The extreme right is climbing positions throughout Europe. In Hungary and Poland, he has been in power for years. In Italy, he conquered it last year. In Finland, he has just entered the government. In other Scandinavian countries, he gets more votes every day and determines the formation of governments. In France, he heads the opposition. In Germany, it has just won local elections in the Sonneberg district of Thuringia, and the latest nationwide polls put it in second place behind the CDU, tied with the Social Democratic Party.
Naturally, this causes all kinds of alarm bells to go off, not only in Berlin, but also in Brussels and in the main European capitals. Until now, the possibility of him coming to power in Paris or Berlin was unthinkable. Today, it is a hypothesis with which to count. The European Union can resist a far-right government in Hungary, and even in Italy, but can it resist it in France or Germany? It is a question that, unfortunately, is becoming more pertinent every day.
I wonder if this rise of ultra populism is not the result of a change of cycle in European politics –comparable to the social democratic wave of the 1960s and 1970s, straddling the construction of the welfare state– and if it is not related to an apparently remote process, the long stage of progress that, in the last 30 years, has freed more than a fifth of humanity from misery.
Let me explain: in 1990, more than a third of the world's population lived in conditions of extreme poverty, with less than two dollars a day per capita. Now, the people who live in these conditions are less than 10%. This will surely be the most decisive change the world will have experienced during our time. In a couple of generations, more than a billion people, mostly from Asia and Latin America, have been lifted out of poverty. They were people who lived outside the economic circuits, in conditions of pure subsistence, often without running water or electricity. Now they have a fridge, mobile phones, motorbikes, cars. And, above all, they have a job and a salary and they take their sons – and their daughters, fortunately – to school.
All these people compete with European workers, because many companies can easily move their production from one continent to another. In addition, they charge less and have no social rights. I do not think it is unreasonable to think that this process has some kind of relationship with the wave of job insecurity that is sweeping through Europe and the United States.
For decades, the European middle classes and workers have overwhelmingly supported the social democratic parties. Today, they are disenchanted that these parties no longer guarantee the preservation of the welfare state and must accept working conditions that, without being equal to those of emerging countries, are getting worse. The result is that they go to the extreme right. This creates a great paradox: the wealthy classes, the more educated people, those who have benefited from globalization, often vote in favor of the social democratic parties. Instead, workers and people with a more basic education vote for right-wing populism. This is what happened in the United States with Donald Trump and what, I fear, may be happening in Europe.
I don't want to be simplistic. I know that all these processes are more complicated than it seems. Globalization has also generated much progress in Europe and the United States. In addition, the rise of the extreme right is not only due to economic causes. Perhaps they are not even the most important. It is also related to the speed of technological changes, which drive a return to traditional values due to the insecurity they generate among those who cannot keep up, and with advances in the field of equal rights, especially the rise of women and the approval of homosexual marriage. It is, in part, the work of the recoil that usually follows the shot, a background reaction that follows the advances on the surface, which in recent years have been formidable. It would be naive to ignore the resistance that still exists. The assimilation of the role of women and the new family models requires time. Laws are easier to change than mentalities.
Nor do I want the reader to doubt that the improvement in the standard of living in Asia and Latin America seems enormously positive to me. It is an unstoppable process, fortunately. Hopefully it will soon spread to all of Africa. But it breeds losers. Europe should react with better education and more innovation, to gain competitiveness. But this requires effort. Solution: simplicity. The losers play the protagonist of the lamppost joke. Instead of looking for the keys where they have lost them, they look for them where there is light and, spurred on by parties that have no scruples in encouraging xenophobia to gain power, they blame immigrants for their poverty and turn against values that associated with globalization, such as feminism, the rights of LGTBI people or the fight against climate change.
The center of gravity of the world has changed. The improvement of living conditions in emerging countries will continue. Now it no longer depends so much on commercial access to the United States and Europe, because these same emerging countries have created vast markets. This can translate into more job insecurity in Europe and generate more rejection of immigration, more denial, more machismo and more homophobia.
I don't want to be a doomsayer, but I suspect that we have an extreme right for a good season.
