Vol 3 – Issue 4 by Catalyst

Author:Catalyst
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-08-25T20:36:41+00:00

Rifts on the Right

Like the previous two populisms, right-wing populism both benefits and suffers from the structural evolutions outlined above. But they also display important programmatic and organizational limits. First, they are not anti-systemic at all, and might thus rapidly lose their aura of radical outsiders. Their main policy issues — anti-immigration, welfare chauvinism, anti-EU, and security — require little but cosmetic fixes to European debt ceilings and occasional cultural posturing on “Western values.” When it comes to migration, Angela Merkel and Matteo Salvini, or Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, have little to disagree on except how to distribute its financial load. Even the alleged Euroscepticism of those parties is far less radical than it might seem. As soon as they enter into positions of power (like Salvini) or move closer to it (like Le Pen), they downplay their opposition to EU institutions in order to play up their acceptability. Left populists wanted much more than that. Podemos’s and Syriza’s plans implied a far-reaching overhaul of the Eurozone, a departure from austerity programs, and an ambitious expansion of social provision. To some, this required the perfectly timed rise of several left-populist movements in a domino-like act of coordination. Right-wing populists, by contrast, do not require cooperation in a transnational setting. This is not simply due to the notoriously paradoxical and difficult coordination at the EU level for anti-EU parties; it mostly stems from the modest nature of their political program, which can be implemented without disrupting existing institutional settings. While this incontestably proves a strength in the short term — compared to left populism, it is easier to keep promises — it can become a weakness in the long run.

The far right’s second limit is organizational. Most of all, its tactics remain highly dependent on volatility and stick to digital outreach, which, in turn, means its voting clientele is bound to remain ephemeral. In contrast to historical fascism, for example, right populists do not build right-wing unions or cooperatives, let alone paramilitary formations. Countries with a well-organized civil society (Belgium’s Wallonia, for instance, where the unionization rate is around 55 percent), the far right has underperformed. Where left civil society is moribund, however (French workers have a unionization rate of 7 percent, despite their strategic location in the economy), the far right finds its easier to penetrate industrial constituencies, but often without nesting themselves in it. Even in the case of the gilets jaunes, far-right efforts to capture the movement failed, driven mainly by its refusal of representation. The left-populist takeaway is that a twofold effort of cultivating existing civil society institutions and carefully politicizing new social movements (without engaging in coarse incorporation) offers the best strategy to deprive the far right from developing deeper roots.

Overall, however, the populist left faces two unsatisfying options against a growing radical right: recuperation and opposition. In the first, leftists openly embrace right-wing rhetoric and strategy, especially its nationalist leanings. The potential benefits of this would be to reclaim lost “national” working-class voters instead of becoming the front of minorities and professionals.

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