[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by _tunic_

R.I.P. Netherlands too

From Zakaria's newsletter:

Is the Far Right Now Mainstream?

That has been an open question since the electoral successes of Donald Trump, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Brazilian former President Jair Bolsonaro, and others. Further discussion has been spurred by vote results in the Netherlands, where far-right politician Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV) won the most legislative seats (a projected 37 out of 150) on Nov. 22. Wilders has been the most-prominent far-right Dutch populist off and on for more than a decade, rising to prominence with sharp anti-Islam rhetoric.

Wilders “will still struggle to form a coalition government and to become prime minister” of the Netherlands, writes Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman. But “(h)is success is part of a clear Europe-wide pattern. Political groups that were once dismissed as fringe far-right parties are gaining popularity—and in some places power.” Rachman cites Hungary, Italy, Slovakia, and Sweden. “The far right is also gaining ground in Germany and France. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) now regularly tops 20 per cent support in the polls, making it the second most popular party in Germany. On a recent trip to London, François Hollande, the former French president, told me that in his country ‘the far right have devoured the traditional right’. Polls suggest (far-right politician) Marine Le Pen may finally win the French presidency in 2027.”

In some cases, center-right parties now imitate their far-right competititors. Of the Dutch election, Alexander Clarkson writes for the World Politics Review: “In addition to emulating far-right rhetoric over migration, center-right and even some liberal leaders also echoed the far-right’s posture toward supposedly ‘woke’ issues involving gender and culture. In such an environment, much of what once defined the PVV (Wilders’ Dutch party) as radical and dangerous had become mainstream political discourse.”

The trend cuts both ways. As Caroline de Guyter writes for Foreign Policy, Wilders and other far-right European political leaders no longer seem so enamored of leaving the European Union, heeding lessons from Brexit and softening their stances.

As for why far-right support has become so prevalent, at Foreign Policy in Focus, John Feffer points to economic inequality, suggesting the structural driver of far-right affinity is well in place. Feffer writes: “The desire for profound change is surely understandable. The conditions that generated victories for the far right that I describe in my 2021 book Right Around the World have not changed in any substantial way. Economic globalization, after all, continues to benefit the few and burden the many. … Note that the far right has prospered in precisely the countries that have experienced this rising income inequality: Donald Trump in the United States, Narendra Modi in India, and Vladimir Putin in Russia, as well as Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and now Geert Wilders in the Netherlands.”