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Roula Khalaf, editor -in -chief of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Ucucuşor Dan, the pro-EU mayor of Bucharest, torn off the victory of the jaws of the ultra-nationalist George Simion in the presidential election of Romania last week. European leaders celebrated. Dan will keep Romania on the democratic, pro-nato path that she has followed since the fall of communism. Simion would have taken him in the opposite direction to a darker location, so he is good for Romania and Europe he lost.
But the former football hooligan, which is forbidden to enter Ukraine or Moldova, still won a remarkable 46% of the votes. It is down but not. Unless Dan can somehow inaugurate an ambitious reformist government, Simion and its AUR party, the second largest in Parliament, will draw the strength of the continuous political disorders, necessary austerity measures and a disgust of the public to selfish establishment parties.
Romania is part of a greater European history. The far -right or nationalist populist parties hammer at the door of power. The extreme right has won the elections in Austria and the Netherlands and the nationalist conservative Giorgia Meloni governs, so far, in Italy. The right -wing radical parties took second place in several others, notably Germany and recently in Portugal. Being a pro-Trump has not proven to be political responsibility in Europe that it was in Canada or Australia.
The next test for the general public is the second round of the Polish presidential election next Sunday. If the candidate for the Nationalist Party of Conservative Law and Justice (IP), Karol Nawrocki, beats the center-center of Rafał Trzaskowski, he is likely to block the attempts of the coalition government to restore judicial independence and other democratic reforms as did the outgoing president Andrzej Duda. Government survival can be at stake.
Poland also illustrates another disturbing characteristic of the hard right of Europe: being more extreme can attract rather than repel voters. Two candidates overwhelmed Nawrocki on the far right in the first round, arguing that worse was too much a party of the establishment. They won 21%. The Freedom Party of Austria (FPö) won last year’s elections and alternatives for Germany (AFD) arrived second in February after adopting the “remigration”, or returned to immigrants and even citizens in their country of origin.
Some maintain that the creation of good radical parts shares the responsibilities of power can deflate their anti-establishment call. It worked to a certain extent in the Nordic countries, but Austria is a powerful counterexample. Some parties such as AFD and individuals such as FPö Herbert Kickl chief are too much threat to democratic standards and the rule of law to be empowered by coalition partners.
Many traditional conservative parties have attempted to take hard -right challengers by mimicry. This tends not to work, especially when imitation is mainly rhetorical. Voters tend to prefer the original. But it is insane to think that the concerns of voters can be explained rather than treated. Concerns about uncontrolled immigration are an obvious example.
With the pandemic, high inflation and war, the last five years have been a boon for populists in Europe. These factors will dissipate but anti-establishment anger is there to stay, fueled by an elite betrayal story. This is all the more the case, because coalitions of fragment and wider coalitions are necessary to govern.
Helped by social media, European populists have become masters to polarization, simplification and denunciation. The moderate parties need more daring policies, visible delivery and more convincing personalities to counter them. Plunging centrism will not. If they do not start to deliver, the right -wing parts that arrive in second position could win the next time.
