With Trump as president-elect, and the populist right on the rise in Europe, will Britain manage to stand its ground?
The far right is on the march. In the US, Donald Trump has been re-elected president, vowing to implement “the largest deportation program in American history” and “end left-wing gender insanity”. Meanwhile, at least six EU countries – Italy, the Netherlands, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary and Croatia – have far-right parties in government, though mostly as part of coalitions. Elsewhere, such parties have only been kept out by a cordon sanitaire. In France, the National Rally – heir to the National Front – was blocked from entering government this year by a broad alliance of parties opposed to the National Rally’s politics. In Austria, the far-right Freedom Party took the largest share of the vote in September but looks set to be excluded from a coalition government as negotiations continue.
But even where the far right has been kept out of government, its rise has often dragged mainstream politics in its direction, particularly on issues such as migration, climate and human rights. We’ve seen this effect at home in the UK, where the Conservative Party has just elected Kemi Badenoch as its new leader – a politician who says that “not all cultures are equally valid” when it comes to controlling immigration and who would consider taking the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights.
In the US, the Republican Party has been transformed by populism. But even the Democrats have been affected. According to an Economist analysis, Kamala Harris’s policies were pushed to the right, particularly on key populist issues like immigration and climate change, by her rivalry with Trump. The president-elect “has redefined both par ties’ agendas”, the magazine argued.
Recently, Vicente Valentim, an Oxford University re searcher and author of The Normalisation of the Radical Right, wrote that “political elites are key” when it comes to setting norms. Dots could be drawn, he argued, between recent political rhetoric in the UK – from mainstream parties even more than fringe ones – and the riots that broke out over the summer, during which mosques and asylum-seekers were attacked. Individuals may have felt emboldened to act on views that had been normalised and legitimised by people in positions of power.
For the next four years, we will also have to contend with the influence of Trump on our politics. So while in the UK we may feel relieved that such parties are not in government right now, it’s only part of the battle. Even outside government, the effect on the broader political life of our democracies can be almost as dangerous.
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