It’s starting to get scary out there. People with really weird hairdos and wild, right-wing politics are getting elected all over the place.
Britain’s floppy-haired Boris Johnson and the United States’ orange-tanned Donald Trump set the pace. Then, last month, Argentinian oddball Javier Milei was elected president, and only a week later, Dutch neo-fascist Geert Wilders managed to get the most votes in the Netherlands’ parliamentary election.
A year earlier, Italian voters took a similarly hard right turn. Shortly before that, the far-right in Sweden and Finland became part of their respective coalition governments. And here in Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany keeps rising in the polls. It’s the second-most popular party in the country. French and Austrian extremists are doing similarly well.
The nicest thing you can say about all of the latter is that at least they have hairdressers (although the Swedish fellows all appear to share a fetish for slicked-back hair, à la the 2000 movie American Psycho).
This is why the hope the rest of us have clung to – that, hey, maybe people were just upset about the pandemic and wanted something a bit different, or that maybe the polling was wrong – is slowly withering.
“From Helsinki to Rome and Berlin to Brussels, far-right parties are climbing steadily up the polls, shaping the policies of the mainstream right to reflect their nativist and populist platforms,” the Guardian’s Europe correspondent wrote shortly after Wilders’ unexpected victory.
But why? Experts point to a number of factors. Communities seem to be lining up on one side of a debate or the other, with little room for negotiating commonalities or shades of grey in between. Either you are with us on – insert populist talking point here – or you’re against us.
There’s also rising distrust of the “establishment”, whether that’s centrist politicians or legacy media. Last year, about a third of Europeans voted for anti-establishment parties, researchers at the University of Amsterdam found. During the 1990s, only 12% did.
It’s also true that centrist politicians, worried about losing ground to extremists, are more frequently aping populist talking points on topics such as migration.
Additionally, the far-right themselves are using more restrained language, especially if they make it into a governing coalition. All this makes attitudes that were previously unacceptable in polite society more palatable for everyone.
Looking at how the world makes merry of all those terrible haircuts, one might hope this will all eventually work itself out. It’s Europe, after all, a project created to combat nationalists and fascists. So, maybe they’ll all sod off eventually.
Hans Kundnani, author of the rather controversially named Eurowhiteness, isn’t so sure. In his book, he argues that European ideas about civic unity and democracy are being replaced by other common values, ones based on ethnicity, culture, religion and, at its heart, being white. As one reviewer put it, Kundnani’s book is “a polemic against racial prejudice at the heart of Europe”.
Kundnani argues this is happening in part because centre-right politicians keep cosying up to their far-right counterparts. What happens next, he predicts, will depend on Europe’s left-wing politicians. Will they try to fight those uglier common values? Or will they acquiesce for the sake of European unity? he asks.
Now, if you don’t want to be worrying about the future of democracy in Europe, then maybe don’t take this next step. Because even a brief google of what the EU’s supposedly liberal politicians have been saying about migration and Muslims lately does not make for settling reading. They, too, are stumbling, apparently unaware, rightwards.
