The extreme right is scaling positions throughout Europe. In Hungary and Poland, he has been in power for years. He arrived in Italy last year. In Finland, he has just entered the Government. In the other Scandinavian countries, it gets more votes every day and conditions the formation of governments. In France, he heads the opposition. In Germany, she just won local elections in the Sonneberg district of Thuringia, and the latest national polls put her in second place behind the CDU, tied with the Social Democratic Party.
Naturally, this is causing all kinds of alarms to go off, not only in Berlin, but also in Brussels and the main European capitals. Until now, the possibility of him coming to power in Paris or Berlin was unthinkable. Today, it is a hypothesis to be reckoned with. The European Union can withstand a far-right government in Hungary, and even in Italy, but can it withstand it in France or Germany? It's a question that, unfortunately, is becoming more relevant every day.
I wonder if this rise of ultra populism is not the result of a cycle change 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 connected with an apparently remote process, the long stage of progress which, in the last thirty years, has freed more than one-fifth of mankind 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%. Surely this will be the most decisive change that the world will have experienced during our time. In a couple of generations, more than a billion people, mainly 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 refrigerators, cell phones, motorcycles, cars. And, above all, they have a job and a salary and take their sons – and daughters, fortunately – to school.
All these people compete with European workers, because many companies can move production from one continent to another with ease. In addition, they are paid 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 Europe and the USA.
For decades, European middle classes and workers have given majority support to social democratic parties. Today, they see with dismay that these parties no longer guarantee them the preservation of the welfare state and they have to accept working conditions that, while not equal to those in emerging countries, are getting worse and worse. The result is that they move to the extreme right. This creates a great paradox: the wealthy classes, the people with the most education, those who have benefited from globalization, often vote in favor of social democratic parties. Instead, workers and people with a more basic education vote for right-wing populism. It 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 they seem. Globalization has also generated much progress in Europe and the US. In addition, the rise of the extreme right does not only respond to economic causes. Maybe they're not even the most important. It is also related to the speed of technological changes, which drive the return to traditional values due to the insecurity they generate among those who cannot keep up, and to the advances in the field of equal rights, especially the rise of woman and the approval of homosexual marriage. It is partly the work of the recoil of the stock that usually follows the shot, a background reaction that follows the advances in the surface, which in recent years have been formidable. It would be naive to ignore the resistances that still exist. The assimilation of the role of women and the new family models requires time. Laws are easier to change than mindsets.
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 act like 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 qualms about encouraging xenophobia to win power shares, they blame their straits on immigrants and turn around against values associated with globalization, such as feminism, the rights of LGBTI people or the fight against climate change.
The world's center of gravity has shifted. 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 denialism, more sexism and more homophobia.
I don't want to call the weather bad, but I suspect that we have the extreme right for a good season.
