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Good evening. It's Monday, June 10.
Tonight: American politics since the emergence of Donald Trump have been driven by at least two dominant political sentiments. One is an intense and rapidly growing distrust for and contempt of leading institutions of power and authority: large corporations, almost every branch of government, the corporate media, the establishment wings of all parties and now even the health policy and scientific establishment - there's barely an institution of authority left unscathed. The loss of trust and faith in key sectors of authority has historically been monumentally consequential for any society where it emerges but it also creates a large opening for politicians and political parties to ascend to power by convincingly vowing to destroy the hated establishment. To me, that more than anything else, explains the success of Trump's highly improbable victories in the 2016 GOP primary and then the general election and to a lesser extent also explains the equally unlikely 2008 ascension to the Oval Office of Barack Obama, who also postured as an anti-establishment figure.
The second major factor is a byproduct of the first which is the rise of populist politics. Populism is a term that is often used and thrown around, but rarely defined. A fundamental precept for certain is the belief that establishment ideology and establishment orthodoxy are directly harmful to the economic and cultural lives of ordinary citizens, and also that economic or establishment orthodoxy is designed to benefit only those elites who control those institutions at the expense of everybody else.
That belief is almost always accompanied by the perception that rulers secretly or even openly harbor contempt for the lives and values of ordinary people. The anger and resentment that is produced by such a perception is in some sense more personal and emotional than even ideological - which does not mean it is invalid - and that in turn enables any skillful politician to exploit that anti-establishment resentment to their side as long as they are perceived to be an outsider and therefore an enemy to establishment sectors. And it almost doesn't even matter whether they’re right, left, or anything else.
Judging by the results of yesterday's election in the European Union Parliament, both political strains appear at least as prevalent and as rising among European voters as they are among American voters. The election results did not produce a revolution. The center-left and center-right parties that formed the establishment in Brussels and the key EU states did manage to hold on to a majority. But any supporter of the establishment in the EU should be looking at these results with deep concern if not panic and that is precisely the reaction in many European capitals and of the European and American press. Some of the results in individual EU countries, especially the largest and most powerful ones, are nothing short of stunning.
In France, the party of Marine Le Pen, long deemed to be fascist and fringe, received almost double the vote total of the current centrist establishment party of French President Emmanuel Macron. In Germany, what is often called the far right or even Nazi-adjacent party, to the point that it is often censored and may even be headed to be made illegal – the AfD: Alternative for Deutschland – received roughly 20% of the vote by German citizens. Even more concerning, from the establishment perspective, the AfD was by far the most popular party throughout East Germany, half of the country that was never fully integrated politically or economically back into Germany after reunification once the Berlin Wall fell. Many of these same patterns are repeated throughout the EU.
One must be cautious not to over interpret the results of this particular election. As it is true for elections in the United States that are held in non-presidential years, V\voting for the EU Parliament in this last election was very sparse but many of the trends that these results reflect have been visible for years in multiple EU countries, going back at least to 2016, to Brexit, when British voters shocked the EU establishment by simply voting to leave the EU and liberate themselves from the rule of Brussels. Of course, many of these same trends have been visible in the United States, particularly when it comes to the ongoing success of Donald Trump, who, even after everything thrown at him, even after his conviction on 34 felony counts, continues to lead in polls for the 2024 election. What we see now is not merely country-specific changes in ideology, or dissatisfaction with one party or another, but a growing and pervasive distrust and even hatred for Western institutions, contempt and hatred, which I would say, as the United States, has been very well earned.
To help us make sense of these trends in EU politics and the meaning of the latest election results, as well as what they might mean for the United States and its 2024 election, we will speak to a political scientist whose scholarship focuses on EU history and politics. She is Sheri Berman of Barnard College and Columbia University. Professor Berman is the author of the 2019 article “Populism is a Symptom Rather than a Cause: Democratic Disconnect, the Decline of the Center-Left and the Rise of Populism in Western Europe.” Just yesterday, Professor Berman published “How serious is Europe's anti-democratic threat?” in “Project Syndicate.” We will speak to her after I spend some time laying out the context for what happened in last night's election and how it relates to the United States.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
There are many reasons to be very interested in political trends in the EU and specifically, in the results from the elections of the new EU parliamentarian. That is true for many reasons. Beginning with the fact that the EU is a very sizable political force in the world, its population when you combine all of the EU states is larger than the United States, it is also a very close ally of the United States economically and militarily, at least for now. Therefore, what happens there matters a lot from the perspective of the American citizen. But I also think it seems quite clear that many of the political trends driving these anti-establishment changes are very similar, maybe not identical, but very similar to and even connected to political trends that have become dominant in the United States and that, I think, is starting to determine more and more the outcome of our elections.
I've been thinking about the connection between European and U.S. politics, even politics in the broader democratic world and the United States. Based on this thought, back in 2002 and 2003, when the United States was proposing to invade and attack Iraq as part of the War on Terror, there were some countries in Europe, like Italy and Spain, that supported the United States' effort but, by far, the two largest and most influential countries in the EU, Germany and France, were vehemently opposed and vehemently opposed on the level of their governments but the populations were overwhelmingly against having their countries or any country invade Iraq. And that was at the same time when 70% of Americans supported that invasion and 70% of Americans believed, falsely, of course, that Saddam Hussein played a role personally in planning the 9/11 attack because that was what they were led to believe, a belief that did not exist in Germany or France.
Obviously the internet existed back then but what did not really exist was social media in any meaningful form, certainly nowhere near compared to what it is now – and the fact that we all use the same social media platforms - you see European politicians and European journalists sitting on Twitter, the same exact place where American politicians and American journalists sit and do their work and express their views - means that we are really more interconnected politically than ever before, leaving me to wonder because of that, because we're all now feeding on the same discourse, the same global discourse, no more different discourse for each country, whether that type of sharp split between, say, French and German opinion about a major war in Europe and American views would even really be possible. When it comes to the war in Ukraine, all over the non-Western part of the world, there are so many countries that view that war as unjust in terms of the United States and NATO supporting it and who blame the U.S. and NATO for doing so. Yet, that view is a minority view not only in the U.S. but in all of Europe, where it's pretty unanimous, at least among governments, maybe except for Hungary, that continuing to fuel the war in Ukraine is the absolute right thing to do morally, as well as strategically, in the same view that the United States has.
This change is so striking where there used to be these vast splits among even the establishment of the United States, versus the establishment of different European capitals. Now you see that very rarely. And I think that points to the fact that we can indeed look at the political trends that are taking place in the EU, that are growing and that are shaping the results of the election, as we saw yesterday, and find a lot of illustrative information about what it's likely to foretell about the upcoming 2024 presidential election as well. I don't want to overstate that. There are obviously some differences, but I think far fewer than before for many reasons, including this interconnectedness on social media.
Frequently, EU Parliament elections are not very well discussed. As I said, there's not a lot of interest among European voters in it. However, the results from this particular election were so stunning in European capitals that it's receiving far more attention than it normally does and I think that's for a good reason because it's not just confined to this one election, but reflective of broader trends happening in European politics and American politics as well.
So, first of all, from The Economist, today:
The biggest winner of the night was Marine Le Pen and the National Rally, her hard-right party, which is part of the ID group. National Rally was projected to win 30 seats whereas President Emmanuel Macron’s coalition secured just 13. […]
Not just less than half, almost one-third. Macron got a seat in the EU compared to Marine Le Pen's party, which was 30.
[…] On Sunday evening Mr. Macron announced he would dissolve the French national assembly and called legislative elections, to take place on June 30th and July 7th.
Another winner is Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s prime minister since 2022 and the leader of the hard-right Brothers of Italy. Her party looks to have won 29% of the vote—up from 6% in 2019. Overall, hard-right parties […]
No one hates populist politics and anti-establishment politics more than The Economist.
[…] Overall, hard-right parties have come first or second in eight of the 26 member states with available data.
At the previous election in 2019, liberals also feared a shift to the right. But although the number of right-wing MEPs grew, so did the tally of those belonging to the most pro-EU parties. Since then, however, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, war in Ukraine and the Middle East, and renewed worries about immigration have led to a surge in support for right-wingers in some member states. In 2022 Italy voted a hard-right party into office, and in 2023 the party of Geert Wilders, an anti-Muslim populist, won the Dutch election (though he has not been able to form a government).
As polls predicted, the centre-right group known as the European People’s Party, or EPP, is once again the largest; it is projected to win 186 seats. The centre-left Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D) looks set to win about 134 seats. But the hard right has gained ground in some countries. (The Economist, June 10, 2024)
As I said, it's not a revolution, it didn't overthrow the establishment parties in Brussels, but it certainly shook them up and made them weaker.
Here from The New York Times also today:
And the fascinating thing about this far-right party in Germany is that it's probably the most extremist right-wing party in Europe of any of the major countries. The right-wing coalition that is going to Brussels expelled Germany's right-wing party, after very offensive claims from a couple of its members, including saying that there were a lot of German military officers during World War II who were not criminals and there were a lot of other controversies about corruption and other things involving the AfD. But they also have been the major target of the German government, often censoring them openly, speaking about banning them entirely, even though they're now the second most popular party in Germany. Obviously, Europe has a particular fear about the rise of the right in Germany for obvious historical reasons, nonetheless,
The AfD’s fortunes seemed to have risen in concert with the fall of those of the Greens, an environmentally focused party for which Germany was once a stronghold. The Greens saw their vote share drop by nearly half, to about 12 percent, according to the preliminary results, from a high of more than 20 percent in the 2019 elections. […]
Let me just stop and say here that although the Green Party was founded to be an environmental party, hence the name, in many ways, the Green Party in Germany and in a couple of other European countries have become the most stridently pro-Europe, pro-NATO and pro-war party. The Green Party, in fact, ran on a platform of promoting Green Party women into key positions in the government – and they did it so well in the last German election that they were able to become a coalition partner with Olaf Scholz with the foreign minister and other key members of the Green Party as important members of the current German government – and they ran on a platform that the reason it was so important to promote women in key governmental positions, especially ones involving military and war, is because women are far less likely to support or to pursue war, based on this very stereotypical, but I guess in some sense feminist theory, that women prefer to resolve conflicts peacefully, whereas men prefer to resolve them violently (a fairly stereotypical view of men and women, but also a very clearly false one when you look at politicians like Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice or Samantha Power, and on and on and on.) However, the Green Party has moved away from its roots, which is a key part of the establishment. They love the war in Ukraine. They are the most vocal supporters of it. These women ran on a platform of never being involved in wars and as a result, or at least concurrent with all of that, the Green Party collapsed, losing more than half of its support. While the AfD rose.
Emilia Fester, a Green party member of Parliament who is one of its youngest elected officials, said in an email: “Although the AfD has made gains, it is also clear that few young people have switched from us Greens to the AfD. Instead, many have voted for smaller parties that often have programs close to the Greens and are more focused on individual issues,” she said. “This gives me hope.” […]
That’s some of the worst coping rationale you will ever hear from a party that just got its support cut in half. Amazingly, she talked about young voters, even though – and this part from The New York Times is fascinating:
This election was also the first time that 16- and 17-year-old Germans were permitted to vote, and AfD had major wins in the under-30 demographic, […]
The far-right-adjacent Nazi Party, as the AfD is called.
[…] increasing its share of that electorate by 10 percent, results showed. The Greens, once supercharged by the activist Greta Thunberg and student protesters against climate change, saw an 18 percent drop-off of those voters. […]
In other words, the exact opposite of what that Green Party official claimed.
“Younger voters tended to be more left-leaning and progressive in the past,” Florian Stoeckel, a professor of political science at the University of Exeter in England, said in an email. “However, this time, they turned right.”
He added that the AfD’s recent push to market itself on TikTok might have played a role. […]
Yet again we're seeing the reason that the establishment hates that app so much.
[…] “This is in line with recent findings that younger people, and especially younger men, across Europe tend to take more right-leaning positions,” Mr. Stoeckel said. (The New York Times, June 10, 2024)
Just to focus on France and how that relates to what happened in Germany, here is The Economist, yesterday:
Not entirely true, but as I said, largely true...France and Germany happened to be the two largest and most powerful countries in Europe. Here's what Macron did in response to Marine Le Pen's party getting essentially three times the number of seats in the EU and more than double the number of votes.
The elections to the European Parliament held on June 6th-9th have delivered a stinging rebuke from voters to some incumbents, most clearly in Germany and above all in France, where President Emmanuel Macron responded to his party’s routing at the hands of the hard right by dissolving the French parliament and calling a risky snap election. […]
Obviously, it's risky because Marine Le Pen's party just crushed Macron's party, and now he wants to call a snap election to see if more voters are participating in France, and whether the far right will be able to beat his party.
The continued rise of populist parties in the EU’s two biggest countries, even though it was not matched in the rest of the bloc, will make it harder for centrist parties to run the union’s powerful institutions in Brussels without courting the support of nationalist politicians once considered beyond the pale. […]
Right in the middle of Europe. In France.
In France, the surge of the populist right was so strong that, to widespread surprise, Mr. Macron announced that fresh elections to the National Assembly will be held on June 30th and July 7th. At the vote for the European Parliament, which had been expected to be the last nationwide ballot ahead of the presidential election of 2027, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (NR) was projected to have scored nearly 32% of the vote—more than double the share secured by Mr. Macron’s party, which it had beaten only narrowly five years ago.
Add to that another 5% or so for Reconquest, a migrant-bashing far-right outfit whose lead candidate is Ms. Le Pen’s niece, Marion Maréchal, and the hard right now looks like the country’s dominant political force.
In Germany the ruling coalition also fared abysmally. All three of its component parties were beaten by the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD)—despite a slew of scandals enveloping the party and its top candidate during the campaign. (It was even, shortly before the election, kicked out of its EU-level alliance with the National Rally and others.) The Social Democrats of Olaf Scholz, the chancellor, fell to their worst score in a national election in almost 150 years of existence. (The Economist, June 9, 2024)
Here from Arnaud Bertrand, who is an excellent analyst of global politics, yesterday:
That gives you the basics for what happened in the election and some of what led to it.
We are delighted to be able to have a true scholar and an expert who has been studying through her research and scholarship, not only the current nature of EU politics but also all kinds of European history as well. She is Professor Sherry Berman, who is a political scientist on the faculty of Barnard College, of Columbia University. Her scholarship has focused on European history and EU politics, the development of democracy, populism and fascism, and the history of the left. From 2009 to 2012, Professor Berman served as chair of the Barnard Political Science Department, and then again in the fall of 2021, as well as chair of the Council on Economic and European Studies. Her most recent book is entitled “Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe From the Ancient Regime to the Present Day,” published in 2019, and she is also the author of an op-ed that was published just yesterday entitled, “How serious is Europe's anti-Democratic threat?”, published in Project Syndicate.
So, it's very obvious that she is in a very excellent position to help us understand these elections and the dynamics that led to them.
The Interview: Professor Sheri Berman
G. Greenwald: Professor Berman, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. I know there's a lot of confusion and uncertainty about this election, and we are thrilled to have you here. Thanks for taking the time.
Prof. Sheri Berman: My pleasure.
G. Greenwald: So, let me just start by asking this: There's obviously a lot of discourse surrounding this election, a lot of attempts to try to understand it but at the same time, EU parliamentary elections are notoriously sparsely voted for to cycle out of primaries and off-year elections are. How much meaning do you think can be derived from these results?
Prof. Sheri Berman: So, that's a great question because you're right, up until fairly recently, these elections got fewer voters to the polls than national elections did. That's begun to change. And in fact, anyone following the news in Europe would have seen much more attention paid to these elections than previous ones: much more attention on the news, much more attention online and much more debate among the parties about the election and its consequences. That has begun to change. And so, these elections are somewhat different than previous ones. The participation level was up somewhat. I do not think it is any longer correct to see these elections as distinct from national elections. As you said, it's no longer the case that folks will often vote one way in the European elections, then another way in the national elections. The standard line was that you more often saw protest votes at the European elections because the stakes were lower and, you know, more moderate votes at the national level. That has begun to change. And so, I think these election results are not a bad reflection of public opinion in the countries overall.
G. Greenwald: One of the points you made in the article that you published that I just referenced – and I should say, you know, it's as I said, it's important not to overstate the tumultuous nature of these results because the kind of status quo party did eventually get a majority, although clearly there are a lot of changes going on – one of the things you emphasized was that, at least in Germany, France and the Netherlands, these election results didn't come out of nowhere. They were a part of events leading up to it that you could almost predict. And I just want to read this one paragraph that you wrote:
Right-wing populist forces have indeed enjoyed remarkable success in recent years. In 2022, the Brothers of Italy became the largest party in Italy, elevating its leader, Giorgia Meloni, to the premiership. The Sweden Democrats have become the country’s second-largest party and now have a dominant position in the right-wing government. In France, National Rally’s Marine Le Pen achieved her best result yet in the 2022 presidential election. Then, in 2023, Geert Wilder’s Party for Freedom won a resounding victory in the Netherlands’ general election, and the Finns Party placed second in the Finnish elections, joining the new government. (Sheri Berman. Project Syndicate, June 2024)
I want to get to in a minute whether there are differences in the dynamics driving this in each country but before I get to that, can you say whether it is concerns with immigration, concerns about economic difficulties, or kind of a general animosity toward EU leadership that is driving the rise of this right-wing populism? What do you see as its causes?
Prof. Sheri Berman: I'll take that last question first. So, I think the answer to that question is all of the above. If you look at the issues that European voters are most concerned about, the ones that you mentioned very much come out on top in almost all European countries, that is to say, immigration and economic concerns, jobs, economic insecurity, a poor social welfare state, those kinds of things. So, people are concerned about both economic and immigration-related issues but also, you know, sort of on top of that, is the other factor that you mentioned, which is a kind of resentment of or disillusionment with the ability of what you might call mainstream or establishment politicians and parties to deal with these issues. So, it's one thing to say, look, voters have a series of concerns and demands, and then it's another thing to say, well, those concerns and demands lead them to vote for, let's say, right-wing populists as opposed to traditional social Democrats or Christian Democrats. They are voting for populists because they believe that the parties that have that establishment's history are not doing their job. That is to say, they were not dealing with the economic and immigration-related challenges they see their countries facing.
G. Greenwald: Just focusing on that point a little bit, in terms of the role immigration is playing, because I do think it's often assumed by American analysts looking at it through an American lens, that the reason right-wing populism is increasing is because of concern about and even hatred for this increase in immigration that we've seen in Europe and that that concern of or anger toward immigration is in turn fueled by racism, white nationalism, and the like. It is interesting because as recently as 15 years ago, the standard left-wing position in the U.S. and throughout Europe was to be a little bit opposed or even a lot opposed to immigration because it would drive down wages for American workers and the like. And it's sort of recent that this fear of immigration has been put through a kind of racism prison.
But one of the things you also wrote in this article that I just want to ask you about, you say:
Nor is there much cross-national correlation between levels of racism or xenophobia and populism’s success in a given country. Some countries with low levels of racism and xenophobia, like Sweden, have large populist parties, whereas some countries with higher levels of racism and xenophobia, like Ireland and Portugal, do not. And, as a general matter, racism and xenophobia have declined in almost all Western societies over the past few decades, while support for right-wing populism has grown. (Sheri Berman. Project Syndicate, June 2024)
Is it your view, and it seems like it is but maybe you can elaborate on this, the view that in the United States that anti-immigration sentiment is primarily driven by racism. Do you think that's overstated?
Prof. Sheri Berman: I do think that that's not to say that racism and xenophobia don't exist and that it's not driving some voters in Europe and certainly in the United States, but stopping there really misses, as you mentioned, both the cross-national differences and support. There are countries that, you know, no matter how many polls you take, come out quite low on these sentiments and yet still have very large levels of support for right-wing populist parties and also the dynamic over time, which a lot of people also don't seem fully aware of. That is to say that almost everywhere in the West, these kinds of sentiments have declined. Not as much as they should, of course, but they have declined at the same time as support for these parties is going on. So, to stop your explanation there, it's just too easy and it's also empirically inaccurate. So, what we have to do is we have to layer on a more sophisticated understanding of what voters' concerns really are. And if you dig deeper into concerns about immigration in particular, they tend to focus on two types of things that you've already mentioned. One is straightforward economic concerns, which is why, as you said, the left was really quite hesitant about immigration up until a generation ago. Jobs are scarce, economic insecurity has increased, access to government resources has become more difficult. And in those kinds of situations, it's very easy to make people look at newcomers to the country and see them as taking up resources using community institutions that they feel very concerned about.
So, tons of research shows that in these kinds of difficult economic situations where people feel that they're in some kind of zero-sum competition, it's much harder to gain acceptance for immigration. There are also some other concerns that, while I would not consider to be racism or xenophobia straightforwardly, do relate to levels of social change. These are concerns that I would put more correctly under the rubric of assimilation or integration, it's much easier for people to accept newcomers when they feel like those newcomers are willing to respect national traditions and play by the rules of the game, you know, accept the rule of law, these kinds of things. So, these should not be, I think, conflated with racism and xenophobia, both because they are not and also because understanding these differences points to different ways of dealing with them.
G. Greenwald: Absolutely. One of the points you've made both in that article and I've seen you make it elsewhere in other writings and things you've done, that actually surprised me a little bit, just based on press coverage in the U.S., is that other than the AfD in Germany - which is just its own sort of very extremist manifestation - that by and large, what was once called fringe, far right, even proto-fascist parties in Europe have to a large extent moderated and even kind of integrated themselves into the mainstream. I remember when Giorgia Meloni was elected, the headlines everywhere in the United States were “She’s a new Mussolini, She's a fascist, Italian democracy is over,” and then in a very short time, she announced support for the war in Ukraine, kind of embraced a lot of EU policies, made clear she doesn't intend to be revolutionary, at least internationally, and you don't hear that anymore. In what respects have these right-wing parties generally, other than the one in Germany, moderated?
Prof. Sheri Berman: Many of them, but not all, and the AfD is the key most important example, many of them have moderated. Meloni is a good example. I mean, as you mentioned, when she was elected, there were headlines on both sides of the Atlantic about a new fascism in Italy. That term is still used, fascism, with regard to Marine Le Pen and the National Rally. I think this is inaccurate and also dangerous. Dangerous because when you call someone a fascist, there is no real way to sort of cooperate with them and their supporters become beyond the pale, that is to say, people that it's not worth reaching out to the fact that these parties, some of them – I would say Meloni is a great example, Marine Le Pen's party, anybody who's old enough to remember Marine Le Pen's father knows that there has a been a very significant shift between her and her father. That doesn't mean that one shouldn't be concerned. It does mean that one should recognize that shift and if one is a small d Democrat, one should welcome that and want to encourage it. You may still very much disagree with the policies that she stands for, but that's fine. The question is, is she still pushing for racist, unconstitutional policies? If she's not, then you know, she is part of a legitimate Democratic field of competition. There's a big difference between, as I said, Marine Le Pen and her father's party, the National Front. There's a big difference between Meloni and some of the neo-fascist movements her party grew out of. There's a big difference between the Sweden Democrats today and the neo-fascist movement that they came out of. Again, I'm not saying one should not be wary, but one should also recognize the difference throwing them all under the label of fascist or even far right for that matter. I think at this point obscures more than it clarifies.
G. Greenwald: Yeah, it's so interesting how Marine Le Pen has very aggressively, very explicitly distanced herself not just from her father, but from his ideology. They've expelled some of those old members and really worked hard to create this new identity.
The passage from your article that I referenced talked about these events that led up to this EU election. That was a harbinger of the results that we saw and probably more future events. When I think about animosity toward Brussels and EU institutions, I of course first think about the 2016 vote in the United Kingdom where they approved Brexit. They didn't even limit the control of Brussels. They just left. I know in some sense British politics in the UK itself are a little bit different from European politics because of geography and history and the like but do you see Brexit as a similar dynamic to what is driving this rise of populism that we're now discussing as well?
Prof. Sheri Berman: Well, I think first, as you said, it's important to note that the British have always been a little bit different. They joined the EU very late and somewhat reluctantly, and so that they were the last in of the big countries and the first out is perhaps not that surprising. I think that was a mistake on the part of the Brits. But I'm not British, so my view is completely and utterly irrelevant. It was not an anti-democratic decision. It may be one that some people think is unwise, but it is not anti-democratic. I would note that parties like the National Rally in France, Marine Le Pen's party, and the far-right parties in Italy, including Meloni’s, initially were quite EU skeptical. They have moderated on that as well because it serves their interests. They recognize that their citizens, as much as they complain, often legitimately, about EU posture, about the continued democratic deficit, as some people refer to it in Europe – and people really benefit more than they do not – and still, while criticism may be quite sharp, demands to actually leave are really quite low. So, their populations are reflecting ambivalent, I would say, attitudes sometimes towards the EU, but they're no longer calling for leaving the EU. And that is in line, I think, with what their populations by polling all over many years seem to indicate.
G. Greenwald: Let me ask a little bit about the differences, if there are any, even any non-trivial ones, between right-wing populist parties throughout Europe other than AfD. As you might know, I live in Brazil. I’ve lived in Brazil for a long time. My husband was a member of the Brazilian Congress. I became very involved in Brazilian politics, and I remember when Jair Bolsonaro was first running for president, and then it began looking like he would win, the American press labeled him “the Trump of the tropics.” Although I understood why they kind of needed a shorthand to convey to Americans who this person was, and there were some obvious similarities, stylistically, Bolsonaro clearly was copying Trump strategically and rhetorically in a lot of ways, it was driving me crazy because, in reality, their ideology is so radically different in so many ways. Bolsonaro is kind of this throwback to the Cold War, right? Obsessed with communism, very, very focused on social conservatism in a way that Trump hasn't. And, you know, those differences get lost because it's hard to convey the nuances. What about in the EU, again, other than Germany, is there some kind of very common connective ideological tissue that connects these parties in a way that makes the local parts of them almost trivial?
Prof. Sheri Berman: So, the parties do vary quite a bit by country, as you would imagine. As you said, you know, sort of it was wrong to conflate Bolsonaro with Trump, it's wrong to conflate Geert Wilders with Marine Le Pen. But sure, there are some similarities. I would say one thing that really does differentiate most, not all, but most of these right-wing populist parties from their counterparts in the U.S. if you want to throw Trump or the Republicans in there, is that these parties, most of them moved to the left on economic issues a generation or two ago. So Marine Le Pen's party is not a far-right party on economic issues. Her father was. He was a Thatcherite or a Reaganite, but she is a center or center-left figure, as is her party on economic issues. She sells the party very much as the champion of the ‘Left Behinds’, whether you agree that that's true or not is irrelevant, that's how she presents herself. Denmark and Sweden criticize the Social Democrats for having abandoned their defense of the welfare state. These parties are really quite different from their American counterparts on economic issues.
They do have some connective tissue. I would say the issue that they are most associated with is immigration and their opposition to it. Having changed the way that opposition is phrased over the years, having moved away from sort of direct racial or xenophobic opposition to immigration to claiming that their opposition to immigration is based on a purported unwillingness by immigrants to assimilate conflicts over economic resources – whether that's true or not, that is what they say – and that is clearly a connective tissue among almost all these parties. Again, with the caveat that there are some, like the AfD and certainly the East European counterparts, which I would put in a separate category, that is really not the mainstream, if you can call it that now - far-right populist parties in Western Europe are.
G. Greenwald: One of the really fascinating aspects of these election results, especially in the two biggest and most important countries, France and Germany, is just how segregated and separate the various political groups are, not unlike, I think, the United States, where the vast middle of the country and the South are hardcore red states while the coastal states are blue states. If you look at the German map of the voting, what you see is that the AfD's popularity was overwhelmingly from what was once called East Germany. I think they were by a good distance, the most popular party, if you just looked at East Germany, and they had a lot less support in West Germany, especially in Western cities. What explains the AfD's extraordinary popularity compared to the other parties in East Germany?
Prof. Sheri Berman: That's right. I mean, the AfD is exceptional in a number of issues, and in the German context, it's exceptional because it still retains a very, very heavy eastern base. Its support has expanded somewhat to the western parts of Germany, but it remains a party that is disproportionately successful in the East. In fact, it is the most popular party in many of those eastern states. And that is because folks in those states have a very different history than folks in the West. They did not live through West Germany's postwar history, the reckoning with the Nazi past, and the democratic norms that developed during that time. And they also feel very much still like they have been sort of, to use a common term, left behind over the past decades or two that, you know, these are regions that have suffered a lot of emigration. They are regions that remain to some degree poorer than the West and so, this is a place where anti-establishment kinds of voices gain much more resonance than they do in the West. That map is really quite telling but note that in West Germany, the most popular party, the plurality, not the majority party, is the very traditional, you know, center-right CDU/ CSU.
G. Greenwald: That was Angela Merkel's party, for example. Just to tie this a little bit to the United States, and I realize it's a very simple oversimplification, but in these places that are kind of far from the nation's capital and far from the concentrated centers of power like Wall Street and Silicon Valley, there is a very strong perception, the anti-establishment sentiment comes from this notion that the people in power basically harbor contempt for the beliefs and values, but also the material interests of all these people in the middle of the country who have this anti-establishment sentiment. Is that true as well in the EU writ large, and East Germany specifically?
Prof. Sheri Berman: Oh, absolutely. That kind of resentment of highly educated, cosmopolitan elites is a central part of the appeal of these parties. So, in the German case, for instance, again, I'll pick that one, even though it has some exceptional qualities. The AfD's main target is always the Greens, not so much the Social Democrats, the sort of traditional, albeit now really diminished party of the sort of working class, but the Greens. Right? Why? Because the Greens are the party of the highly educated, cosmopolitan urban elites. So, they make a very strong effort to kind of constantly attack the Greens, their party and their policies. They say that they are out of touch. They don't care about the sort of “average people.” So, if you could imagine the United States with a proportional representation as opposed to a majority electoral system as we have, the Greens would be the party of the sort of educated elites living in oceans and university towns, that kind of thing. So, you see this very much play itself out in Europe. It's just that these people have now segregated themselves into different parties, as opposed to being clumped together into big ones as they are in the United States.
G. Greenwald: Let me ask you a similar question about France, where it seems to me at least, having not studied nearly as in-depth as you, to put that mildly, that there is a similar dynamic, especially when it comes to the United States. So, I think the conventional wisdom in the United States is that the Democratic Party is becoming much more the party of affluent suburbanites and wealthy centers of power – lots of exceptions, obviously – whereas the Republicans are really trying to become, let's call it, the party of a multiracial working class, not just the white working class, but the multiracial working class. But you can't really say that poor people in general have abandoned the Democratic Party, because there are a lot of very poor people, for all kinds of different non-economic reasons, including race, who traditionally vote Democrat. There was this interesting passage from an article in The Guardian, and this is September 2023, obviously before yesterday's election, by Julia Cajé and Thomas Piketty, trying to explain French politics from that perspective of who it is that is anti-establishment in favor of Marine Le Pen and who still supports Macron.
They said the following:
The French political landscape can be described as follows: low-income urban voters, who tend to be mainly service industry employees and tenants, vote predominantly for the left, while working-class voters outside the main cities, who are mainly blue-collar workers and homeowners, are more likely to vote for parties of the far right. (The Guardian, Julia Cagé and Thomas Piketty, September 26, 2023)
If that’s true, if you agree with that, how is it that kind of working-class people who, at least in the United States, the Democratic Party always claim to represent obviously, the British party is called the Labor Party, how is it that so many of these working-class voters are now turning to the far right because they believe they represent their interests?
Prof. Sheri Berman: Well, we see, as you noted, a very similar dynamic in the U.S., right? The white working class is also right and so this skims a disproportionate force of working-class votes from folks who are living in non-urban areas and evangelical voters. If you are to look at sort of white working-class voters who are secular, who live in whatever, New York or Los Angeles, those folks still have a fairly strong tendency to vote for the Democratic Party. But so, then the question becomes, well, why? Why do we see the tendency of low-income, low-educated voters and others to vote for these right-wing populist parties? I mean, we could go back to the issues that you brought up at the beginning. I mean, I think they are applicable, generally, to white people who have economic, social and cultural grievances. I would say when you're looking at working-class voters, though, the other thing to throw in is the changing profile of the left, which is these people, a generation ago, would have disproportionately voted for, in Europe, as Piketty and his colleagues say, they would have voted for whatever socialist parties, Labor party, social democratic parties. Those parties now no longer have those voters at all. They really lost them gradually, over time, and suddenly, through the 1990s, when they really kind of abandoned their traditional economic profile and ran headlong to embrace a kind of softer, gentler version of neoliberalism, what was called Third Way politics in Europe, or progressive neoliberalism in the United States. And what you see after that is that working-class voters no longer see these left-wing parties as standing for them as their “natural,” so to speak, political homes. These parties no longer have the ability to capture or attract, particularly these working-class voters the way they would have during the postwar decades. Those voters were particularly up for grabs. And now in Western Europe, even more so than in the United States, I would add, many of these right-wing populist parties are the largest working-class parties in their countries. That is to say, the parties that receive a plurality, sometimes more, of working-class votes.
G. Greenwald: Yeah. It's fascinating. And the same in Brazil, where you have all these left-wing parties and politicians who speak incessantly about representing the poor people and the working class, and yet all their votes and donations come from highly educated, primarily white sectors of the city and the country. There's this big breach between the left on the one hand and the people they claim to represent on the other, throughout the democratic world.
I want to ask you about that because we've been spending time talking about how hatred toward or dissatisfaction with establishment centers of power are needed in right-wing populism and of course, the question is why can't it lead to left-wing populism? Or at least why isn't it? And there are some figures in Europe who I find really interesting, one of whom is the longtime German leftist Sahra Wagenknecht – we've interviewed her on our show several times – who basically went to war with the left of what she was always a part of. You could call her the leader of the left in Germany if you wanted, and she basically split from the left, over things like attacking them over an obsession with every kind of academic and obscure cultural issues that alienate ordinary people, and not because they're hostile to it, because they don't find it relevant to their lives. She's become more anti-immigrant, for sure. She's against the war in Ukraine and NATO and institutionalist policies. And she started a new party. It just got almost 6% and won six seats in the EU, a fairly decent showing. But then you even have in Slovakia, the prime Minister who just got almost assassinated, Robert Fico, who was a long-time left-liberal of the very mainstream kind, who also did a similar trajectory against immigration, against the war in Ukraine. And then you can kind of put maybe Jean-Luc Mélenchon, in France, in that pile as well, though with lots of differences. Is there any real viable path for the left to capitalize on populism and anti-establishment sentiment using this sort of politics?
Prof. Sheri Berman: Well, I will say that, you know, especially you, based in Brazil, you know that left-wing populism is the standard or the more popular, so to speak, form of populism historically in Latin America. So, the fact that we're talking about right-wing populism because we're focused on sort of the aftermath of the European elections, makes perfect sense because that is the dominant form of populism in Europe and indeed the West today. But it's not the only form of populism, although that term is really very broad, so, one wants to be careful with what one means when one says it. But, you know, generally, when one talks about left-wing populism, there are many parts of the world where that would be, again, the dominant form of populism. And historically, that was indeed the case in Latin America. We recently had an election in Mexico where a party that many people considered to be a left-wing populist party, its presidential candidate, won in one hand. And to get back to the question of why, I mean, look, there's a lot of reasons for that. Figures like Wagenknecht and Mélenchon are problematic for a variety of reasons for voters, which, you know, you may or may not want to discuss further. But I would say a lot of this actually […]
G. Greenwald: Sorry to interrupt, but I would love to hear a little bit about that actually.
Prof. Sheri Berman: If you look at Wagenknecht, I think there's a lot of distrust of her and her motives both among mainstream parties and, of course, among her former colleagues in Die Linke. The particular package that she is trying to put together, which is not just far left on economic issues, but also really very conservative on a variety of social and cultural issues. She is very much, if you look, for instance, at the votes for the EU election, which they now have out, you can watch the vote streams, she is really trying to and did pull a significant number of votes from the AfD. Now that may be good because she is certainly more of a small d Democrat I would say, than the AfD is, but it does give you some sense of what kind of profile she is giving to voters and why, therefore, that might be of somewhat limited reach. I think there’s a very strong plurality, perhaps even majority support for limiting, let's say, immigration in Germany, particularly illegal immigration, but dog-whistling toward some of the things that I think folks think she is, it tends to make some people nervous..
G. Greenwald: This is all super illuminating. I just have a couple more questions with respect to your time. I actually have a ton more, but I'm just going to ask a couple more.
Ursula von der Leyen, who is the president of the EU, is seeking a new term reelection of five years and it is interesting that we're spending so much time talking about this growing anti-establishment sentiment, when to me, in so many ways, she's kind of like the living, breathing embodiment of establishment politics, not only in her ideological beliefs, but just in her comportment, all of that. She's just like you couldn't invent in a lab a more establishment politician than she. Even though these status quo mainstream parties do have a majority, it's not much bigger than the amount of votes she needs. Do you regard her reelection as close to certain, or is there a decent chance that she won't be able to get those votes?
Prof. Sheri Berman: As you mentioned, the coalition that had supported her in the past, is somewhat diminished, but still has the votes in Parliament to elect her. But, you know, these coalitions are not completely stable, right? So, before the election, she was already kind of making nice, with Meloni, in particular, who has been a fairly strong supporter of the EU's efforts in Ukraine and elsewhere. And so, she clearly understands that, as is the case in national parliaments, as the party spectrum has fragmented, it's no longer enough to kind of get the support of the mainstream parties behind you. Right? So, you want to have some sort of insurance policy, so to speak. So, if she could potentially rely on support from some of those far-right parties that are seen to have moderated, that would give her an alternative way of passing policies that she might not be able to get support for otherwise. So, for instance, the green section of the EU Parliament said they simply will not, under any circumstances, work with far-right parties. So, if she is trying to pass something that, for instance, she cannot get support from the Greens on, she may have no choice but to look to parties in that kind of – whatever you want to call it – far-right grouping. Particularly, what is going to be contentious going forward is the Green New Deal because the Green parties really did suffer a significant loss at this election and those environmental policies have been the subject of some very serious, national-level protests, farmers protests, things like that. So, figuring out what to do about that is going to be a major challenge for her going ahead.
G. Greenwald: You mentioned Ukraine. I just want to ask you about that because the German Green Party, for example, is one of the most vocal supporters of NATO and U.S. financing of this war, prolonging the war. And yet, Ursula von der Leyen has been steadfast in her views on that. But it seems like a common thread of almost all of these right-wing parties is growing opposition to involvement in the war in Ukraine, for whatever their motives. I mentioned Robert Fico in Slovakia, who really ran on a platform of ending support for Ukraine, even though Slovakia, with its proximity to Russia, has been so pro-Ukraine. What do you see as the role of that war and opposition to continuing it, to NATO's involvement in it, to have been a factor in this and this election?
Prof. Sheri Berman: There are some parties, as you mentioned, like Fico, in Slovakia, that have been very wary indeed opposed to continuing support for Ukraine. Obviously, Orban is kind of the cheerleader of this particular group. That particular position is less popular in Western Europe, as you know, as has been mentioned already, Meloni is sort of on board with supporting Ukraine. Even Marine Le Pen's party is kind of now relatively neutral on that, whereas, before, she had been accused of being a sort of closet Putin supporter that does not go along with her desire to moderate her party, so, that has essentially disappeared from sort of prominence in her platform. The Scandinavians are pretty hysterical about Russia because it's on their border. So, there are definitely parties that are wary of that and the person that you mentioned before, Sahra Wagenknecht, would be a great example of that, right? She has been, along with the AfD, the most prominent voice for rolling back support for Ukraine, trying to push for a cease fire, you know, that kind of thing. And I would say in the German context that’s true along with the comments that I mentioned earlier in a very specific slice of the German electorate, that might limit her ability to attract more votes from the, let's say, mainstream left.
G. Greenwald: All right. Now, the last question. President Macron, in response to this election, dissolved the legislature, the parliament, and called for snap elections. That kind of seems counterintuitive, right? After an election where your own party gets crushed, to then want to have another election? I'm sure he's very well aware of that question and has good motives for doing so. What are those motives? What is he hoping to achieve with these elections?
Prof. Sheri Berman: Well, I'm a political science professor. I do not have a crystal ball, so I do not know what was going on in his mind. I will say that is quite a risky move that he made. He did not need to do this. Why he did this, again, I cannot see inside his head, so I will try to sort of conjecture as best as possible. He is a risk-taker and has a lot of faith in his ability, I think, to convince the electorate that he is the best choice and that the National Rally represents a bad choice. I think he is hoping to be able to once again, as he has in the past, although with diminishing effectiveness over time, rally all the pro-Republican what you might call in the United States pro-Democrat, small d Democrat forces behind him, when it comes to a choice between, sort of allowing the National Rally to gain a dominant place in the Parliament and therefore to be able to name the Prime Minister, I think he thinks that he can still convince people that that would be a bad idea. But, you know, as the quote that I think you put up earlier in the broadcast says, should he lose that bet, he himself does not lose the presidency. He is a president who was elected independently. He will have to cohabitate with the prime minister from the National Rally, most presumably Jordan Bardella. And, you know, that won't be the first time that that has happened. He is paying a price for having a party which is a party more in name only. It is really a vehicle for him individually and does not have a platform or a profile significantly separate from him. So insofar as people are fed up with him, you know his party is going to pay that price.
G. Greenwald: Professor Berman this was super illuminating, so refreshing. After being subjected to days of, American punditry that has knowledge of these issues that are worse than superficial. So, I really appreciate your taking the time to come on and help us understand all of this. Thanks very much.
Prof. Sheri Berman: It's my pleasure.
G. Greenwald: Have a good evening.
All right. So that concludes our show for this evening.
