The Rise of the Extreme Right in Europe
Sweden has revealed the future direction of Europe, and not for the first time. For decades, Sweden led the way in defining the mixed model of free trade and social solidarity that became the European ideal. Not anymore. In the election this month Swedish voters joined their less successful EU neighbors in turning their backs on traditional politics, in which the pendulum swung between parties advocating more free trade and parties on the center left advocating more solidarity—but no further. Now even the solid Swedes have ushered in to Parliament a block of single-issue politicians obsessed with the perceived loss of national identity and angry about immigrants and other outsiders who supposedly threaten their Swedishness....
Without a common foe and without agreement that the Atlantic alliance is an overwhelming priority, politics in Europe has lost its moorings. The politics of Gemeinschaft (community) is replacing the politics of Gesellschaft (society). New communities of true believers are forming all over Europe. Those who trace their national woes to immigrants—or nuclear power, or the EU, or Muslims, or Jews, or market economics, or the United States—are uniting in new political communities, all of them harmful to society. To govern a society requires compromise and a choice of priorities. The guiding impulse of the new identity politics in Europe is to reject, to cry “No!”...
The decay of the centrist ruling parties is being hastened by European electoral systems based on the 19th-century philosophy of proportional representation, which allows even small parties to gain a share of the seats in Parliament. This is now preventing any coherent leadership from emerging in Europe. Each movement or group can create its own party to maintain its electoral purity. Recent elections fought under variations of proportional representation have seen the rise of nationalist and anti-immigrant parties into national parliaments. Some parties, like Jobbik, which also calls itself “The Movement for a Better Hungary,” are anti-Semitic. The nationalist right in East Europe seeks to downplay the Holocaust by comparing the crimes of European communism with the industrialized extermination of Jews in Nazi death camps....
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Without a common foe and without agreement that the Atlantic alliance is an overwhelming priority, politics in Europe has lost its moorings. The politics of Gemeinschaft (community) is replacing the politics of Gesellschaft (society). New communities of true believers are forming all over Europe. Those who trace their national woes to immigrants—or nuclear power, or the EU, or Muslims, or Jews, or market economics, or the United States—are uniting in new political communities, all of them harmful to society. To govern a society requires compromise and a choice of priorities. The guiding impulse of the new identity politics in Europe is to reject, to cry “No!”...
The decay of the centrist ruling parties is being hastened by European electoral systems based on the 19th-century philosophy of proportional representation, which allows even small parties to gain a share of the seats in Parliament. This is now preventing any coherent leadership from emerging in Europe. Each movement or group can create its own party to maintain its electoral purity. Recent elections fought under variations of proportional representation have seen the rise of nationalist and anti-immigrant parties into national parliaments. Some parties, like Jobbik, which also calls itself “The Movement for a Better Hungary,” are anti-Semitic. The nationalist right in East Europe seeks to downplay the Holocaust by comparing the crimes of European communism with the industrialized extermination of Jews in Nazi death camps....