When Jean-Marie Le Pen made it into the second round of the 2002 French presidential election, part of the horror many voters felt was in seeing, in stark light, a face of the nation that had previously been in shadow. “It means people we know voted for the National Front,” a shaken friend and supporter of the Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, told me at the time. Even understanding the reasons — economic protest, apathy in the mainstream — did not diminish the impact, nor the anger.
The near certainty that Le Pen’s daughter Marine will be a presidential contender for 2017 is shocking in a different way, landing with the thud of grim inevitability. Marine Le Pen saunters through French politics, emanating the sharp smell of professionally laundered fascism. She has distanced herself and her party from the brutish style of her father, jettisoning explicit racism, colonising the political space where his extreme position shades into mainstream respectability. After a triumphant showing in the first round of regional elections last week, the National Front claims to be France’s main opposition party. But France is not an exception .
A long malaise in continental liberal democracy is beginning to feel more like decline. Illiberal democracy is already thriving in the east of the continent. It is the explicit creed of the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, who has tried to proscribe press criticism of the government in the name of protecting “public morality”, and who treats non-Christian religions and non-governmental organisations as fifth columnists, contaminating the vigour of a national project. That record was established even before the eruption of a European Union (EU) migration crisis, in which Orban sees himself holding the line against an infiltrating “army” of Muslims.
In October, the ultra-conservative Law and Justice party swept aside a centrist government in Poland, raising fears among the country’s liberals of a lurch towards Orban-style Christian nationalism. Phlegmatic commentators counsel against panic, explaining the result as a backlash against an exhausted incumbent class by poorer Poles, mostly in small towns and villages, to whom the bounty of post-Communist market transition has not cascaded down.
The reassuring theory is that moderates can regroup and renew their pitch, at which point, the pendulum will swing back. But pendulum politics is looking off kilter across Europe. Even in Scandinavia, the amicable to and fro between conservative and social democratic modes of liberalism has been disrupted by right-wing populists. The Sweden Democrats, a party with neo-Nazi factions in its roots, has topped opinion polls in that country. In Denmark, the anti-immigration People’s party is part of the ruling coalition.
No two countries have exactly analogous politics, but common threads run across Europe. The unifying dynamic appears to be the interaction of financial insecurity and the cultural detachment of governing elites from the governed. From Paris to Warsaw, politicians of the technocratic centre are perceived as a caste apart, professionally complacent, insulated by hoarded privilege from the anxiety provoked in electorates by economic turbulence and abrupt demographic change. On to that canvas is then projected the spectre of terrorism, smuggled into the body politic by refugees from predominantly Muslim countries.
What makes this resurgent nationalism so hard to defuse is the panache with which it sports the robes of popular democracy — as indeed nationalism has always done. Marine is careful not to present herself as a scourge of foreigners, but as a defender of Republican secularism. The Scandinavian hard right configures its refusal to welcome refugees as a pragmatic defence of traditional Nordic values of tolerance and reciprocity — implying that the social contract is undermined by migrant communities whose failure to integrate is somehow wilful, a function of religious self-segregation. Once the idea takes hold that Islam contains innate tendencies to insularity and illiberalism, it is easy to argue that mass migration is a threat to “European” values, and that a porous border is incompatible with pluralist democracy. Recognition that continental Europe achieved relative religious homogeneity by the systematic extermination of its largest non-Christian minority in the 20th century is usually omitted from that argument.
Britain, while hardly a model of interfaith community cohesion, has stayed relatively immune to the rise of explicitly xenophobic populism. Mercifully, United Kingdom Independence Party is an amateurish also-ran compared with more dynamic equivalent movements elsewhere. We like to think this protection is the enduring legacy of Churchillian anti-fascism, although it is also an accident of electoral architecture and geography — the absence of land borders with the rest of Europe and the mixed blessing of a voting system that suffocates small parties.
Britain’s collective inoculation against racist politics will be tested in the EU referendum campaign. Before the terrorist attacks in Paris, it seemed that the arguments would hinge on economics. The “leave” camp would say prosperity depends on unshackling Britain from the dead weight of a low-growth, high-unemployment Eurozone.
The “remain” side would say that jobs and investment rely on membership of the huge trading club in the British corner of the globe. Those will still be dominant themes. But in recent weeks, the lens of British politics has shifted its focus from economy to security. When that template is applied, EU membership is either the necessary mechanism for coordinated anti-terror policy — sharing data, cross-border arrest warrants and intelligence cooperation — or it is an unlocked door through which terrorism sneaks, in refugee garb.
This evolution of the argument poses a new, more profound problem for the “in” side. The case for keeping Britain in Europe has always been hampered by its reliance on abstract liberalism and historical romanticism: Extolling openness and continental engagement as emblems of a modern, self-confident nation; recalling the founding purpose of the EU as the elimination of nationalism by blurring borders; rejecting Euroscepticism as a form of reactionary cultural protectionism, coloured at the fringes by outright xenophobia.
Those were never easy arguments to configure as campaign themes with mass appeal. But what pro-Europeans now confront is something all together more challenging — not just to the practical pursuit of their cause, but to its very premise. There is still a liberal case for integration with the rest of Europe, but it gets progressively harder to make when so many countries in the rest of Europe seem to be turning their backs on liberalism.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
