Voter insecurities feed rise of rightwing, populist politicians

PHOTO: AP

French far-right National Front Party leader, Marine Le Pen (left) greets National Front regional leader for southeastern France, Marion Marechal-Le Pen in Paris.

Mass shootings by Islamist militants. Migrants crashing borders. International competition punishing workers but enriching elites.

Across the Western world, a new breed of right-leaning populists from Donald J. Trump in the Republican presidential primary to Marine Le Pen in France and Viktor Orban in Hungary are surging in popularity by capitalising on a climate of insecurity unrivalled since the period after the First World War.

Many of them- led this week by Mr. Trump - have made headlines in recent months by railing against Muslim immigrants, calling them a threat to public safety and cultural identity. Left-leaning critics have compared their nativist and nationalist rhetoric to the fascists of the early 20th century because some riding the populist wave — like the Freedom Party in Austria or Golden Dawn in Greece - have neo-Nazi roots.

Unlike earlier right wing movements, though, these populists disavow the overt racism, militaristic rhetoric and associations with fascism that previously scared away many mainstream voters.

Before the recent terrorist attacks or the European migrant crisis cast a spotlight on Muslim immigration, the populists had built support primarily as trade protectionists or economic nationalists appealing to hard-pressed working-class voters who felt disaffected from their country’s established parties and political elites. And, for the first time in nearly a century, established parties across Europe and the U.S. are struggling to fend off the populist insurgents as their competition pulls the mainstream further to the right.

“What you are seeing here is quite a radical shift,” said Roger Eatwell, a political scientist at the University of Bath who studies right-wing parties.

Ms. Le Pen is the best-known figure from more than a dozen right-leaning populist parties across Europe that have scored big gains during the last two years. This week, her National Front party won the largest share of the vote in the first round of regional elections in France, with 30 per cent, making her a contender for the presidency in 2017. She campaigns against what she calls the “Islamisation of France” and has compared Muslims praying in French streets to the “Nazi occupation”.

But Ms. Le Pen fuses her cultural chauvinism with appeals to the economic anxieties of working or lower-middle class voters who — like their counterparts across Europe — have suffered from high unemployment, stagnant wages and growing income inequality, especially since the financial crisis of 2008.

“They are pulling out all the stops for the migrants, the illegals, but who is looking out for our retirees?” Ms. Le Pen asked in a recent campaign appearance. “They are stealing from the poor to give to foreigners who did not even ask our permission to come here.”

Mr. Trump on Monday evoked comparisons to Ms. Le Pen and her European counterparts with his call to close American borders to all Muslims “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on”.

Ms. Le Pen said that was too much for her, perhaps in part because she feared jeopardising the progress she had made in shedding her party’s previous image as racist and anti-Semitic. “Seriously, have you ever heard me say something like that?” she asked on Thursday when questioned about Mr. Trump’s comments during a television interview.

Others in Europe’s right-leaning populist parties, though, are applauding Mr. Trump for breaking with what they call the multiculturalist orthodoxy of dominant political elites.

“He is a phenomenon,” said Gawain Towler, a spokesman for the U.K. Independence Party, a right-leaning populist party. — New York Times News Service