Europe has gotten tired of being anguished about Donald Trump and has now moved on to being anguished about itself. The question being asked by all the Big Think editorials and news magazine programs runs: “Is Europe going populist too?” It’s especially unavoidable this weekend because of the coincidence of three events:
French president François Hollande, facing the prospect of a humiliating defeat, announced on Thursday that he would not contest next year’s presidential elections, in which, as everyone knew, he would have run a poor third to the populist Right’s Marine Le Pen and the conservative Right’s new favorite, former prime minister François Fillon.
On Sunday there will be a referendum in Italy on constitutional reform that, if rejected, will lead to the resignation of the prime minister and new elections in which an anti-euro party, Beppe Grillo’s Five Star movement, would at least start out as the favorite.
Also on Sunday there will be a rerun of the Austrian presidential election, which – because the first, narrow victory of the establishment candidate was overturned owing to irregularities – could swing a victory for the candidate of the populist “far right” Freedom party.
As if this trifecta were not excitement enough, almost every news broadcast reminds us that next year we will have – in addition to the French presidential elections — a Dutch election in which the populist party of Geert Wilders (who is currently on trial for demanding fewer Moroccan immigrants in Holland) may end up as the largest single group in parliament, and a German election in which Angela Merkel will seek a fourth mandate in a contest in which, for the first time, a populist anti-migrant party, the AFD, may win a serious number of votes and seats and deprive the conservative Christian Democrats of office.
Something big is clearly going on. It fills the imaginations of the more excitable members of mainstream parties of Left and Right with dramatic fantasies of fighting neo-fascism alongside Paul Henreid and Ingrid Berman. Worse, it suggests that Donald Trump may inspire a new populist politics in Europe that will put them out of a job.