Has the Far Right Won in Europe? (w/ David Adler & David Broder)
Added 2024-06-28 12:00:18 +0000 UTCWe're joined by two experts on European politics to explain the EU parliamentary election results: David Adler, general coordinator of the Progressive International, and David Broder, historian of Italy and Europe editor at Jacobin.
What do the results say about the strength of the far right in Europe? And why has Emmanuel Macron of France called snap parliamentary elections in response? Is Macron welcoming the far-right into power in France, or is there some other explanation for his gamble?
Further Reading:
David Broder, "Giorgia Meloni’s Europe," Dissent, Spring 2024.
Cole Stangler, "France Is on the Brink of Something Terrifying," NYTimes, Jun 13, 2024.
Comments
To add to this episode - this essay is a very useful reflection on the academic study of the far-right in the past 30 years. Mudde, Cas (ě024) From the Margins to the Mainstream: A Personal Reflection on Three Decades of Studying and Teaching Far-Right Politics - https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0dz5488c
Jonáš Syrovátka
2024-07-09 16:40:23 +0000 UTCAppreciated this discussion! Always love it when you do international episodes! If you do more international coverage Canada might be interesting as a future topic post-US election... picking up on a point Matt raised about this next while being consequential electorally. In the next 18 months we will have 4 provincial elections, 2 territorial elections, and the federal election. The current predictions / polling is for Trudeau and the Liberal party (so-called "ruling party of Canada") to get wiped out by a Trump-aligned Conservative party nationally and those national shifts are having knock-on effects and re-alignments provincially.
Dee
2024-07-04 02:21:13 +0000 UTCThere was something of a "Nordic exception" in the recent EU parliamentary elections. The parties to the left of social democracy did well, while the parties of the far right did much worse than their counterparts in the rest of Europe. Left-wing parties finished ahead of the social democrats in both Finland and Denmark (Denmark's Green Left finished first, Finland's Left Alliance jumped up into second place while the far-right True Finns' vote share was halved). In Sweden, the Left Party had the biggest jump in vote share and came close to the far-right Sweden Democrats, who took a meaningful hit. Pretty much the entire political spectrum in the Nordics, including the radical left, is in favor of support for Ukraine, and the Swedes and Finns joined NATO last year after many years of neutrality (in the latter case, most Left Alliance MPs even voted in favor of NATO membership). But this doesn't seem to have fueled the right or the kind of civilizational politics discussed in the episode in this part of Europe, and it doesn't seem to have harmed the left. Why is that? Hard to get a sense of this from the English language coverage, which is unfortunately rather limited.
Chris Maisano
2024-07-02 18:40:26 +0000 UTCReally enjoyed this episode, hope you guys continue to do more internationally focused episodes!
Brendan Kane
2024-07-02 14:02:19 +0000 UTCOut of respect for Matt’s expanding Auden collection (have you got the libretti?): Yesterday, the wall/dam between the far/hard right and the putative centre. Today, the consensus that the far/hard right is both a threat and that it has already been absorbed by mainstream centre-right politics. Tomorrow, the KYE episode which boldly and psychoanalytically goes into what is most definitely disingenuous, rotten, and terrifying but also seemingly mobilizing in Pim Fortuyn’s, Alice Weidel’s, and, at some level of analysis, Jorg Haider’s opposition to masculinist homophobia within (orientalist presentations of) Islam?
Aaron Deveson
2024-07-01 19:06:12 +0000 UTCThere really is a "scaremongering" paradox: If you rally people to take action against a threat and as a result reduce the damage the threat does, then people start to complain that the threat wasn't that bad and people were overreacting.
Stephen Schiavone
2024-06-30 16:00:08 +0000 UTCHi, this was a great conversation. There is one point on which, as an Italian, I think David Broder might be underestimating Meloni a bit: it's true that she has mostly followed Berlusconi's footsteps so far, but this doesn't mean her project is not subversive. Berlusconi's governments were not perceived as being business as usual back then, and it gradually got normalized. I think it's a matter of emphasis more than substance, but it's also important to state that Meloni's government IS repressing dissent and trying to move the balance of power towards the executive and away from potential counterweights, as well as attacking abortion, universities, all the usual extreme right targets. So yeah, maybe the objection I have is that the sky didn't fall in Italy in 2022 because it had already fallen in 2001, or even in 1994
Fede
2024-06-29 09:06:50 +0000 UTCI’m sorry for you that you aren’t like me upset rather with the other guy for talking so much like a Brit.
Paul Bowman
2024-06-29 01:41:14 +0000 UTCThis David Adler’s voice is infuriating. Much like Daniel Bessner, why do all foreign policy experts sound like they work at the Genius Bar?
Psych-O-Sonic 99
2024-06-28 18:39:23 +0000 UTCYes the shared commitment to fighting back “the jungle” from the European “garden” is in a lot of ways a concession that the priorities of the far right are also at the center of the respectable mainstream parties.
Chad Stanton
2024-06-28 18:38:40 +0000 UTCExcellent episode. Honestly, at his point I’m more worried about the “centrist consensus” in Europe than I am of anything else. German remilitarization, the continuation of brutally cruel border policies, the cudgeling of migrants and leftist groups that organize among them, all this sets Europe for a stark and bitter evolution. When push comes to shove, I fear that the center right is more comfortable allying and co-opting the far right than they are with accepting (let alone working with) any viable leftist movement. We’re gonna be in for a bad few decades- and global climate change (as well as its destabilizing secondary political effects in the global south) will only make things worse.
Isaac Suárez
2024-06-28 17:50:47 +0000 UTC
