18 March 2017

The Economist: What Geert Wilders poor showing means for Marine Le Pen

[...] Mr Wilders’s bad showing is welcome. The less he can impose his version of xenophobia and Euroscepticism on the Netherlands the better. Unfortunately, however, it is too soon to celebrate the roll-back of populism.

The very idea of a populist “domino theory” is misleading. The term derives from the war in Vietnam, where it was used to justify American intervention to stop the spread of communism. In a military context it made sense. North Vietnam’s conquest of Saigon let it move on to Cambodia. But in democratic elections, nothing similar happens. When Britain voted to leave the European Union, the UK Independence Party did not suddenly take control of the economy and establish coastal bases from which to launch raids on Scheveningen.

Even if Mr Wilders had prevailed this week, he would not have won power—in the Netherlands governments are formed from coalitions, and virtually all the other parties had vowed not to work with him. The boost his triumph would have given Ms Le Pen, who the polls suggest is unlikely to become president, would have been insignificant next to the ebb and flow of the campaign within France. So, too, his defeat is a setback but hardly decisive.

Political movements sometimes leap in inspirational waves from one country to another, but local circumstances make all the difference. Mr Trump’s win could not have happened without the peculiarities of America’s electoral college. By the same token, the fact that Mr Wilders did not win does not translate on to Ms Le Pen. The Dutch political system is open and diffuse, with over a dozen parties in parliament and low barriers for new ones to make it in. The French system is more rigid. Because it has shut Ms Le Pen’s National Front (FN) out of nearly all levels of government for years, despite rising popular support, the prospect of a sudden breakthrough is greater. France’s presidential run-off will pit two candidates head to head. One of them will almost certainly be Ms Le Pen.

Another reason to think that this may not be the high-water mark for populism is that Mr Wilders has shown how to drag politics in your own direction even without winning power. Mr Rutte has held him off in part by adopting some of his language. In the Netherlands, traditionally a tolerant country, it is now common to speak of Islam as a threat; the discussion of asylum-seekers focuses entirely on how to keep them out, and the idea of leaving the EU is now taken seriously. Mr Wilders has also put forward legitimate arguments about the welfare of working-class Dutch left behind by globalisation. If a new government dominated by the centre-right Liberals and the liberal D66 party ignores these issues, it will find its triumph over populism short-lived.

Here’s to Ponypark Slagharen

All of these anxieties, over Islam, refugees, the EU and globalisation, are as pressing for European voters today as they were yesterday. As it turned out, they did not lead to a win for Mr Wilders in the Netherlands, but they might yet for Ms Le Pen in France. The international rise of populism is not so much a row of dominoes, as a wave bearing down on a line of sand castles. Some will fall and others stand. Celebrate Mr Wilders’s disappointment, but the wave rolls on.

Full article on The Economist (subscription required)

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