Furio Ferraresi - 17/05/2012

     In almost the whole of Europe the concomitance of the crisis, the austerity policies, the cuts to welfare and the unemployment rates are fuelling the wave of Right-wing populism, which has by now stably conquered the centre of the political stage and the governments of some countries. From the France of Marine Le Pen’s Front National to the Greece of the neo-Nazis of Golden Dawn, from Geert Wilders’ Low Countries to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and the Jobbik party, from the Great Romania of Bucharest to Ataka in Bulgaria, everywhere in the Old World the spectre of radical Right wing criticism against the reckless capitalism of neoliberal globalisation and the EU as the executor of its will. This critique, albeit with significant differences in tone depending on the national contexts in which it is expressed, shows some basic traits that allow for its interpretation as a unitary phenomenon.

     The first of these is the attack against the European elites and the traditional parties, which are set in opposition to the “people” as being the custodians of the authentic spirit of the nation. Of course, the “people,” to be deemed as one and homogeneous, must weaken the virus of diversity and plurality, that is exclude the migrants, the Roma and any other ethnic or religious minority capable of undermining its compactness, as much imagined as it is unrealistic. Right-wing populism, then, can only express itself with racist and xenophobic (and often Islamophobic) tones, contributing to building the most classical of all the “scapegoats:” the reserve army of foreign workers that steal work and scarce resources from the citizens, towards whom a sense of insecurity and fear fuelled by globalisation tend to grow.

     This common feeling, on a par with the “people” that claims its monopoly, is not a recent invention of the Right wing, but rather the point of condensation of neoliberal practices and fears at length cultivated by the same European liberal governments and inoculated by their policies on immigration, all too often willing to sacrifice people’s rights on the altar of security. The “people” of the Right wing populism are not then just made up of the majority of the losers of globalisation, but have become the “significant void” that expresses the feeling of common belonging and a nation described as being threatened by the internal as well as external enemies. The second common trait is the claim of the “true” democracy as opposed to the “false” democracy of the European technocratic elites. Even in this case, nothing new in respect to the allegation of the constitutive democratic deficit of the European project, put forward on several occasions both by the Right and the Left.

     But the semantic shift in the term democracy in the rhetoric of the populist Right consists in the fact that democracy is thought of as the identity of the people with themselves, as the immediacy of a people all too often neglected, which is called to restate its own political existence against those who claim to act on their behalf. It is then an anti-liberal democracy, the expression of the presumed totality of the people, enemy of the political mediations, the compromises, the class stratification, the procedures of representative democracy, but also of its every emptying or technical suspension. A democracy, then, whose people can also identify with a chief or a leader, but never with an irresponsible post-democratic technical apparatus, as the one proposed as a model by the European elites seems to be, all too often fearful of the free manifestation of popular wishes.

     In this case as well, the difference in respect to a Left-wing perspective is that there is no attempt to deal with the crisis of representative democracy with injections of deliberative and participative democracy; that is, there is no attempt to democratise democracy by valorising its vocation to open-mindedness and pluralism, but, on the contrary, there is an attempt to give it a total interpretation, self-enclosed and self-referential. The third common trait is the critique of the neoliberal economic model, which is counterpoised by economic protectionism and the defence of national welfare. From this point of view, it is significant that while many Left-wing parties have hitherto proven to be open to collaborate with the conservative parties in dealing with the crisis with recipes hinging on austerity, on cuts and taxes, the populist Right wing parties have instead increasingly radicalised their aversion to such solutions, challenging the radical Left’s monopoly of the social opposition to the Eurozone’s recessionary policies.

      This is the decisive bench test: the populist Right wing is not defeated with less democracy, but with more democracy; not with technicalities, but with policies; a policy that can recuperate its own essential function of mediation and representation of the complexity and variety of interests and world views, and that has the courage to imagine a future of growth and development for a political and federal Europe, learning lessons from the errors and the ghosts of the 1930s, when entire peoples were destroyed to save the economy.

Furio Ferraresi