Liberal democracy continues to struggle at the ballot box
Illiberal populists have made gains in elections in Italy, Sweden, and France this year. Liberalism hasn’t demonstrated the capacity to respond to the problems and anxieties of our age.
Many advocates of liberal democracy breathed a large sigh of relief in May 2017 when Manuel Macron defeated Marie LePen by close to a 2:1 margin. Macron’s victory gave hope that the tide of illiberal (mostly right-wing) populism that had been spreading across the globe since the Great Recession had perhaps crested. Recent election results in Italy and Sweden, as well as the 2022 Macron-LePen rematch, suggest, however, that the pandemic and the economic turmoil and cultural anxiety it has spawned is exposing weaknesses in liberal democracy yet again.
Numerous factors contributed to surging support for anti-establishment populist parties of the left and right in the years following the Great Recession and financial crisis of 2008-09. The Eurozone experienced over 10 percent unemployment from mid-2009 until well into 2016, a very long period for such high unemployment. The European sovereign debt crisis resulted in severe austerity measures and higher taxes in Greece and Italy, leading to the anti-austerity left-wing Syriza gaining power in 2015 in Greece and the rise of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement in Italy in 2018. The Syrian refugee crisis of 2014-15 also stressed Europe’s political system, with anti-immigrant right-wing parties increasing their vote share in Sweden, Austria and Germany, and the nationalist AfD party gaining a record number of seats in the German Bundestag a few months after Macron’s victory. Concerns over immigration and sovereign rights fueled Brexit in 2016. Donald Trump centered his campaign for the presidency on hostility toward immigration and anti-establishment economic populism, executing a hostile takeover of the Republican party during the 2016 presidential primaries, and then defeating Democratic establishment stalwart Hillary Clinton in the general election.
This surge of populism took place amidst the large-scale democratic backsliding over the past decade in Hungary and Poland, with overtly anti-immigrant Christian nationalist parties taking power, then altering the constitutional landscape to bring about soft-authoritarianism in both of these EU and NATO members.
There is some thought that the onset of the pandemic may have blunted the shift towards the populist right, as many in Europe rallied toward the more reliable, centrist parties in response to the public health crisis. Biden then ousted Trump in 2020, and the AfD lost seats in Germany in 2021. However, the evidence is decidedly mixed at best, with the right wing Vox party in Spain and a cluster of Dutch far right parties both gaining strength in elections in 2021. It is also possible that border closures due to COVID-19 took the steam out of anti-immigration concerns during the pandemic.
Whether there was a pandemic populism pause or not, recent elections in Europe have shown quite decisively that the appeal of right-wing populism hasn’t waned. As William Galston writes in the Wall Street Journal, “there’s widespread discontent with the status quo, which presents an opportunity for parties willing to invoke nationalist themes and scapegoat immigrants as a threat to their countries’ economies and cultures.”
The Brothers of Italy party, with roots to the country’s fascist past, won a stunning 25% of the seats in the election last week, enough to put its leader, Giorgia Meloni, into the prime minister’s office. Like many on the right, she stokes white nationalist fears of being replaced and economically disadvantaged by runaway immigration and calls for a resurrection of Christian anti-LGBT and anti-abortion cultural values. In September, the far right Sweden Democrats, once considered the extremist fringe with origins in Nazism, emerged as the second-largest party. In April, Marie LePen lost her bid for the French presidency, but received over 3 million more votes than in 2017 and cut the margin between her and Macron in half.
Ironically, these elections advancing illiberalism are all taking place while the United States and Europe have united, successfully to this point, to defend Ukraine’s fledgling democracy against the authoritarian Christian nationalist Putin regime. So the West is providing an “arsenal of democracy” for Ukraine, while at the same time its own democratic institutions are eroding.
Illiberalism has few if any solutions to the great problems of our times – mass inequality, climate change, climate and conflict-based migration, and pandemic-induced inflation. But the illiberals are experts at blaming people’s dissatisfaction on others and stoking positive feelings of national, ethnic and racial identity among their supporters. Over and over again, liberal democrats seem to have no rejoinder to these political appeals.
To stem the tide, we liberals need to do a much better job speaking to voters’ anxieties about immigration, addressing genuine economic grievances, and finding a cultural middle ground that that at least is not alienating to large swaths of the population.
To dig deeper, read:
William Galston, “Right-Wing Populism May Rise in the U.S.” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 27, 2022, https://www.wsj.com/articles/right-wing-populism-may-rise-in-the-u-s-giorgia-meloni-italy-europe-immigration-working-class-college-educated-11664277816
Spencer Bokat-Lindell, “Is Liberal Democracy Dying?” New York Times, Sept. 28, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/28/opinion/italy-meloni-democracy-authoritarianism.html
[N.B. – While writing this, I was flipping constantly to the Brazilian election results. While Lula is far from perfect, Jair Bolsonaro is an environment-destroying autocrat deeply in the Trump-Orban illiberal mold. Lula won the election by 5%, but did not command a majority, so will have to face Bolsonaro in a run-off on October 30. Much like polls in the U.S. in both 2016 and 2022, Brazilian pollsters underestimated the right-wing populist’s strength, predicting Lula would win by double digits. With Bolsonaro buoyed by this closer than expected result, October could be a tough month in Brazil with a desperate Bolsonaro pulling out all stops to cling to power. Keep an eye on Brazil.]