They are running out of steam. Of course, one should not count their chickens before they are hatched, but the fact is that from Washington to Budapest via Warsaw, the nationalist and authoritarian regimes, the so-called “populist” regimes, no longer have the wind at their backs.
From on State to another, the polls are bad or catastrophic for Donald Trump, whose management of the pandemic seems more and more overwhelming. We no longer see how the orange man could get a second term, and neither Viktor Orban in Hungary nor Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland are in much better shape.
The latter will not be meeting with voters for a long time, but they have both been able to stir up protest movements around themselves, which they will have a hard time putting down. Even though he had lost the top ten cities in Hungary in the municipal elections a year ago, the theorist of “illiberal democracy” wanted to rein in the University of theatre and cinema. As a result, this bastion of freedom has been occupied for almost two months; the students are in the streets and Zsuzsa Hegedus, the Prime Minister’s political advisor, publicly agrees with the demonstrators and calls for negotiations to begin.
Alarm bells are ringing from within the regime itself, and in Warsaw, the ruling regime has done even better. Because it won the presidential election only by a hair’s breadth last summer, it is now divided between supporters of moving back towards the centre and advocates of a radicalization towards the extreme right. It is being pulled from the inside to every direction, and so Jaroslaw Kaczynski thought it was smart to satisfy his right wing by having the Constitutional Court pass a near-total ban on abortion.
The episcopate is delighted. The far right applauds, but last March a poll showed that 58% of Poles were in favour of free abortion up to the twelfth week of pregnancy and without any conditions. On this point at least, Poland is infinitely more liberal than its political majority, which has just clashed with women. In the countryside as well as in the cities, demonstrations were immediately organized. It is just the beginning. These new rights are clearly running out of steam, but even assuming that they lose their American hero next week, does this mean that they are doomed?
The answer is no, because electoral setbacks, however stinging they may be, would not erase the root causes of the emergence of these new currents, born of the rejection of free trade, the industrial relocation and the decline in public investment – of the triumph of neo-liberalism, which has led to a global decrease of poverty but has deepened inequalities, set back the welfare state and undermined the infrastructure of developed countries.
In a political confusion mixing right-wing nationalism and left-wing social demands, the rise of the populists was based on real causes. They may lose an election, but they now represent a broad base of voters that will not be eroded until the American and European Democrats make social justice their priority again. But let’s face it: we’re not there yet.
