Keep calm in the face of European populism

28/12/2014

Europe faces a busy electoral calendar in 2015. Parliamentary elections are scheduled in Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Poland, Portugal, Spain and the UK — and a snap election is possible in Greece. In most, it is impossible to predict the winner. In Britain, it is hard to predict the consequences for its EU membership.

Europe owes its uncertain political outlook partly to rightwing and leftwing populist forces whose growth predates, but has been assisted by, the post-2008 financial turmoil. These movements have gained strength at the expense of a European political establishment depicted by its opponents, and often seen by the general public, as tired, ineffectual and remote.

Some unconventional parties despise democracy, espouse explicit racism and flirt with violence. But these labels do not accurately describe insurgent rightwing movements such as the UK Independence party and the Sweden Democrats, let alone leftist parties such as Greece’s Syriza and Podemos in Spain. Where these forces have made gains — for example, in the European Parliament elections in 2014 — they have done so by playing within the rules of representative democracy.

Mainstream parties of the centre-right, liberal centre and centre-left will not therefore regain the initiative by portraying the populists as an anti-democratic, lunatic fringe. Instead parties such as the Conservatives in Britain or Spain’s Socialists and Sweden’s Social Democrats, must keep a cool head. They must persuade voters that core elements of the populists’ platforms are incoherent and unrealistic. If implemented, they would harm the economies, social fabric and international standing of their nations.

For whether it wears leftist or rightist clothes, European populism offers simplistic, even irrational solutions to complicated problems. To suggest, as Ukip and the Sweden Democrats do, that a crackdown on immigration will cure their nations’ social ills is to offer a false diagnosis of the problem and so false hope of a cure. The same goes for the proposals of Syriza and Podemos to make vast increases in public spending and the minimum wage, as if such measures can substitute for the harder choices necessary to address the deep-seated problems of Greece and Spain.

In a few countries, such as Finland, there would be no serious cause for alarm if a populist party were to enter a coalition government as a junior partner. In most countries, however, populist parties relish their outsider status and prefer slogan-making to the compromises essential to democratic government.

Naturally, the mainstream parties have no automatic claim on power. But they will have little hope of regaining public trust unless they renounce the discredited game of making patently undeliverable promises in order to win office. If it is too much to expect them to come fully clean about their past occasional incompetence, they can at least say humbly that they will try their best next time to meet higher standards. Above all, mainstream politicians must resist the temptation — regrettably, on recent display among centre-right parties in France, Italy and the UK — to borrow the strident, irresponsible rhetoric of the populists on topics such as immigration and EU or euro area membership.

Such tactics will attract few votes from hardcore populist supporters and will strike the mass of voters who occupy the centre of the political spectrum as shallow and cynical. And the centre ground, as David Cameron, the UK prime minister, correctly told the Conservative party conference in 2006, is where political success is built.

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