Spain is the only country in the European Union with a left-wing Government and, moreover, it will be very difficult for it to renew its mandate in the elections called at the end of July. There are centre-left coalitions in Germany, Portugal, Denmark, Estonia, Slovenia, Luxembourg and Malta. The rest are conservative governments, some led or endorsed by parties inherited from fascism.
Ultra-conservative leaders are proliferating in all countries, who are the battering rams of harder and more authoritarian societies, more intransigent and less supportive, more unequal in the economic and social spheres. Some of these leaders have majority popular support, such as Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in Italy. Others have enough support to decide who governs.
17% of Europeans voted for the far right in the last elections in their country, according to a survey by the European Center for Foreign Relations. They are legitimate votes, but the result of a political revolution that erodes democracy and the welfare state, while inflicting chronic anxiety on us.
The radicalization of conservatism is not new. He dominated the interwar period in Germany. Indoctrination and propaganda techniques, neither. The power that radio and cinema had a century ago is comparable to what television and social media have today.
That power manipulates the masses is as old as human civilization itself. Authoritarianism feeds on the collective anxiety that it itself causes. It is important that the individual feels anxiety, worry and irritation. It is necessary to scandalize him. Nothing better than scandal, even if fictitious, to exacerbate fear and dominate public debate. It is enough to defend extremist positions on the issues that most divide public opinion. And do it from the side of good and us, the victims of multiculturalism and progressivism. The good legitimizes any action because the moral burden is always on the part of the victim. This is how cultural wars are decreed, how violence is justified, in self-defense, whether of the nation or of the individual.
None of this is new either. It was described very precisely by Gustave Le Bron in Psicología de las masas, a work from 1895.
Why now returns this past that seemed to be overcome? Because inequality ignites revolutions, because wealth gives meaning to life and poverty takes it away.
The financial crisis of 2008 accentuated inequality and the loss of purchasing power in a middle class heavily punished by the industrial transformation demanded by globalization. Between 2015 and 2016, these outraged people supported Brexit in Great Britain, made Trump the president of the USA and opposed the massive arrival of immigrants and refugees in Europe. They arrived at each of these positions more from emotion than from reason, spurred on by fiction.
The radical leader constructs a fake problem, such as the Great Replacement or that Europe is stealing from us, and offers a fake solution: leaving the EU will save us.
Perception is everything, and misperception is so entrenched in political debate that it seems true.
Inequality and the manipulation of reality, however, do not explain everything. There are more reasons. There is the idea that everyone is the master of their own destiny, that the responsibility to prosper is theirs, even if they were born at the bottom of the social pyramid. Carl Schmitt, chief philosopher of many post-fascists, said that equality is desirable, but only among those who are born equal. He saw no more effective way to guarantee order than social hierarchies.
Distributing wealth and opportunities has been the great achievement of liberal democracies, of the social market economy that created the welfare state and the European Union.
Social Darwinism, however, is back. We saw it during the pandemic, when, in the name of a misunderstood freedom, it was chosen to keep everything open even if it was at the cost of the lives of the weakest, the elderly and the sick. It was a lesser evil necessary to keep the economy going.
The sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer talks about the emergence of a "brutal bourgeoisie", without scruples or remorse, the basis of radicalized conservatism.
The old conservative parties let themselves be seduced by the radical leaders, by their audacity and bad education, the aggression that gives them a rebellious image. They buy into his strategy of permanent confrontation. They leave the center where consensus is possible.
Social democracy and the liberal and centrist parties appeal to morality, to decency, to the values that uphold European architecture. They think that fallacies fall by themselves, but they are wrong. Appeals to reason and management crash against the nihilistic wall of radicalized conservatism.
The only way to defeat the radical right again is to restore the dignity of citizens, offer them security and good jobs. This requires deglobalization and the investment of a lot of public money, but it is the only path towards equality and integration.
The European Union is a good place to achieve this. Perhaps, the best in the world. But time is lacking, and time is what the progressive governments that are still standing do not have.
