This is an xlnt read, with the EU, Dutch & French politics, etc.>
International Perspective, by Marshall Auerback
European election results reflect an anti-EU sentiment, not a swing to the right
May 21, 2002
“The two ideologies, of Communism and of Europe, have much more in common than they [Euroenthusiasts] like to admit…One had its apparatchiks, the other its Eurocrats…Their respective credos come together in many respects including their belief in the inevitable withering-away of the nation-state…Initiates in the secrets of History, the two schools are equally convinced that they know where History is leading – toward the Promised Land. For the first, its name is the classless society, for the second, it is Europe without borders.” – Gabriel Robin, retired French Ambassador
“A new political wind is blowing through Europe. That wind is carrying a distrust of political leaders. That wind is carrying a kind of anger because of the arrogance, especially of Social Democrats who speak too much on behalf of the people and not too much with the people.”
-Marcel Boogers, Dutch political scientist.
Following on from Jean-Marie Le Pen’s relative success in France, the List Pim Fortuyn (LPF) party last week celebrated an election result that left the group of political novices (shorn of their leader just 10 days ago) as the second-biggest party in the Dutch parliament. The Presidential election in France and the electoral consequences of the assassination of the LPF’s leader, Pim Fortuyn in The Netherlands appear to confirm the view of many analysts that we are witnessing the beginnings of a conservative tide sweeping Europe.
This is too simplistic. This swing is motivated not by Thatcherite economic liberalism
but by the loss of national identity and control; at the core, these results suggest a profound disenchantment with the European Union’s technocratic elites. It is a disaffection that cannot be explained by a recession supposedly creating an army of unemployed prone to the attractions of anti-immigrant demagogues for the simple reason that these populist onslaughts have come at a time of comparatively benign economic conditions. Should economic conditions begin to worsen in Europe, however, we would expect the current disenchantment to become more widespread and more directed toward the institutions of the EU themselves. This is hardly the best environment in which to construct a durable monetary union, the twin pillars of which are the European Central Bank and the Maastricht Treaty’s Stability and Growth Pact.
Thus far, most of Europe’s mainstream politicians remain in denial. Cynically using the racist card as an excuse, the political establishments have generally cocked their individual snoots at those parties which refuse to buy into a vision of nationhood that does not pay automatic obeisance to the current political status quo. Both French President Jacques Chirac and recently retired Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok (of The Netherlands’ centre-left Labour Party) responded to the relative recent successes of Le Pen and Fortuyn respectively by indicating that were unworthy of debate and tried to ignore them instead. To engage them would only legitimize them, they argued.
However unattractive one might find their respective ideologies, if the political establishment persists in ignoring the overall aspirations of an electorate that is increasingly seeking refuge in parties outside a status quo that Le Pen, Fortuyn and others have sought to challenge, it risks begetting an even more extreme response in future elections. A cavalier refusal to debate and address the concerns of those who feel threatened by a headlong rush into a more all-encompassing political and monetary union without adequate democratic safeguards lends legitimacy to the views of populist politicians that the voters’ concerns are not even being considered by what they would characterize as a corrupt and cozy political class.
Although the recent successes of France’s National Front and The Netherlands newly-formed LPF party have strengthened the overall position of Europe’s centre right, there is much more to these results than meets the eye. As we noted in an earlier piece on the European Union, the comparative success of Jean-Marie Le Pen in the first round of France’s Presidential election tended to obscure the fact that, in addition to his vote, the extreme left, represented by three Trotskyites, polled 11%. Add in the anti-Maastricht candidates, and the record level of abstentions, and over 60% of the French population refused to vote for candidates whose parties represented the prevailing pro-EU consensus that exists within the mainstream left/right political spectrum.
By the same token, in last week’s Dutch parliamentary election, the real story was the not just the success of the country’s right-wing Christian Democrats (which will likely lead a coalition government there for the first time in 8 years), but the rise of a neophyte political party, List Pim Fortuyn (LPF), named after the recently assassinated Dutch leader, who was murdered in the midst of the Dutch election campaign. This party did not even exist 6 months ago, and had Fortuyn not been killed, he stood a very good chance of being appointed Prime Minister. To mobilize so many voters in such a short space of time cannot simply be ascribed to Fortuyn’s tragic assassination two weeks ago; his party had already registered success in local elections in Rotterdam last March and its growing momentum (even before Fortuyn’s murder) suggests that the party was obviously tapping in to some profound disenchantment with the Netherlands’ cozy and complacent system of power-sharing. Coalition politics, when combined with bureaucratic directives foisted on electorates by officials with no public legitimacy, creates an anti-democratic cancer which empowers an unaccountable State while betraying voters of all political persuasions.
Nor one can attribute the LPF’s rise solely to an incipient anti-immigrant neo-fascism. To describe Fortuyn as a right wing neo-fascist (as was sloppily done by most of the mainstream press in the aftermath of his killing) is nothing short of blood libel. In fact, much of the vote for his party appears to have been driven by a determination to uphold the Dutch commitment to tolerance; Fortuyn was a maverick politician, but he was no Le Pen, despite his opposition to immigration. In the amusing turn of phrase by National Post columnist Mark Steyn:
Fortuyn and Le Pen had virtually nothing in common: Le Pen's a Vichy nostalgist; Fortuyn was a flamboyant gay sociology professor, a beneficiary of Dutch liberalism who boasted about the ethnic diversity of his many lovers. Le Pen's a left-wing protectionist; Fortuyn was a Thatcherite on economic issues. But in the shorthand of European politics both were dismissed as "extreme," "hateful" and, of course, "right-wing."
In fact, Fortuyn’s party featured an eclectic set of policies, which made it harder to classify with a simple “left” or “right” label. On the one hand, Fortuyn recruited ethnic minorities to his cause and condemned Le Pen for his anti-Semitism. He opposed widespread Muslim immigration in particular because of the threat he believed this posed to Western liberalism. He argued that Islamic extremism threatened the way of life he promoted: women’s rights, homosexuality, drug use, free speech, etc. In death, he was in many respects more a martyr to liberalism than conservatism or fascism.
On the other hand, many of the LPF’s policies sounded like they came out of a libertarian manifesto. Fortuyn himself railed against the entrenched political interests at the heart of Dutch politics, as well as the increasing role in national life played by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. He wanted tax cuts, an axe taken to public service red tape, more use of the private sector in health care, the sort of things that would have made him a comfortable figure in the British Conservative Party. He even discussed borrowing Margaret Thatcher’s famous handbag to bang the EU table for the return of the Netherlands’ money.
But for all their differences, there is a common thread that links Le Pen, Fortuyn, and other non-mainstream parties which have recently experienced electoral success across the continent. All of these parties (and presumably the people who voted for them) believe the European Union and its attendant institutions are characterised by a huge democratic deficit, which has led to an increasing sense of political alienation and a corresponding move toward extremist parties hostile to any kind of political and monetary union in other parts of Europe. Anti EU parties are on the rise across continental Europe and have already won power from Portugal to Austria. Although there are special factors at work in each of these elections, the one common denominator in countries where non-mainstream parties are experiencing considerable electoral success is that political apathy is giving way to a disaffection and correspondingly greater activism. Such activism in turn is manifesting itself in votes for parties whose aspirations are not currently accommodated by the technocratic elites now dominating policy in the backrooms of Brussels or Frankfurt (home of the European Central Bank).
Were these elections simply a matter of economic incompetence, then the Dutch would have little reason to throw out the dominant Labour party in such a comprehensive manner. In power for 8 years under Prime Minister Wim Kok, his left wing coalition government delivered consistently strong economic growth and low unemployment. It has long been considered a model for many parties of the left. It got hammered in spite of its obvious economic successes. Consequently, it is too facile to explain the relative success of populist movements like Fortuyn’s on the grounds of poor economic conditions; there must be some other dynamic at work.
Our views about the economic lunacy of Europe's Stability and Growth Pact, not to mention the anti-democratic political oppressiveness, should already be familiar to most readers. With the French and German elections focusing increasingly on unemployment and fiscal policy, these topics are belatedly being reopened for debate around Europe, but so is the accompanying resistance to change by the Eurocrats of Brussels, trying to retain the status quo implied by the stability pact. The crunch may come with next month's French parliamentary polls if Mr. Chirac's interim centre-right government is victorious and sticks to its platform of tax cuts and higher spending on law and order. Although a French government spokesman promised yesterday that Paris would abide by the stability pact, he also said the tax cuts would go ahead. There is even talk that the new French Government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin could introduce a 5 per cent tax cut by decree even before the June election, challenging the Socialists to oppose it if they dare during the election campaign.
This appears difficult to reconcile with President Chirac's reaffirmation at an EU summit in Barcelona in March that France would bring its budget close to or in balance by 2004. "I don't understand how Mr. Chirac can vote in favour [of the 2004 deadline to bring the French budget deficit into balance] in Barcelona and say a few weeks later that this no longer applies," commented Hans Eichel, Germany’s Finance Minister last week. It is indeed ironic to hear these concerns being expressed by Mr. Eichel, given that he was one of the first European politicians last year to make the perfectly logical point that in regard to the stability pact, it made more economic sense to pay attention to spending targets, rather than overall budget deficits: “You can plan spending in a budget but you cannot plan your income.” He questioned whether countries ought to pursue budget consolidation steadfastly, “independent of whether there is more or less income one year owing to economic developments”.
In The Netherlands, as elsewhere in France and elsewhere in the EU, the economic outlook is starting to deteriorate again. But as the criticism of Mr. Chirac’s fiscal plans implicitly demonstrates, the capacity of elites to change course toward greater reflation is constrained by membership of the euro (which precludes the expedient of devaluation) and the failure of most EU members to pursue full free-market reform. For all of their public rhetoric, the Commission and European Central Bank have to be alive to the possibility of some such compromise if economic growth is less robust over the next two years than they currently envisage. Even Mr. Eichel says a balanced German budget by 2004 will require growth of 2.5 per cent in both 2003 and 2004 – somewhat optimistic for an economy with average annual growth of 1.5 per cent since unification in 1990.
And should the EU’s technocrats refuse to respond realistically to these pressures, we can anticipate rising anger at the inability of establishment politicians to pursue economic policies in the national interest. There will be increased opposition towards interest rates being set by “outsiders”. There will be increased anger at Brussels bureaucrats in the event that vital development funds are withheld from needy countries such as Portugal (which is already technically in breach of its fiscal borrowing limits), or if financial penalties are imposed. Politics might become even more polarized and extreme as a consequence.
In addition, the deflationary policies of the European Central Bank can be justifiably blamed for many of the forces driving the neo-Fascist upsurge across Europe. The ECB itself might therefore become a target of this new populist militancy, given its lack of transparency and divorce from any kind of democratic accountability. Within the next year or so, therefore, political pressures for a more expansionary ECB policy could become overwhelming. At that stage, a consensus will hopefully develop for fundamental revisions to the Maastricht treaty to bring monetary policy under direct political control or at least to impose on the European bank the greater accountability seen at the Bank of England and the US Federal Reserve. If not, a Europe with greater numbers of immigrants will provide populists and less liberal-minded people than Fortuyn with new scapegoats across the continent.
Far from the EU being the project to ensure that fascist or communist dictatorships never occur again in Europe, its removal of the power of self government, its politically unaccountable central bank, and the economically misconceived Stability and Growth Pact (which arbitrarily circumscribes national fiscal independence), all combine to make a mockery of conventional politics and sending people who are terminally disaffected and alienated by the political system straight into the arms of the extremist parties. This disaffection cannot be pigeon-holed into a straight “left/right” classification. If anything, the left-wing Dutch coalition government of Wim Kok was far more economically liberal than an instinctive meddler and promoter of “national champions” like France’s Chirac, or Germany’s new conservative challenger, Edmund Stoiber of the Bavarian CSU.
Yet the discontents remain. Fortuyn may no longer be alive to exploit them, and a 74 year old, such as Le Pen (comprehensively rejected in the 2nd round of voting two weeks ago) will likely fade away to political irrelevance, particularly if his party does not do well in June’s Parliamentary elections. But the opportunities for politicians even less scrupulous are set to grow. As are the risks of political violence, which is hardly the context in which to base a successful currency union. This is the real lesson to be drawn from the recent election results in France, The Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Portugal, etc. – one which supporters of the euro continue to ignore at their peril.
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