“A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of populism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Politicians and financiers, Macron and Merkel, French bureaucrats and German central bankers.”
As you may have noticed, the above is a slightly modified excerpt from the 1848 Communist Manifesto. Then, as now, the political establishment was faced with an external threat; and then, as now, they didn’t entirely succeed in exorcising it. Populism continues to haunt European politics. Populist governments in Hungary and Poland retain their grip. And far from fading away, populist movements elsewhere are still making breakthroughs. Only this week, Spain’s Vox party made it into Catalan parliament for the first time.
And yet, earlier fears of a wholesale populist takeover were wildly exaggerated. 2016 — the year of the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump — was not the end of days after all. Instead, the political establishment has adapted.
In Greece, the power of the European Central Bank proved more than equal to that of the Syriza government. In France, a centrist movement — En Marche — emerged out of nowhere to see off the hard Left and the hard Right. In Ireland, Sinn Féin has surged in popularity — only for Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to put aside their historic differences and form their first coalition. In America, the country’s democratic institutions weathered an attempt by a bad loser President to overturn an election result. And in Italy, the populist government elected in 2018 has been replaced by a technical government headed by Mario Draghi, the ultimate establishment fixer.
The establishment has not killed off populism, but it is learning to live with it. There’s a parallel here with the situation in post-war western Europe, when the main challenge wasn’t populism, but homegrown communism. We forget it now, but there were times in the 1940s and 50s when the French Communist Party was the biggest party in the National Assembly. The Italian Communist Party was another major force — peaking in 1976 with more than a third of the vote.
Despite the scale of the challenge, the communists of free Europe were tolerated — though also deliberately excluded from power, in some parts of Italy with the help of the Mafia. Today’s establishment will hope to do the same in regard to the populists; and, so far, they’re succeeding.
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