of Swedish magnitude, it was transformed into a residual welfare state of Anglo-American design in a mere forty years.
“Nowhere in Europe have public services become a happier hunting ground for Anglo-American finance than in the Netherlands… The results for the foundational economy were dismal, especially in the rural areas where schools, hospitals, elderly care facilities and bus stops were ruthlessly thinned out. And as some PVV voters were heard saying after the elections: the erosion of the foundational economy was crucial for their voting behaviour.
“But so was the absence of alternatives. The decision to construct a neoliberal utopia as well as the decision to pursue mindless deficit reduction, were not only those of Mr Rutte’s VVD but were backed by every centrist party.”
In these circumstances, without a fundamental change in economic policy focused on redistribution, a broad centre-left alliance supposedly against the far right, but pursuing economic neoliberalism, may just reproduce the same conditions for far right renewal. Today’s liberals are neoliberals. They may favour equality of opportunity but that’s as far as it goes. Even democracy – a central tenet of liberalism, based on political equality – is compromised by neoliberalism’s commitment to globalisation and market fundamentalism. It’s no accident that the birthplace of the neoliberal economic experiment was Chile after the 1973 coup: it could be pursued only on the basis of crushing political democracy.
Enter ‘El Loco’
This is again apparent from the programme of the newly elected right wing libertarian President of Argentina, Javier Milei. It includes health care privatisation and an end to disability payments, unemployment insurance and other forms of welfare.
But these policies are just a more extreme version of what has gone before. As one analyst notes: “Much like the United States, up until the 1960s Argentina had a top income tax bracket of 90%, which stabilized the economy and prevented massive wealth inequality. Subsequent administrations, including the military dictatorship, cut that down to 35%, like today’s US, with enough loopholes that, like America, most billionaires pay virtually nothing.”
Any form of redistribution is labelled as state theft, according to Milei. Rather than rely on state hand-outs, poor people should be free to sell their body parts, children, and organs to wealthy people on private, unregulated exchanges to pay their rent and medical expenses. It seems astonishing that Argentinians should freely elect this man, but this is a country where the state’s finances and the corrupt profiteering of individual politicians have historically overlapped considerably. To cut the corruption, reduce the state, runs the logic.
Milei favours an extreme liberalism where the sole legitimate state functions are the traditional repressive ones – policing, the military, the courts, etc. The law is there to enforce the property rights of the wealthy which take priority over all other environmental and social entitlements. American libertarians like Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard – with whom Milei claims to have communicated after his death – advocated this years ago.
In extreme circumstances, people will vote for these policies. Trump supporters in the US will be watching the Argentinian experiment closely – particularly how much of Milei’s programme can be achieved within the framework of democratic institutions. But as a general principle, the destruction of the welfare state entails the extermination of democracy itself. Thus the extreme right economic agenda can be accomplished only by traditional political authoritarianism.
On that basis, Argentina’s outgoing President Alberto Fernández was right to call Milei a “threat to democracy”. Those on the left who called for an abstention in the second round of the presidential contest between Milei and the centre-left former economics minister Sergio Massa may come to regret their decision, if only because far right leaders in office – whether strictly fascist or not – tend to greatly reduce the political space in which the left can organise itself.
Resistance
The outlook is bleak. If a broad centre-left alliance against the very real threat of the extreme right is unlikely to be effective, we must look elsewhere to defend ourselves. In Argentina, the trade unions will inevitably be in the forefront of opposition to Milei’s breakneck privatisation and job destruction plans. They are already gearing up for a fight. The General Confederation of Labour of the Argentine Republic, the country’s largest trade union confederation, has warned that it will not accept any rollback of rights or delays in bargaining negotiations.
Julio Acosta, General Secretary of the Federation of Energy Workers of Argentina, summarized the situation:
“In the 1990s, the neoliberal model was installed in Argentina as a result of successive foreign debt payment crises and planned hyperinflation… A process of state dismantling began and in a few years the energy income and sovereignty over the nation’s strategic resources were lost. The sale was to be used to get out of debt, stop inflation and attract foreign investment to boost national development.
“None of this happened, the foreign debt increased twenty-fold, investments came for financial speculation and subsequent capital flight, extractivism, the plundering and depredation of natural resources deepened…
“For the working class the consequences were also dire. Hundreds of thousands of workers were dismissed, collective agreements were liquidated, laws protecting workers were modified, work was made precarious and flexible, poverty, indigence and unemployment increased exponentially, and finally wages were pulverised, destroying purchasing power and pushing 42% of workers below the poverty line…
“The denationalisation of public companies made Argentina lose its sovereignty, in this offensive of capital over labour it brought our country to its knees to the point that currently economic policy is dictated by the IMF and every three months a delegation from the Fund comes to our country to check whether the objectives proposed by them are being met, which means more adjustments for the working people, more dependence, more backwardness.
“The only way out for Argentina is to regain sovereignty… Recovering sovereignty means decommodifying the energy sector, nationalising it, re-nationalising essential services, changing the privatisation model for a model of state ownership with the participation and control of users and workers, and thus recovering rights for workers, users and society as a whole.”
Quoting this statement at length underlines the clarity and uncompromising nature of the stance taken by some unions. Milei’s party has only 38 members of Congress out of a total of 257, and seven senators out of a total of 72. He has no support among the country’s state governors.
“Argentina’s highly mobilized civil society and powerful trade unions could bring their protest to the streets in efforts to paralyse Milei’s promised radical cuts to social spending,” says one commentator. “At that point, it will be seen how much of his electoral support translates into social support.”
An Argentinian journalist pointed out on election night: ““A recent example of the limits to pure, ideology-based models occurred last year in the UK, when prime minister Liz Truss implemented a brutal, Thatcherite-inspired tax cut. She lasted less than two months in office.”
Starmer ill-prepared
With Labour poised to win the next UK general election, it may look as if Britain is moving in a different direction. But there is little room for complacency. The collapse of any democratic socialist vision – which must include a commitment to greater social equality – has paralysed most left parties western Europe. In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership revived this central set of beliefs, which clearly resonated in the 2017 general election when the Labour vote leapt to nearly 13 million. Since 2019, however, socialist ideas have been expunged from the Labour leadership’s thinking, which helps explain why so many voters are genuinely perplexed as to what Keir Starmer stands for.
Once in office, Starmer may temporarily arrest the rise of the right. But it’s not clear, to put it mildly, that he has the economic programme, the ideology or the vision to turn the tide in any fundamental way. If Trump regains the US presidency, every free market fundamentalist, social conservative and political authoritarian on the planet will feel emboldened – just as they were in 2016. Starmer’s proven loyalty to the US means he would be ill-prepared to withstand any serious pressure that might be exerted over his domestic policy once that were applied – even if his government were genuinely minded to pursue a more egalitarian course in the first place – and there’s not much evidence that it would.
These circumstances would undoubtedly embolden the far right here which may well have captured the leadership of the Tory Party by then – after all, there are plenty of credible candidates already in the front rank. Where would that leave the left? Instead of refighting last year’s battles, it is time to give some serious thought about how to stop the rot.
We might start by returning to the issue of empathy. Nobody could accuse much of the older left of being overly empathetic. It’s clear that the fight for a more compassionate society requires a more caring left, something underlined in Lynne Segal’s recent work, particularly her new book Lean on Me. Perhaps a younger generation of activists, committed to maintaining and rebuilding our communities and environment, making our rights and freedoms truly global and welded together through diverse activities, from Mutual Aid groups to campaigns against the carceral state, see this more clearly. Let’s hope so.
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