As expected, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally came out on top in the first round of French elections yesterday, solidifying the country’s move to the right after the European vote earlier in the month.
The EU’s three largest countries by population and three largest economies – France, Germany, and Italy – are now all led by far right parties or on that path.
In France, Macron should get a thank you card for helping to make the National Rally’s victory possible:
France is a gruesome case study in how centrists acted as the handmaidens of the far right.
Under Macron, France became a cauldron of disillusionment which the far right fed off.
The centrists relentlessly focused on demonising the left. Behold the consequences. https://t.co/OjpjJJTzEv
— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) June 30, 2024
The story is the same across much of the EU as the centrists – as they call themselves – continue to dismiss working class voter concerns, pursue disastrous economic confrontations, and now appear prepared to plunge the bloc back into austerity in the coming months.
While the Davos crowd that runs the EU is still expressing widespread disapproval of voters’ choices following the recent European elections, and no doubt there will be more after the vote in France, they keep doing their best to empower the far right [1] with their choices of policy.
The effort to explain away the increasingly rightward shift of the European electorate typically blames the voters. Take your pick: media explanations range from lumping populism in with fascism to blaming the Covid lock downs(!), but they all strike the same note that it is not the people in power that need to change; it is the fact that the voters are dangerous.
Dismissing Economic Concerns
The media seems to be latching onto the fact that a larger share of younger voters swung right. And their explanations are variations of the same: they brush off economic concerns and emphasize the role of new media like TikTok, Twitter X, Youtube, etc.
Reuters declares, “With the leaders of Europe’s often upstart ethno-nationalist, anti-establishment movements mastering new social media better than their mainstream counterparts, they are earning cachet as a subversive counterculture among some young people.”
CNN gets bonus points for the now-common misuse of the term populism while also running through a range of economic concerns of younger voters only to brush them aside as the result of short attention spans and the failure to grasp the larger picture:
After her center-right bloc secured the most seats in the European Parliament, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen took to the stage in Brussels to give a victory speech. But her tone was more somber than victorious. She spoke of the importance of defending European values: integration, democracy and the rule of law.
How do these abstract values sound to young voters?
“Young people will double check, does that help me with any of my needs? Does it entertain me? Does it give me security? Is it fun? And if it’s none of that, it’s boring,” said Schnetzer. “If you have this TikTok logic, you’ll quickly swipe further.”
And CNN adds in a reminder of just how silly voters are for expecting anything to change:
Out of office, the far right is unable to break promises, while it can point endlessly to the mainstream’s inability to deliver. Once in government, it will prove just as disappointing.
Ignoring the people’s concerns is really the responsible course of action, they tell us.
Take Politico’s “Europe’s ‘foreigners out!’ generation: Why young people vote far right.” And the deck: “Their grandparents ushered in the sexual revolution. Today’s youth want to turn back the clock to 1950.”
In it, the reporters explain that the increasing number of young voters voting right is largely due to immigration backlash, but it’s not that simple. It’s also that the information they receive about the immigration debate is tainted by the nefarious influence of TikTok, and there’s the unexplained assertion that younger voters swung right partly due to “the isolation many youths suffered during the COVID lockdown years.” [2]
On voters’ concerns over economic policy, Politico explains that they are simply wrong:
In many ways, the surge in youth support is disconnected from reality. After hitting a high of more than 10 percent in October 2022, Europe’s inflation rate is now back down to 2 percent. The same goes for unemployment which, at 6 percent on average across the EU according to Eurostat, is far below the 12.2 percent average joblessness rate reached in 2013.
In other words, on the economy, migration and the effects of the pandemic, Europe has already weathered the worst of the storm.
In other words, nothing needs to change – well, almost nothing. If there’s one item on the to-do list, it looks to be that more censorship is needed as the blame for voters voting the way they did is being laid at the feet of social media companies like X and TikTok.
It seems odd to brush aside economic concerns in an EU that is dealing with an ongoing energy crisis, deindustrialization, and declining real wages. The European Trade Union Confederation, which represents 45 million European workers, recently found that real wages slid by 0.7% in 2023, after dropping by 4.3% in 2022. Those 2023 numbers include falls of 2.6% in Italy (currently led by the far right), 0.9% in Germany (far right gaining ground), and 0.6% in France (far right on the cusp of power).
And yet the elite conventional wisdom, represented by Politico declaring Europe has weathered the storm, is that this is all no longer a concern.
More Austerity on the Way
Another sign that the EU elite has learned nothing is that it plans a return to austerity starting in six months. Should it stick to that plan, it will force member states to start cutting spending under already-difficult conditions. There’s also the fact that there is a wealth of evidence that increased austerity leads to a larger vote share for “extremist” parties. You can go back as far as the 1930s to see the results.
A 2021 study published in the Journal of Economic History showed that voting data from a thousand districts and a hundred cities for four elections between 1930 and 1933 showed that areas more affected by austerity had more support for the Nazi Party. More recent research from May shows that 1930-32 “austerity shocks reduced German GDP by more than four percent and caused an increase in unemployment by almost two million, paving the way for the success of extremist parties.”
For something a little more recent, we have a 2023 paper, The Political Costs of Austerity, published in The Review of Economics and Statistics. It is authored by Ricardo Duque Gabriel from the National Bureau of Economic Research, Mathias Klein from the research division of Sveriges Riksbank, and Ana Sofia Pessoa from the University of Bonn’s Department of Economics.
In it the authors review more than 200 elections in several European countries, providing evidence of the political consequences of fiscal consolidations. The main takeaway is the following:
Fiscal consolidations lead to a significant increase in extreme parties’ vote share, lower voter turnout, and a rise in political fragmentation. We highlight the close relationship between detrimental economic developments and voters’ support for extreme parties by showing that austerity induces severe economic costs through lowering GDP, employment, private investment, and wages. Austerity-driven recessions amplify the political costs of economic downturns considerably by increasing distrust in the political environment.
Austerity will worsen economies that are already on life support in many areas of the EU. The decision to force countries to cut spending comes despite the main driver of increased government expenditures over the past two years being the need to deal with the energy crisis brought about by the elites’ decision to wage war against Russia. As the authors point out, “Austerity leads to a significant fall in regional output, employment, investment, durable consumption, and wages.”
Shockingly, voters react angrily to the willful destruction of their standards of living:
…people’s trust in the government deteriorates much more strongly during austerity recessions compared to non-austerity recessions. This might point toward a “doom loop” between distrust in the political system and more extreme voting following fiscal consolidations. In sum, austerity-driven recessions are special in the sense that they considerably amplify the political costs of economic downturns by creating more distrust in the political environment.
…in recessions coinciding with fiscal consolidations, a reduction in regional government spending implies a larger increase in extreme voting compared to lowering public spending in non-austerity recessions. These results suggest that austerity recessions are special in the sense that they considerably amplify the political costs of economic downturns.
The fact that the EU is granting a minimal amount of wiggle room on austerity requirements set to go into effect in 2025 might be an acknowledgment of this data.
For example, the new agreement stipulates that countries with a deficit above 3% of GDP are required to halve this to 1.5% but can do so during periods of growth. That growth might quickly evaporate with such a public spending pullback, but that’s the plan. Elsewhere, countries will still be required to reduce their debt on average by 1% per year if it is above 90% of GDP, and by 0.5% per year on average if the debt is between 60% and 90% of GDP. The new rules give countries seven years to get their spending in order, up from four previously.
And yet, these minor attempts to make the pain more palatable are unlikely to impress voters who will still see a reduction in quality in life. In some cases, it could be even worse than the Euro Crisis:
Too meet reformed EU fiscal rules, Italy and France would have to go for fiscal consolidations over 2025-2028 that are larger than during the Euro Crisis (2011-2014). Spain has to do about half.
Do we properly remember the effects and political debates of €zone austerity? pic.twitter.com/Rmuz8jfkTJ
— Philipp Heimberger (@heimbergecon) June 21, 2024
The “Doom Loop”
The great question is where will voters turn when austerity returns? The Political Costs of Austerity offers a somber possibility:
Our results show that fiscal consolidations are associated with significant political costs: a 1% reduction in regional public spending leads to an increase in extreme parties’ vote share of around 3 percentage points. The higher vote share captured by extreme parties coincides with a fall in voter turnout together with an increase in the total votes for these parties. Thus, in response to fiscal consolidations, fewer people vote and those who do, exhibit a higher tendency to vote for extreme parties.
This “doom loop” appears to be what is taking hold in Italy – which has been dealing with current EU-wide trends of austerity and declining living standards for decades. It is abundantly clear in recent votes empowering Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy (FdI) party. The number of Italians who have effectively given up on the system (51.66 percent) and chose not to vote in the recent EU election trounced those that support Meloni who got 13.89 percent of eligible voters. And it wasn’t just that it was an EU election; Italy’s voter turnout has been dropping in national elections for decades and hit a post-WWII low of 64 percent in the 2022 election that brought the FdI to power. And unlike parties elsewhere in Europe who were recently punished in the European elections over two years of a sanctions and energy policy that has hurt European workers, FdI came away in the top spot nationally.
France and Germany just saw very high turnouts, but how will voters respond if, as CNN claims, they are destined to be disappointed? Will it look like Italy where FdI’s success largely revolves around lower turnout and the successful blaming of – not the economic sanctions against Russia, not a disastrous energy policy, not the decades-long adherence to fiscal rules, not the decades of market-friendly reforms, not the decades of wage suppression strategy, not the decades of pursuit of more “flexible” labor – immigration for Italy’s problems.
Similar arguments are everywhere across Europe nowadays because it would be difficult for the Davos crowd to create an atmosphere more suitable for the rise of the right if it tried. They push an artificial scarcity of resources while immigration increases making it easy for the right to argue that those dwindling resources should be reserved for the native population and taken away from the immigrants.
So while some point to the increase in immigration:
Remarkable chart, within just a decade net migration into Germany has been 6 Million people. That’s more or less Berlin and Munich combined. Is it sustainable? pic.twitter.com/s8JZAZ8dVx
— Michael A. Arouet (@MichaelAArouet) June 27, 2024
What gets far less attention is that the EU’s own polling of bloc citizens shows that nearly 80 percent favor stronger social policies and more social spending.
CNN’s above prediction that the right will be unable to deliver any meaningful economic benefits to voters would appear to be accurate as even those on the right who would want to do so are constrained by the EU’s “tools.” Does that necessarily mean they will be voted out of power and Europe will see a return towards the center? Not necessarily. As The Political Costs of Austerity points out, it’s just as likely that the doom loop takes over, voters increasingly give up, and parties on the right redirect frustration with plummeting living standards towards other targets, such as immigrants (as Meloni has done) or other perceived enemies like, say, Russia.
So while much was made about the fact the “center held” in the most recent EU elections, the trend is clear – and one that is likely to only be sped up by more austerity.
So why is the EU’s ruling center seemingly doing all it can to help these forces on the right?
Are they oblivious to these concerns or do they simply dismiss warnings that conflict with their dogma? Is it hubris? Does the von der Leyen crowd think they can control the far right as they have done with Meloni and are attempting to do now with Le Pen?
A scarier thought is that the center welcomes alliances with the far right as long they’re the center’s kind of far right (i.e., pro-EU, pro-NATO, and anti-Russia + China). The responsible center can continue with its pet projects of war against Russia, censorship, and neoliberalism while the far right blames immigrants for the results of the former’s policies (66 percent of the EU working class feel their quality of life is getting worse).
Either way, the coming rounds of austerity should be clarifying if the EU doesn’t break in the meantime. Will governments like Meloni’s or the National Rally in France be punished if they enact harsh economic plans? Or will the doom loop only become stronger?
Notes
[1] Among the parties and candidates under that far right umbrella term, there are many differences – on Ukraine policy, for example, or the fact that some have softened their stance towards the EU and NATO while others remain “sovereignists.” The one trait they have in common, however, is that they are outside the respectable “center.”
[2] The Politico piece does later say the following:
Another oft-cited factor: COVID and the lockdowns that confined youths at a time when many were due to leave their homes to start university. The lockdown orders that were handed down by leaders across Europe within a few weeks in 2020 helped cement the idea that political elites were high-handed and insulated from the effects of their policies. Such grievances are deeply entrenched among right-wing voters in many European countries.
The assertion that these “grievances are deeply entrenched among right-wing voters” doesn’t explain why 2020 lockdowns swung 2024 voters to the right, however.
