By Andrew Stuttaford
Monday, June 02, 2025
The use and abuse of the term “far right” has become a
cliché, but even so, some sections in this recent editorial in the Financial
Times (more and more a newspaper of the radicalized “center”-left) are
worth a look.
Consider this, for example:
Some argue making radical right
parties share the responsibilities of power can deflate their
anti-establishment appeal. It has worked to some degree in Nordic countries.
But before doing so, note a sentence that comes a little
later:
It is foolish to think that
voters’ concerns can be explained away rather than addressed. Concerns over
uncontrolled immigration are an obvious example.
Indeed they are. Those concerns were ignored for years
and were hugely intensified by Angela Merkel’s decision to fling open Germany’s
doors still wider in 2015. And how did the Financial Times react to that? Why, it made her its “person of the year”:
The cautious, “step-by-step”
chancellor who had led Germany for a decade was gone, replaced by a politician
with bold convictions.
“Bold convictions.”
It was a big gambit, and it is
far from clear whether it will pay off. If it does, however, it will cement her
reputation as one of Germany’s great chancellors. By keeping Europe’s doors
open for more than 1m mostly Muslim refugees, Ms Merkel will leave a legacy as
enduring as her mentor, former chancellor Helmut Kohl, who presided over German
reunification and the birth of the euro. For this reason, the Financial Times
has named Angela Merkel its 2015 Person of the Year.
But back to 2025. The FT writes that handing
“radical” parties a share of power in the Nordic region has worked “to some
degree,” a curiously lukewarm description. In fact, this strategy has worked
pretty well. Voters’ concerns over immigration at least, and in part, are now
being addressed — controls have been tightened to a degree unthinkable a decade
or so ago — but that might be something that the FT cannot bring itself
to salute.
The story varies throughout the Nordic region, sometimes
considerably, but in each of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, the populist
right has either been brought into government (or given a supportive role to a
government) in a process that also included shedding its more unsavory
elements. And, significantly, this has also been mirrored to varying degrees on
the Nordic center-left, most strikingly in Denmark, where the Social Democrats’
hard turn toward immigration restrictionism goes a long way to explaining their
return to government. In the 2022 elections, the party’s showing was the best
in two decades.
The Nordic countries, above all Sweden, still have to
work out how to deal with the legacy of their mass immigration binge. That will be extremely difficult
(state-enforced multiculturalism is not the answer), but substantially
slowing the migrant inflow into these countries is an important first step. And
no, there is no threat to the Nordic democracies from the “far right.”
Writing more broadly, the FT’s editorial writers
observe that “mainstream” conservatives (an adjective that may, on current
electoral trends, have to change in some countries) have not done well, aping
what they refer to as the “hard right” through “mimicry,” especially when it is
“mostly rhetorical.” That’s true, especially over immigration, as they note.
But back in 2015, the FT praised Merkel, the EU’s leading center-right
politician, for making a mockery of her earlier (hollow) attacks on
multiculturalism:
The chancellor once criticized
multi-culturalism. But today she praises migrants, not only for their economic
contribution but also their role in “enriching German cultural life”. Knowing
that a fifth of Germans are first- or second-generation immigrants, she is
pushing the nation to be more inclusive. Thomas Schmid, political editor of Die
Welt, says she seeks a “new, different, more colorful, ever less homogenous and
fairly rugged republic”.
The rise of the AfD is a complete mystery.
And those statistics are an argument for assimilation,
for less multiculturalism, not more.
The FT’s editorialists write that “with the
pandemic, high inflation and war, the past five years have been a bonanza for
populists in Europe,” a comment that passes over the fact that the rise of
populism was well underway before then. The FT maintains that these
factors “will dissipate” but that “anti-establishment anger is here to stay,
fueled by a narrative of elite betrayal.”
And why might that be? Other than immigration, there is
the ratchet of European integration, an imposition from above that the FT’s
editorialists choose not to mention, perhaps because this was something that
the paper has typically supported. This ratchet (“ever closer union”) was what
led to Brexit, perhaps the most dramatic example (so far) of the rise of the
“populism” the paper deplores. That ratchet was made more painful by
introduction of the euro, a catastrophic act of elite hubris, unwanted by quite
a few in the countries that adopted the single currency, most critically,
perhaps, in Germany (where it was the trigger for the formation of the AfD,
although the party’s principal focus soon changed). Naturally, the FT makes
no mention of the destructive and futile pursuit of net zero, a policy with
which it is broadly sympathetic, and which is already contributing to
“anti-establishment anger.” The more net zero bites, the more voters will bite
back.
But the FT appears to see such voters as
manipulated simpletons, riled up by rhetoric rather than reality:
Aided by social media, Europe’s
populists have become masters at polarisation, simplification and denunciation.
The reference to “social media” is, in all probability, a
call for more censorship. As for Europe’s populists becoming “masters at
polarization, simplification and denunciation,” has the FT heard the
language (and noticed the policies) that Brussels, its British imitators, and
many EU member-states use against the “far right”?
If this faux “center”-left (and those on the center-right
that have, self-destructively, gone along with them) wishes to reverse the
advance of the “far right,” it needs to walk away from the policies that would
have been considered extreme until very recently and are still considered by
many to be extreme today.
The FT’s editors:
Moderate parties need bolder
policymaking. . . . Plodding centrism will not do it.
“Bolder.”
Translation: Extremist “center”-leftism has never been
tried.
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