This article originally appeared in our Elevenses newsletter.
Europe is under siege by the menace of the far right, the New York Times has warned this weekend, with more extreme politics taking over the ground once occupied by old conservative parties. Citing figures such as Jordan Bardella in France, Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, the American newspaper laid out irrefutable proof the pendulum has swung dangerously away from the centre ground in some of the biggest democratic nations on the continent, the repercussions of which could be huge.
It is a caution that Europeans can seldom afford to ignore, given the way outbreaks of Fascism have ended in the past. Yet warnings of the disasters that engulfed 20th-century Europe tend not to resonate with 21st-century supporters of xenophobic nationalist movements that have none of the militarism of fascism, nor the personality cults of its dictatorial leaders but are fed by hatred of “the other” and jingoistic hymns to national glory. “You can no longer rely on saying, ‘This is evil, because look what happened in the fascist past,” Nathalie Tocci, a leading Italian political scientist said. “You have to have an argument for why those ideas are bad today.”
One such argument can be found closer to home, where after almost five years a Conservative government elected on populist, nationalist principles is crumbling at the seams. This week we learned that the controversial Rwanda policy – a measure taken straight from the far-right playbook – is going to be disapplied in Northern Ireland because it contravenes the Windsor Framework brought in under the Brexit process. Put another way, they have cut their nose off to spite their face in a dose of galactic-level irony that seems to have become a common feature in British politics these days. This is, after all, the party that oversaw record levels of net migration to the UK despite using almost all their policy platforms to talk tough on bringing numbers down. If it didn’t so vehemently go against everything I stand for, I would describe it as a betrayal of the principles they were elected upon.
And they can hardly claim to have looked after their own, either. High levels of unemployment, soaring food bank use, a crumbling health service. The Conservatives have failed on almost all measures of domestic success, and cruelly, it has often been to the detriment of the very people who stepped out of the mould and marked an X against their name in 2019. But if there is a silver lining in all of this, it has shown that a party elected on catchy far-right promises have failed to deliver on any of them. In spite of a whopping great majority, affable political figures and catch three-word slogans, they will emerge on the back of an all-but-certain electoral loss having achieved very little of whatever it was that convinced people to vote for them in 2019.
It shows that, against the backdrop of a resurgent right wing elsewhere on the continent, Britain’s loss on this front could be Europe’s gain.
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