The devastation wrought by World War II gave way to a bold quest for European federalism, Continent-wide socioeconomic security, and military and diplomatic peace among nation-states. The architects working to build a “United States of Europe” found a home for their ambitious political vision in efforts toward greater economic cooperation. The European Union began as the European Coal and Steel Community, in which participating member nations pooled coal and steel production in hopes that closer economic ties would make war between European powers less likely. For many fans of the European project, the creation of a single currency marked one of the greatest steps toward “ever-closer union.”
While technocrats worked to build a European polity, supranational citizenship elicited only weak enthusiasm from voters. Dampening celebrations of the Union’s birth, national referenda on the 1992 Maastricht Treaty establishing the European Union drew low voter turnout, narrow margins of victory, and the recognition of member state exemptions.
The Eurozone financial crisis, which began in 2009, was the ultimate test of public faith. As member states struggled with sovereign debt, negotiated bailout packages, and implemented austerity measures, voters throughout Europe blamed the regulatory framework designed by bureaucratic elites for weakened social protections and slow economic recovery. In the wake of the crisis, formerly marginal populist parties began to enjoy unprecedented electoral success, and new parties entered the scene with fervent support.
In Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway, parts of the electorate embraced welfare tribalism, defending ethnic natives as the exclusive beneficiaries of Nordic social democracy and castigating Muslims, immigrants, and asylum seekers as drains on the public fisc. In 2017, Austrian voters gave the anti-immigrant Freedom Party 26 percent of the vote, up from 21 percent in 2013. The center-right People’s Party won by adopting much of the FP’s agenda.
Political parties led by charismatic leaders, including self-proclaimed Marxists, have made significant gains in southern European countries that have experienced some of the most suffocating austerity measures. In Greece, Syriza’s Alexis Tsipras is now the prime minister. In Spain, Pablo Iglesias’s Podemos gained sixty-nine seats in the Spanish parliament in a single election. Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement in Italy, founded in 2009, received more than 25 percent of the vote in 2013, securing more than a hundred seats in the Chamber of Deputies. Although far-left politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon did not make it past the first round of the 2017 French presidential election, he enjoyed three times the support of the Socialist Party’s candidate.
Despite its long history of Euroskepticism, the United Kingdom stunned the world with its vote in the summer of 2016 to leave the European Union. Even in Germany—a country where many believed historical guilt would create an eternal aversion to populism—the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany received nearly 13 percent of the popular vote in the 2017 general election and entered the Bundestag.
Hungary, Poland, and France offer the three leading cases of contemporary European populism. Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s pledge to turn Hungary into an “illiberal democracy,” the efforts of the Law and Justice Party’s Kaczynski twins to reject Poland’s postcommunist transition and create a “Fourth Republic,” and the National Front’s promise to wrest control from an oligarchic and globalist elite demonstrate what contemporary populist politics looks like. Hungary and Poland show what can happen when populists gain control.
While every country’s populism demands a careful assessment of its unique causes and consequences, each of these cases can be understood as part of a collective European story. Pope Francis’s recent speech on the European Union’s sixtieth birthday reflected the growing divide between the political orientation of European elites and common populist refrains. Speaking to the heads of state and government leaders of the bloc, Francis declared: “Politics needs [the] kind of leadership which avoids appealing to emotions.”1 But Mabel Berezin, an expert on the European far right, notes that in legitimizing fear, right-wing politicians prove they “are often more adept than their liberal counterparts at valorizing emotion and responding viscerally to events.”2 Populists, in other words, provide a collective political voice for feelings of vulnerability. As Berezin observes, in the wake of terrorist attacks it is not hard to see why the common line urging voters not to give in to a fear that “lets the terrorists win” often loses out to a populist message that validates fear and energizes the quest for strong, protective leadership.
In his speech, Francis also called for “a spirit of solidarity” to “[devise] policies that can make the union as a whole develop harmoniously.” But European solidarity holds little appeal for voters who see the bloc as a threat to their economic well-being and sense of cultural belonging. Instead, the calls for solidarity uttered by populists today are anti-European; one slogan on Marine Le Pen’s website reads, “Solidarity with the victims of fiscal injustice and eurosterity!” Francis insisted that “Europe finds new hope when she refuses to yield to fear or close herself off in false forms of security.” But for many voters, the European project itself represents a failed security strategy. In this environment, fearful voters are drawn to older forms of national self-protection.3
The European project now confronts populists who challenge liberal democracy’s capacity to satisfy rank-and-file citizens. While proponents of Europeanization make idealistic appeals to Continent-wide political and economic solidarity, populists offer an unabashed nationalism that guarantees security against economic dislocation, terrorism, and threats to individual and cultural identity. It is not difficult to see why populists throughout Europe are making headway against long-established parties and institutions.
Unlike the authoritarian and totalitarian movements of the interwar period, today’s populists do not mount a frontal attack on democracy itself. Instead, as Müller argues, the threat to democracy comes “from within the democratic world—the political actors posing the danger speak the language of democratic values.”4 Populism represents a reaction—to some extent a corrective—to an elite-driven project that proceeded over the heads of many citizens. Still, populists’ rejection of pluralist politics challenges the liberal democratic order, which stands or falls with the recognition of individual rights, social diversity, and the need for reasonable compromise among competing interests.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Hungary and Poland underwent remarkably successful and rapid transitions to democratic governance and market liberalization. Fears that these postcommunist states would be gripped by authoritarianism, nationalism, and xenophobia were allayed by widespread support for liberal norms and consistent moves toward alignment with the West. Today, however, populist and illiberal political forces in both countries are threatening to usher in a new era of democratic backsliding. Hungary’s Fidesz and Poland’s Law and Justice openly embrace authoritarian actions, delegitimize political opposition, call for extreme majoritarianism, and are skeptical of or openly hostile to the rights of powerless minorities.
For many proponents of liberal democracy, the postcommunist transition signaled that the West had decisively won the ideological battles of the twentieth century. It was conventional wisdom that democratic consolidation marked a permanent turn to liberal democracy. Hungary and Poland held their first free parliamentary elections in 1990 and 1991, respectively. They joined NATO in 1999, and in 2004 they became members of the European Union along with eight other countries. Throughout the 1990s, Hungary benefited from an influx of foreign investment, while Poland was heralded as the poster child for market-friendly reform. By 2014, the Polish economy had grown more than 4 percent a year for two decades, making it the sixth-largest economy in the European Union and the Continent’s fastest growing. The Polish standard of living more than doubled between 1989 and 2012. Against this backdrop, the electoral success of these countries’ populist movements has sent shockwaves across Europe.5
A closer look helps explain why democracy is challenged in Hungary and Poland. Despite impressive aggregate gains, many felt excluded from the economic growth that accompanied market liberalization. In Hungary, the 1990s and early 2000s saw growing socioeconomic and urban-rural divisions affecting the life prospects of Hungarians. During Hungary’s postcommunist transition, inflation rose while real wages declined. Although Poland’s overall economy improved significantly in the postcommunist era, rural Poland stagnated, and large-scale structural unemployment forced many Poles to seek work abroad. In some areas of the rural east, where Law and Justice enjoys significant support, unemployment is double the national average. As a trade union activist from eastern Poland remarked, “This is the backwater of Europe. If it could, Warsaw would fill it with forest.”6
In both Hungary and Poland, populist parties have capitalized on these widespread economic woes. Originally founded as a student movement in 1988, Hungary’s Fidesz has undergone several changes, including ideological flirtations with libertarianism and conservatism. Since 2010, when it won a supermajority in the Hungarian parliamentary elections, the party has settled on a firmly nationalist stance. Fidesz’s electoral success followed revelations that Hungary’s Socialist prime minister lied about the country’s collapsing budget to secure his reelection, a scandal many connect with Hungary’s 2008 bailout and ensuing austerity measures. It is no surprise, then, that Fidesz’s antibank rhetoric, staunch opposition to foreign investors, and attack on multinational financial institutions resonated with voters in the 2010 election.
But Fidesz does not merely propose an alternative to the European Union’s globalist outlook. The party combines its promise to bring economic prosperity with calls for an emboldened Christian-national culture. In a recent address to the European People’s Party Congress, Orban decried the immigration of Muslims into Europe and called upon the party to protect Christian identity, national pride, and traditional family values. These declarations underscore Orban’s anti-pluralist aims.7 As Müller notes, “For Orban, Christianity is irrelevant as a guide to individual action. What matters is Christendom as a collective identity that helps to demarcate good Europeans from bad Muslims.”8
In a similar vein, Poland’s Law and Justice Party promotes economic populism and calls for a “Christian democracy.” After winning 27 percent of the vote in the 2005 parliamentary election, the party failed to hold the presidency or substantial parliamentary representation for several years. In 2015, however, it won 38 percent of the vote and retook control of the government. Campaigning on a traditionalist critique of post-Soviet Poland as corrupt and in need of moral and political renewal, the party called for regulation and intervention in the market to lift up Polish citizens. These demands included an increase in the minimum wage, improved family benefits, taxation of foreign banks’ assets, job creation, and limits on central bank independence.
The Hungarian and Polish populist parties’ hostility toward refugees reflects an agenda that is at once economic and cultural. In both countries, about four in ten citizens hold negative views of growing diversity, and majorities believe their society is better off when composed of people from the same nationality, religion, and culture. Hungary surpasses other E.U. member states in its citizens’ fervent belief that refugees are a burden, take away jobs and social benefits, and increase the likelihood of terrorism. More than half of Poles advocate refusing refugees entry, even if it comes at the cost of E.U. membership.9 In this climate, Fidesz and Law and Justice argue that the refugee crisis poses one of the greatest threats to Europe, and the two joined forces in a lawsuit against the European Union’s refugee quota system. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the cofounder (with his brother) of Law and Justice, once warned that the refugees were “bringing in all kinds of parasites” and claimed that Muslim migrants pose a threat to Polish values. Fidesz’s Orban declared, “Migration is not a solution but a problem . . . not medicine but a poison. We don’t need it and won’t swallow it.”10
The Hungarian government recently introduced a new asylum procedure that places applicants as well as asylum seekers already living in the country in detention camps, and it barred journalists from entering the camps to report on the conditions detainees face. Poland has since proposed the same policy, and this draconian approach has gained support among most European nations whose borders expose them to large refugee flows.
While this situation has brought to light the bleak injustices confronting migrants in Hungary and Poland, the inadequate response from the European Union has revealed how ill-equipped the supranational structure is to confront the populist members within its own ranks. As Elizabeth Collett, the founding director of Migration Policy Institute Europe, recently noted, “For a set of member states increasingly aware of the security of their own borders and the success of nationalist political narratives . . . additional pooling of sovereignty across the EU . . . may prove too much to contemplate. In this scenario, Poland and Hungary may well just be waiting for the rest of the EU to come around to their way of thinking.”11 Facing few consequences, the harsh nationalist approach to refugee management carried out in Hungary and Poland has gained a significant degree of credibility.
Since coming to power, both Fidesz and Law and Justice have restricted the independence of the courts, prohibited the media from reporting in ways that violate “the interests of the nation,” and discredited NGOs as “foreign agents.” In its first twenty months of governing, Fidesz enacted 365 laws and legal amendments.12 This wide array of changes included the criminalization of homelessness, media regulations that permit the government to fine media outlets for “imbalanced” or “insulting” coverage, measures that allow ethnic Hungarians living outside the country to vote in national elections, and new restrictions on access to public information. Orban also appointed party insiders to nonpartisan bureaucratic positions, a move that radically transformed the Hungarian civil service. After years of attacking the George Soros–funded Central European University, Orban’s party passed higher education reforms aimed at forcing the school to close its doors.
In Poland, Law and Justice brought its chief prosecutor under the minister of justice, eliminating the position’s independence, and licensed the Ministry of the Treasury to appoint the head of public broadcasting. The party has challenged the right of peaceful assembly by enacting a bill that imposes stringent requirements on groups planning public gatherings. It remains to be seen whether the surprising veto by President Andrzej Duda of two bills that would curb the independence of Poland’s Constitutional Court will restrain his party’s push for ever-greater power over all state and civic institutions.
Here too, the European Union’s response has appeared weak. In an effort to thwart further attempts to limit the independence of the judiciary in Poland, the European Commission threatened to trigger Article 7, which would impose sanctions on Poland and suspend the member state’s E.U. voting rights. As many have noted, however, the threat lacks credibility: invoking Article 7 would require unanimity among European Council members, including Orban, who has vehemently opposed such actions against Poland. An inability to meaningfully carry out any kind of response at the supranational level to date has proved disheartening. Reacting to the Polish constitutional crisis, a famous Polish dissident noted that “the EU’s decision-making system . . . guarantees impunity for populists.”13
In a famous 2014 speech in which he laid out his vision for Hungary, Orban declared: “The new state that we are building is an illiberal state.” Although he and his supporters insist that illiberalism is not a front for autocracy, many observers judge that his vision pays only lip service to democratic ideals. Nevertheless, the strategy on which his populism depends includes the employment of pro-democratic language to legitimate his attack on liberal institutions and practices as antithetical to Hungarian interests. Whether a slide into authoritarianism is the inevitable casualty of building an illiberal state remains to be seen.14
However, his rejection of social and political pluralism, explicit when Orban invokes the homogeneity of the people, poses an unambiguous threat to liberal values that could sharpen the party’s authoritarian edge. Addressing a group of Fidesz party activists in 2009, Orban declared that “Hungarian politics over the next fifteen to twenty years will not be determined by a dual power bloc, which, due to constant debate regarding values, generates divisive, petty, and unnecessary social consequences. Instead, a large governing party is being formed, a central political field of force, which will be able to address national issues—and this will not be done by constant debates, but it will represent them in its own natural way.”15
Orban similarly stressed the inefficiencies of multiparty politics in refusing to participate in the debates leading up to the 2010 and 2014 elections: “No policy-specific debates are needed now, the alternatives in front of us are obvious.” Law and Justice’s Jaroslaw Kaczynski has also described pluralist politics as plagued with “chaos and perpetual war,” and the head of Law and Justice’s parliamentary caucus, when asked about the need for political compromise, replied, “What kind of compromise do you mean? . . . There’s no need for one.”16
In an effort to delegitimize its political opposition, Law and Justice even performed an “audit” of its predecessor, the centrist, pro-European Civic Platform. This process featured accusations that Civic Platform had wasted billions of government dollars, “sold out” Polish interests to the European Union, and conspired with Russia. For populists, governing in the interests of “the people” and establishing an illiberal state are inextricably linked, because they insist that the people form a homogeneous group whose only disputes are with the elites.
It was only twenty-nine years ago that Poland set out to secure economic and political freedom through liberal democracy. The trade union movement Solidarity, whose success led to Poland’s first free elections, organized under the slogan “There is no bread without freedom.” As a student dissident in Hungary, Viktor Orban made similar appeals. So what underlies the rejection of liberal democracy in favor of populism with its authoritarian tendencies?
Some argue that the unique structural and historical challenges liberal democracy confronts in postcommunist Eastern Europe strengthen the populist backlash. In Hungary and Poland, they observe, democratic institutions and practices are relatively weak, and civil society remains underdeveloped. In postcommunist countries, moreover, the desire to assert a strong national identity can be explained historically. As John Shattuck notes, “Eastern Europeans were ruled for centuries by successive empires of Ottoman, Russian, Habsburg, fascist, and communist authoritarian regimes. A hunger for national identity and honor among the peoples of the region grew out of oppression by their rulers.”17 Thus, the political climate in Hungary and Poland was ripe for the nativist appeals of populist parties.
Taking a different tack, Ivan Krastev insists that the historic weakness of liberal democracy cannot adequately explain the success of Hungary’s and Poland’s populist movements. Those seeking to make sense of the rise of populism in Eastern Europe often begin by asking the wrong question: “What is going wrong with postcommunist democracy?” They should focus instead, Krastev argues, on the basic nature of the postcommunist period.
Liberal democracy challenges its citizens in a fundamental way: it asks the powerful to resist majoritarian temptations to safeguard the rights of powerless minorities. Against the immediate historical backdrop of communist oppression, a typical citizen in postcommunist Europe was capable of embracing the more arduous elements of civic participation in liberal democracy. As Krastev writes, “Having seen real state repression, this voter was ready to ‘think like a minority’ even when in the majority. Communism’s role in shaping the self-restraint of this voter was communism’s unintentional gift to the cause of liberal-democratic consolidation.”18
While the postcommunist period accounts for the rapid and successful consolidation of liberal democracy in Eastern Europe, Krastev continues, it also clarifies today’s populist challenge. The process of European integration pursued by postcommunist states meant that major economic decisions were removed from the electoral arena, leaving identity politics as a dominant vehicle for political appeals. Polish sociologist and political scientist Rafal Pankowski notes that there was not only economic exclusion, “there was also cultural dislocation and confusion about social values. In the absence of a progressive alternative, social anger came to be channeled through radical identity discourse.”19 This weakness of the liberal democratic transition in combination with the historical fear of multiculturalism in Eastern Europe proved potent. As Krastev writes, “The postcommunist countries know not only the advantages but the dark sides of multiculturalism. . . . For many of them, a return to ethnic diversity suggests a return to the troubled interwar period.” This historical context helps clarify today’s demographic panic in response to the refugee crisis.20
The wave of liberal democratic consolidation after the collapse of the Soviet Union reflected exceptional historical circumstances. When the disease was tyranny, liberal democracy was the cure. But when concrete economic and social issues moved to the fore, the capacity of liberal democratic government to address them became crucial. Populism represents a response to these governments’ perceived inability to do so in a genuinely inclusive manner. The groups that felt left behind by economic modernization and cultural liberalism insisted on being heard, and the populist parties responded. As the Hungarian philosopher Ágnes Heller suggests, “We will now see if liberal democracy was only a kind of surface phenomenon, which flourished due to a period of prosperity.”21
Today, Kaczynski and Orban do not merely promise to enshrine an ethnocentric conception of national identity into public life and laws; they also frame illiberalism as a pragmatic path toward economic prosperity. Orban, laying out his vision for an illiberal democracy, stated, “We are searching for and we are doing our best to find—parting ways with Western European dogmas, making ourselves independent from them—the form of organizing a community, that is capable of making us competitive in this great world-race.” Similarly, Kaczynski insists, “It is completely untrue that to achieve western levels of development, we have to adopt their social models. That is hogwash.”22
In 1972, Jean-Marie Le Pen and a cohort of far-right nationalists founded France’s National Front party (the FN) as a political home for military veterans and imperialists frustrated by the loss of France’s last major colonial holding in the Algerian war. From its inception, the FN focused on the issue of immigration, attributing French economic woes to the influx of newcomers. Hence the party’s slogan: “One million jobless are one million immigrants too many.” The party enjoyed its first electoral success in the 1980s when Le Pen received 14 percent of the vote in the first round of the presidential election. In 2002, he shocked many by making it to the second round.
In an effort to “normalize” the party and distance it from its anti-Semitic reputation—Jean-Marie Le Pen infamously referred to the Holocaust gas chambers as a “detail of history”—Marine Le Pen took over her father’s post as party president. She maintained many of the party’s anti-immigrant and nationalist features but began tailoring its platform to the interests of its rapidly expanding working-class base.
In the 1980s and 1990s, despite mounting economic problems—slow growth, high unemployment, crime, and immigration—many center-left politicians who had staunchly fought on behalf of the working class began accommodating business interests. (A similar process occurred in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany.) This strategic choice, in conjunction with a rightward shift in public opinion on issues such as law and order, immigration, and French identity, allowed the FN to tap into working-class discontent.
Although FN supporters place themselves toward the right end of the political spectrum, they are less enthusiastic about a conservative ideology of limited government and more attracted to protection against the uncertainties of a globalizing world. To this end, Marine Le Pen has promised to safeguard French culture from the creeping influence of Islam, the working class from the dominance of financial interests, and the French social model from the drain of undeserving immigrants.
The FN under her leadership has broken its previous electoral records, shaking the French political establishment by winning 27 percent of the vote in both the first and second rounds of the 2015 regional elections. In launching her 2017 presidential campaign, Le Pen declared the FN a movement to reclaim France’s “national interest” and to strengthen “the people against the oligarchies.”23 Like her father fifteen years earlier, she made it to the final round of the presidential election, where she received more than one-third of the popular vote.
The National Front wages its fight in the interest of “the people” against three enemies—Islam, globalism, and the French political establishment. The party has taken the lead in defining these threats and enumerating a firm response to them in ways that are especially compelling for those who feel economically vulnerable and culturally threatened. The FN portrays Islam as an attack on French identity, globalism as an attack on French economic prosperity and its social model, and the political establishment an attack on French democracy. Understanding how the FN promises to ameliorate these threats reveals a distinct set of populist challenges to liberal democracy.
France is home to nearly five million Muslims—7.5 percent of its population, one of the highest shares in Europe. This helps explain the National Front’s assertion that not just Islamist extremism but Islam itself poses a threat to French security and identity. On the campaign trail, Le Pen claimed that 100 percent of the meat sold around Paris was halal and compared street prayers to Nazi occupation.24 Her rhetoric validates those inclined to see little difference between the increasing visibility of everyday Muslim practices and the threat of terrorism.
Le Pen does not wage the fight against extremism on religious grounds. Instead, she claims she is preserving French republican values and the secularist doctrine of laïcité. As she declares, “Islam is hardly soluble in secularism.” Aurelien Mondon, an expert on the French far right, observes that unlike the racists of previous generations, Le Pen invokes a “new kind of racism” that “[does] not rely on ‘biological heredity, but [on] the irreducibility of cultural differences.’” This framework resonates with many voters, 63 percent of whom believe that Islam is incompatible with French values.25
In an era of routine terrorist attacks in France, the National Front has exploited a growing climate of fear. In a recent survey, 82 percent of French respondents believed another terrorist attack is probable or highly probable.26 Following the attacks on the Bataclan concert hall, Le Pen demanded the shutdown of immigration into France, called for strengthened military and police forces, pushed for a ban on Islamist organizations and radical mosques, and criticized French president François Hollande for failing to declare a “fight against Islamism.” The attack brought the FN a significant surge in public support.
By stoking national security anxieties, the FN taps into the growing climate of fear and asserts itself as the party most capable of a enacting a strong response to imminent national threats.27 For the FN, Russia is not one of these threats. On the contrary, it is in France’s interest to set aside obsolete Cold War habits and maximize cooperation with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that Russian-backed hackers penetrated French television networks as purported members of ISIS in an effort to encourage scared French voters to support the National Front in the 2015 regional elections. It is also not surprising that Marine Le Pen received a warm welcome in Moscow just months before the presidential contest.28
While terrorist acts generate legitimate worries and require a firm response, populists gain by exaggerating the danger. The risk is that overwrought public fear can lead to hasty, ill-considered reactions that violate the rights of individuals and minority groups with no appreciable gain in safety and security. The U.S. internment of Japanese Americans at the outset of World War II suffices to show that this risk is more than hypothetical.
Globalism, the second enemy identified by the National Front, can be broken down into two elements—transnational capitalism and multiculturalism—which the party presents as affronts to democratic representation and the French social model. According to the National Front, the constraining fiscal criteria of the Eurozone and the European Union’s open-borders policy enabling the flow of immigration into France represent zero-sum relationships for the French working class. For the FN, the only adequate response is a “France for the French” strategy that ends the provision of social protections to nonnatives.
As the French left turned away from its traditional working-class constituency to embrace business interests and the political establishment failed to address economic stagnation and chronic unemployment, the FN became a more attractive choice for workers and the unemployed. Its critique of transnational capitalism insists that big-money interests in league with supranational institutions are responsible for France’s loss of control over its own economic life. The party castigates nonelected institutions that impose austerity and fiscal discipline, labeling present economic arrangements a “dictatorship of finance and banks” that controls the French government.29
With the FN as the new political home for globalization’s losers, Le Pen presents her constituency with a cogent message that explains their feelings of vulnerability: Europeanization forces France to concede French economic governance to foreign financial interests, while globalization opens France’s borders to an influx of foreign labor. As Cecile Alduy notes, Le Pen provides “a narrative to frame [the] experience of identity loss and downward social mobility.” This diagnosis works especially well at a time when most people in France believe globalization threatens the country and hope to win back control from the European Union—without undermining it altogether. Le Pen’s policies include promises to reindustrialize France, nationalize commercial banks, and increase the generosity of the French social safety net. By tying economic grievances to the breakdown of fair democratic representation and the promise of self-government, says Alduy, “Le Pen has recast herself as the only leader eager to defend the people’s rights, especially the right to self-determination.” She vowed that if elected president, she would hold a referendum on France’s membership in the European Union.30
The FN’s pro-worker agenda and promise to take bold action to turn the French economy around are tied to a backlash against the second feature of globalism—multiculturalism. Cas Mudde contends that “the economic program is a secondary feature in the ideologies of populist radical right parties. . . . Most of the time, [these] parties use their economic program to put into practice their core ideological positions (nativism, authoritarianism, and populism) and to expand their electorate.” Whether or not this is true as a general proposition, the evidence suggests FN supporters are united less by a shared economic agenda than by a shared animus against immigrants. The party’s support is strongest in the Northeast and Southeast, where a 2013 opinion poll found that more than 90 percent of voters in both regions believe France has too many immigrants. The two regions, however, disagree over issues of taxation. A majority of FN voters in the Southeast believe taxes on the rich are too high, whereas 42 percent of FN voters in the Northeast believe they are not high enough.31
By bringing together voters with divergent attitudes on economic policy, the FN increased its influence in the political mainstream. Also helpful were more traditional conservative politicians like Nicolas Sarkozy, who sought to appeal to the FN’s base by lifting long-standing taboos on political discourse. In the case of the FN’s anti-immigrant message, Alduy notes, “The topic has become such a land mine that challenging these views is political suicide: left or right, few have the courage to contest with hard facts the National Front’s narrative of immigrants stealing jobs and benefits.”32 Giving credence to FN views has become a political necessity.
Mabel Berezin calls the FN’s many electoral defeats “fraught with paradox” because these losses came while the FN’s issues were becoming “increasingly French issues.” In a critical campaign speech, Sarkozy demonstrated how successfully the FN had infiltrated mainstream rhetoric when he declared he was “national without being nationalist” and “of the people without being populist.” On the night of his defeat in the first round of the 2007 presidential election, Jean-Marie Le Pen declared, “We have won the battle of ideas: nation and patriotism, immigration and insecurity were put at the heart of the campaign of my adversaries who spread these ideas with a wry pout.” Populists don’t just win at the ballot box; they also win by changing the political conversation.33
On several issues, the FN has opened policy options by putting new ideas on the table. From this standpoint, it could be regarded as a corrective to a center-left/center-right duopoly over political discourse. On the other hand, the dominance of the far right’s interpretation of these issues presents a standing challenge to pluralist politics.
The third enemy of French populism is the French political class, which it sees as having failed to ameliorate economic stagnation. The FN has responded to this enemy by breaking down traditional right-left political divisions. As Laurent Bouvet, a French political theorist, observes, “When she pretends to defend the Republic, laïcité, women or gay rights, [Marine Le Pen] blurs the traditional image of the far right. . . . She has the political acumen to situate herself right in the center of the political debate by showing that others’ solutions don’t work and that she can borrow from the repertoire of all political forces—that she is pragmatic but knows where she’s heading at the same time.”34
By drawing from the playbooks of both the right and the left, Le Pen demonstrates to her voters that ideological commitments only create barriers to political efficacy. This strategy of defying right-left politics in the name of pragmatism has worked especially well at a time when French voters are politically disillusioned. Increasing numbers of them are opting to abstain from voting, a mere 23 percent report they trust Parliament, and only 8 percent say they trust established political parties.35
It is no surprise that the moderate right began to see potential for electoral gains by courting FN voters. As early as 1986, it began incorporating extreme-right positions into its official program. This process of normalization helped the FN move from the fringe to being a party like any other. The proportion of French people who see the party as a threat to democracy fell from 70 percent in the early 2000s to 47 percent in 2013. It is probably lower today.36
The FN’s antisystem stance allows the party to flout the political norms that constrain others. Le Pen is able to leverage widespread discontent about the FN’s underrepresentation in the French parliament, the undemocratic nature of supranational institutions, and the erosion of faith in French democracy to explain away attacks on her integrity. Responding to accusations that she spent €300,000 in European Parliament funds to pay National Front party staff not employed by the chamber, Le Pen told reporters she refused to pay back the misused money: “I will not submit to the persecution, a unilateral decision taken by political opponents.” As one National Front supporter stated, she “is accused of using money for political ends, which is exactly what it’s there for. . . . We don’t see the point of the European Parliament to begin with.” A former member of the Socialist Party who has since become a prominent National Front figure noted, “If Marine is placed under formal investigation, . . . the voters will see it as one more sign of the system being against Marine.” The enforcement of liberal democratic standards against populists is thus transmuted into evidence that the political system is against the interests of the people.37
As the centrist, pro-European Emmanuel Macron demonstrated, it was possible to run a pragmatic, beyond-left-and-right campaign without appealing to public antipathies—and to prevail on the basis of hope rather than fear. Nonetheless, the far right achieved unprecedented support in this past election. Additionally, roughly half of French voters opted for the far-left and the far-right candidate in the first round of voting, a fact that illustrates the widespread discontent with the French political system. While the victory of Macron offers respite, it does not reveal a broad mandate for his centrist platform. Of those who voted in the second round, 43 percent told survey researchers they supported Macron in an effort to prevent Le Pen from winning, and 33 percent said they voted for him in the hope of political renewal, compared to only 16 percent who cited his program.38
The stakes for Europe’s future appear high, and the prospect of future populist gains remains. If Macron is able to seize the moment and renew France’s sclerotic economy, he will deal a blow to populism by demonstrating that a pragmatic politics of the center can be effective without dividing society and demonizing adversaries. If he fails, the FN remains ready to capitalize on the continuing grievances of many French citizens.
The architects of European liberal democracy believed that if they built the structure for cooperation between nation-states, a political community would develop naturally. Deepening economic and social integration would lead citizens of member countries to abandon nationalist loyalties and adopt a shared European identity. Today, however, the European Union suffers from a legitimacy crisis, and the anticipated European political community remains a far-off vision.
The European reaction to integration is anything but homogeneous. Younger, well-educated, wealthy, and financially secure citizens are more likely to identify as European, while those who are older, less educated, poorer, and financially struggling are more likely to retain national identities and embrace Euroskepticism. While majorities in Hungary and Poland believe that European Union membership benefits their country, approval of the Union drops among those experiencing declining living standards.39
Mounting pressures on the European project—a global recession, a migrant crisis, and terrorist attacks—have highlighted an alarming divide between the ambitions of the European Union’s economic and political arrangements and their public support. In the wake of mounting challenges to the Union, populists have gained traction by vowing to protect their constituencies from growing economic and cultural insecurities through a reinvigorated nationalism.
Benedict Anderson famously wrote that nationalism rests on the idea of the nation as an “imagined community.” The community is “imagined” because in order to identify with it, we must convince ourselves that in sharing a nation, we inherently possess a unique sense of belonging with other members of the nation even though most of them remain complete strangers to us. In an effort to achieve regional integration, the European Union has attempted to foster an “imagined community” at the supranational level. But nationalism remains the prevailing form of collective imagination.
As the political theorist Alan Finlayson writes, “While part of the logic of community is to swallow up and obliterate differences, communities are also always particular.”40 This fact is certainly not lost on today’s populist challengers to the European transnational project.
In the 2014 speech in which he outlined his illiberal vision, Orban declared: “The Hungarian nation is not a simple sum of individuals, but a community that needs to be organized, strengthened, and developed.”41 In Orban’s view, the chaotic and random “sum of individuals” represents European supranationalism, as distinct from populism’s clarifying sense of national identity. The populist articulation of “the people” as belonging primarily to the nation has weakened efforts driven by the elite to popularize its concept of a European “people.” The underdevelopment of European citizenship has allowed populists to depict Europe itself as a primary threat to the national communities that are solidly entrenched in the public imagination. By offering itself as the guardian of the nation, populism has emerged as an alternative to liberal democratic internationalism.
Not only populists make the case for the primacy of national loyalties. The French political theorist Pierre Manent has recently argued against what he characterizes as the “new orthodoxy” that only the individual and all of humanity have real moral weight, with nothing of worth in between. All of modern history suggests that the rise of democracy is indissolubly linked to the emergence of the nation-state. Although Benjamin Constant famously distinguished between the liberty of the moderns (freedom in the private sphere) and the liberty of the ancients (participation in communal self-determination), in practice they go together. As Manent puts it, “Only the representative government of a people formed into a nation” can make legitimate decisions about laws and rules. The traditional national framework of democracy in Europe does not guarantee any particular result; the people will not always be virtuous and far-sighted. But Manent insists that “nothing humanly decent is possible outside this framework.”42
This is not to say that the boundaries of political identification are fixed. The formation of France testifies to the contrary, as does the creation of the United States from colonies with distinctive independent histories. But as both of these cases suggest, expanding formal political boundaries is no guarantee that public sentiments will follow. Overcoming French regional loyalties required centuries; in the United States, subordinating state loyalties to a shared national loyalty took not only time but also a bloody civil war.
Transnationalism is not the cure for populism. It is better understood as a cause of populism. The antidote to populism must include a decent, responsible nationalism, shorn of populism’s nativism and its anti-pluralist fantasies of a homogeneous people.