E.U. Politics Scholar Explains Populism's Surge in Europe While Western Media Warns of Threats to Democracy | SYSTEM UPDATE #280
Read Professor Sheri Berman's article here: https://www.project-syndicate.org/magazine/europe-right-wing-populist-parties-understanding-their-appeal-and-the-implications-by-sheri-berman-2024-06
Watch the full episode HERE
Podcast: Apple - Spotify
Rumble App: Apple - Google
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (00:00)
Unpacking EU Elections: Populist Gains, Neoliberal Losses (8:23)
Prof. Sheri Berman on European Populist Movements (24:43)
Outro (1:04:25)
- - -
Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET.
Become part of our Locals community
- - -
Follow Glenn:
Twitter
Instagram
Follow System Update:
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Facebook
LinkedIn
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight...
American politics since the emergence of Donald Trump have been driven by at least two dominant political sentiments.
One is an intense and rapidly growing distrust for and contempt of leading institutions of power and authority.
Large corporations, almost every branch of government, the corporate media, the establishment wings of both parties, and now even the health policy and scientific establishment.
There's barely an institution of authority left unscathed.
The loss of trust and faith in key sectors of authority has historically been monumentally consequential for any society where it emerges, But it also creates a large opening for politicians and political parties to ascend to power by convincingly vowing to destroy the hated establishment.
To me, that more than anything else explains the success of Trump's highly improbable victories in the 2016 GOP primary and then the general election.
And arguably, and to a lesser extent, also explains the Equally unlikely 2008 ascension to the Oval Office of Barack Obama, who also postured as an anti-establishment figure.
The second major factor is a byproduct of the first, which is the rise of populist politics.
Now, that is a term, populism, that is often used and thrown around but rarely defined.
But a fundamental precept for certain is the belief that establishment ideology and establishment orthodoxy are directly harmful to the economic and cultural lives of ordinary citizens.
And also that economic or establishment orthodoxy is designed to benefit only those elites who control those institutions at the expense of everybody else.
Now that belief is almost always accompanied by the perceptions that rulers secretly or even openly harbor contempt for the lives and values of ordinary people.
The anger and resentment that is produced by such a perception is in some sense more personal and emotional than even ideological, which does not mean it is invalid.
And that in turn enables any skillful politician to exploit that anti-establishment resentment to their side as long as they are perceived to be an outsider, an enemy to establishment sectors.
And it almost doesn't even matter whether they're right, left, or anything else.
Judging by the results of yesterday's election in the European Union to elect members of the EU Parliament, both of those political strains appear at least as prevalent and as rising among European voters as they are among American voters.
The EU election results did not produce, let's call it a revolution.
The center-left and center-right parties that formed the establishment in Brussels and in the key EU states did manage to hold on to a majority, but Any member or supporter of the establishment in the EU should be looking at these results with deep concern, if not panic.
And that is precisely the reaction in many European capitals and in the European and American press.
Some of the results in individual EU countries, especially the largest and most powerful ones, are nothing short of stunning.
In France, the party of Marie Le Pen, long deemed to be fascist and fringe as a party, received almost double the vote total, double the vote total, of the current centrist establishment party of French President Emmanuel Macron.
In Germany, what is often called the far right or even Nazi adjacent party, to the point that it is often censored and may even be headed to be made illegal, which is the ADF alternative for Deutschland, received roughly 20% of the vote by German citizens.
And even more concerning from the establishment perspective, the ADF was by far the most popular party throughout East Germany.
Half of the country that really was never fully integrated politically or economically back into Germany after reunification once the Berlin Wall fell.
Many of these same patterns are repeated throughout the EU.
Now, one must be cautious not to over-interpret the results of this particular election.
As is true for elections in the United States that are held in non-presidential years, voting for the EU Parliament in this last election was very sparse.
But many of the trends that these results reflect have been visible for many years in multiple EU countries, going back at least to 2016.
To Brexit, when British voters shocked the EU establishment by simply voting to leave the EU and liberate themselves from the rule of Brussels.
And, of course, many of these same trends have been clearly visible in the United States, particularly when it comes to the ongoing success of Donald Trump, who, even after everything thrown at him, even after his conviction on 34 felony counts, continues to lead in polls for the 2024 election.
What we are seeing is not merely country-specific changes in ideology or dissatisfaction with one party or another, but a growing and pervasive distrust and even hatred for Western institutions.
Contempt and hatred, which I would say, as the United States, has been very well earned.
Now to help us make sense of these trends in EU politics and the meaning of the latest election results, as well as what they might mean for the United States and for its 2024 election, we will speak in just a bit to a political scientist whose scholarship focuses on EU history and politics.
She is Sherry Berman of Bernard College and Columbia University.
Professor Berman is the author of the 2019 book, quote, Populism is a Symptom Rather Than a Cause, Democratic Disconnect, the Decline of the Center Left, and the Rise of Populism in Western Europe.
And just yesterday, Professor Berman published an article entitled, quote, How Serious is Europe's Anti-Democratic Threat in the Journal Project Syndicate.
We will speak to her after I spend some time laying out the context for what happened in last night's election and how it relates to the United States.
Before we get to all that, a few quick programming notes.
First of all, we are encouraging our viewers to download the Rumble app.
If you do so, it works both on your smart TV and telephone.
Doing that enables you to follow the shows you most like to watch here on the Rumble platform.
If you turn on notifications, which we hope you will, it means anytime any of those shows that you follow begin broadcasting live on the platform, you'll be immediately notified by a link to Taxter.
email, however you wish, and you can just click on that link and immediately begin watching as soon as the show starts.
It really helps the live viewing numbers of Rumble and therefore the platform itself and its cause of free speech.
Add another reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms.
If you rate, review, and follow the program on those platforms, it really does help spread the visibility of the show.
Finally, every Tuesday and Thursday night, Once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble platform.
We have our live interactive After Show that's designed to take your questions, comment on your critiques, and answer them, hear your suggestions for future shows.
That After Show is available only for members of our Locals community, and if you want to join, which gives you access not only to those after shows but to multiple interactive features we have there it's the place where we publish transcripts of every program we broadcast here
it's where we first publish our original written reporting as we did on friday with the report about dr falchi's connections to hideous dog experimentations that he with the help of media tried to falsely deny and most of all is the community on which we rely to support the independent journalism that we try and do here every night simply click the join button right below the video player on the rumble page and it will take you directly to that community for now
welcome to a new episode of system update starting right now There are many reasons to be very interested in political trends in the EU and specifically in the results from the elections that elected the EU parliamentarian.
Now, that is true for many reasons, obviously beginning with the fact that the EU is a very sizable political force in the world.
It has a population when you combine all of the EU states that is larger than the United States.
It is also a very close ally, at least for now, of the United States, both economically and militarily.
And therefore, what happens there matters a lot from the perspective of the American citizen.
But I also think it seems quite clear that many of the political trends that are driving these changes, these anti-establishment changes, are very similar, maybe not identical, but very similar to and even connected to, political trends that have become dominant in the United States that I think are but very similar to and even connected to, political trends that have become dominant in the United States that I think are I've actually been thinking about the connection between European politics and the U.S.
politics, even politics in the broader democratic world, and the United States, based on this thought.
Back in 2002 and 2003, when the United States was proposing to invade and attack Iraq as part of the War on Terror, there were some countries in Europe, like Italy and Spain, that supported the United States' effort.
But by far the two largest and most influential countries in the EU, Germany and France, were vehemently opposed.
And they weren't just vehemently imposed on the level of their governments, but the populations were overwhelmingly against having their countries or any country invade Iraq.
And that was at the same time when 70% of Americans supported that invasion, and 70% of Americans believed, falsely of course, that Saddam Hussein played a role personally in planning the 9/11 attack, because that was what they were led to believe, a belief that did not exist in Germany or France. a belief that did not exist in Germany or France.
Now, interestingly, 2002 and 2003, obviously the Internet existed then, but what did not really exist was social media in any meaningful form, certainly nowhere near compared to what it is now.
And the fact that we all use the same social media platforms, you see, European politicians and European journalists sitting on Twitter, the same exact place where American politicians and American journalists sit and do their work and express their views means that we are really more interconnected politically than ever before.
Leaving me to really wonder, because of that, because we're all now feeding on the same discourse, the same global discourse, no more different discourse for each country, whether that type of sharp split between, say, French and German opinion on the one hand about a major war and American views on the other would even really be possible.
And you see, of course, when it comes to the war in Ukraine, All over the non-Western part of the world, there are so many countries that view that war as unjust in terms of the United States and NATO supporting it, who blame the US and NATO for doing so.
And yet that view is a minority view, not only in the United States, but in all of Europe, where it's pretty unanimous, at least among governments, maybe with the exception of Hungary's, that continuing to fuel the war in Ukraine is the absolute right thing to do morally as well as geo-strategically in the exact same view that the United States has.
So this change is so striking.
Where there used to be these vast splits among even the establishment of the United States versus the EU establishment or establishments of different European capitals and now you see that very rarely and I think that points to the fact that we can indeed look at the political trends that are taking place in the EU that are growing and that are shaping the results of the election as we saw yesterday and find a lot of illustrative information about
What it's likely to foretell about the upcoming 2024 presidential election as well.
I don't want to overstate that.
There are obviously some differences, but I think far fewer than before for a lot of reasons, including this interconnectedness on the social media.
Now, just to give you some summary information, some background about some of the key effects of the EU election, and oftentimes EU parliamentary elections are not very well discussed.
As I said, there's not a lot of interest among European voters in it, but the results from this particular election were so stunning in European capitals that it's receiving far more attention than it normally does.
And I think that's for good reason, because it's not just confined to this one election, but really reflective of broader trends happening in European politics and American politics as well.
So first of all, from The Economist on June 10, 2024, which is today, Quote, who will form the next European Parliament?
The biggest winner of the night was Marine Le Pen and the National Rally, her quote, hard right party, which is part of the ID group.
That's the right wing party in Brussels.
National Rally was projected to win 30 seats, whereas President Emmanuel Crone's coalition secured just 13.
Not just less than half, almost one third, Macron got his seats in the EU compared to Marine Le Pen's party, which was 30.
Quote, on Sunday evening, Mr. Macron announced that he would dissolve the French National Assembly and call legislative elections to take place on June 30th and July 7th.
Another winner is Giorgia Maloney, Italy's Prime Minister since 2022 and the leader of the Hard Right Brothers of Italy party.
Her party looks to have won 29% of the vote, up from 6%.
In 2019, her party went from 6% to 29% in just five years.
Overall, hard-right parties have come...no one hates populist politics and anti-establishment politics more than The Economist.
Overall, hard-right parties have come first or second in eight of the 26 member states with available data.
At the previous elections in 2019, liberals also feared a shift to the right.
But although the number of right-wing MEPs grew, those members of the European Parliament, so did the tally of those belonging to the most pro-EU parties.
Since then, however, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the Middle East, and renewed worries about immigration have led to a surge in support for right-wingers in some member states.
In 2022, Italy voted a hard-right party into office, and in 2023, the party of Geert Wilders, an anti-Muslim populist, won the Dutch election, though he's not been able to form a government.
As polls predicted, the center-right group known as the European People's Party, the EPP, is once again the largest.
It is projected to win 186 seats.
The center-left Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats looks set to win about 134 seats.
So as I said, it's not a revolution.
It didn't overthrow the establishment parties in Brussels, but it certainly shook them up and made them weaker.
And so The Economist concludes, quote, but the hard right has gained a round in some significant countries.
Here from the New York Times, also today in Germany.
Far-right party rises to second place in the EU election.
And the fascinating thing about this far-right party in Germany is that it's probably the most extremist right-wing party in Europe of any of the major countries.
In fact, the right-wing coalition that is going to Brussels expelled the AFD, Germany's right-wing party, after very offensive claims from a couple of its members, including saying that there were a lot of German military officers during World War II who were not criminals, and there have been a lot of other controversies.
about corruption and other things involving the ADF, but they also have been the major target of the German government, often censoring them, openly speaking about banning them entirely, even though they're now the second most popular party in Germany.
And obviously Europe has a particular fear about the rise of the right in Germany for obvious historical reasons, but nonetheless, quote, the AFD's gains We're a sharp rebuke to Chancellor Olaf Scholz's governing coalition and a sign of the rightward political shift across the continent.
The AFD's fortunes, that's the alternative for Deutschland's fortunes, seem to have risen in concert with the fall of the Green Party, an environmentally focused party for which Germany was once a stronghold.
The Greens saw their vote share drop by nearly half to about 12% according to the preliminary results from a high of more than 20% in the 2019 election.
Now, let me just stop and say here that although the Green Party was founded to be an environmental party, hence the name, in many ways the Green Party in Germany and a couple other European countries has become the most stridently pro-Europe, pro-NATO, and pro-war party.
In fact, the Green Party ran on a platform of promoting Green Party women
into key positions in the government and they did so well in the last German election that they were able to become a coalition partner with Olaf Scholz and the foreign minister and other key members of the Green Party are in fact important members of the current German government and they ran on a platform that the reason it was so important to promote women in key governmental positions especially ones involving military and war
is because women are far less likely to support war, to pursue war, based on this very stereotypical, but I guess in some sense feminist theory, that women prefer to resolve conflicts peacefully, whereas men prefer to resolve them violently.
A fairly stereotypical view of men and women, but also a clearly false one when you look at politicians like Hillary Clinton or Susan Rice or Samantha Power and on and on and on.
But the Green Party has moved way away from its roots.
It's a key part of the establishment.
They love the war in Ukraine.
They are the most vocal supporters of it.
These women who ran on a platform of never being involved in wars.
And as a result, or at least...
Concurrent with all of that, the Green Party collapsed, losing more than half of its support, while the AFD rose.
Quote, Amelia Fester, a Green Party member of Parliament who is one of its youngest elected officials, said in an email, quote, although the AFD has made gains, it is also clear that few young people have switched from us Greens to the AFD.
Instead, many have voted for smaller parties that often have programs close to the Greens that are more focused on individual issues.
Quote, this gives me hope, she says.
Some of the worst coping rationale you will ever hear from a party that just got its support cut in half.
Amazingly, she talked about young voters, even though, and this part is fascinating.
It's from the New York Times, quote, this election was also the first time that 16 and 17 year old Germans were permitted to vote the age of 18.
And AFD had major wins, the far right adjacent Nazi party, as it's called.
The ADF had major wins in the under 30 demographic.
including its share of that electorate by increasing its share of that electorate by 10% results showed.
The Greens, once supercharged by the activist Greta Thunberg and student protests against climate change, saw an 18% drop off of those young voters.
In other words, the exact opposite of what that Green Party official claimed.
Quote, younger voters tended to be more left-meaning and progressive in the past, said Florian Stoeckl, a professor of political science at the University of Exeter in England.
"However, this time they turned right." He added that the AFD's recent push to market itself on TikTok might have played a role.
Yet again, we're seeing the reason that the establishment hates that app so much.
Quote, "This is in line with recent findings that younger people and especially younger men across Europe tend to take more right-leaning positions," Mr. Stoeckle said.
Now, just to focus on France and how that relates to what happened in Germany, here is The Economist, June 9, 2024, which was yesterday, entitled, "As the French Hard Right Triumphs in EU Elections, Macron Calls a Snap Vote." Outside France and Germany, the center holds.
Not entirely true, but as I said, largely true, but France and Germany happen to be the two largest and most powerful countries in Europe.
Here's what Macron did in response To Marine Le Pen's party getting essentially three times more the number of seats in the EU and more than double the amount of votes.
Quote, the elections to the European Parliament held on June 6th to 9th have delivered a stinging rebuke from voters to some incumbents, most clearly in Germany and above all else in France, where President Emmanuel Macron responded to his party's routing at the hands of the hard right by dissolving the French Parliament and calling a risky snap election.
Obviously, it's risky because Marine Le Pen's party just crushed Macron's party, and now he wants to call a snap election to see if there's more voters participating in France, whether the far right will be able to beat his party.
Quote, the continued rise of populist parties in the EU's two biggest countries, even though it was not matched in the rest of the bloc, will make it harder for centrist parties to run the Union's powerful institutions in Brussels without courting the support of nationalistic parties once considered beyond the pale.
In France, the surge of the populist right was so strong that, to widespread surprise, Mr. Macron announced that fresh elections to the National Assembly will be held on June 30th and July 7th.
As the vote for the European Parliament, which had been expected to be the last national ballot ahead of the presidential election of 2027, Marine Le Pen's national rally was projected to have scored nearly 32% of the vote, more than double the share secured by Mr. Macron's party.
Which it had beaten only merrily five years ago.
Add to that another 5% or so for Reconquest, a migrant bashing far-right outfit, whose lead candidate is Ms.
Le Pen's niece, Marianne Maréchal, and the hard right now looks like the country's dominant political force.
Right in the middle of Europe.
In France.
In Germany, the ruling coalition also fared abysmally.
All three of its component parties were beaten by the Nationalist Alternative for Germany despite a slew of scandals enveloping the party and its top candidate during the campaign.
It was even shortly before the election.
when it was kicked out of the EU level alliance with the national reality and others.
The social democrats of Olaf Scholz, the chancellor, fell to their worst score in a national election in almost 150 years of existence.
So we're going to talk to our expert on the EU in just a second, but I just want to add a little bit, a couple more facts to set the context for this discussion.
Here from Arnaud Bertrand, who's an excellent analyst of EU politics, yesterday, quote, he notes this, Le Pen got more than twice more votes as Macron in the EU elections in France, 31.5% of the votes to 14.5%.
The brown on the map represents the French localities where the far right led, which is virtually everywhere.
everywhere, which led Macron to dissolve the French parliament.
The French will vote again, which could lead to a cohabitation situation whereby the government and prime minister are from a different party than the president.
So there's a distinct possibility that as early as July, France will be led by a Le Pen government.
So that gives you the basics for what happened in the election and some of what led to it.
But we are delighted to be able to have a true scholar and an expert who has been studying through her research and scholarship, not only the current nature of EU politics, but also all kinds of European history as well.
She is Professor Sherry Berman, who is a political scientist on the faculty of Barnard College at Columbia University.
Her scholarship is focused on European history and EU politics, the development of democracy, populism, and fascism, and the history of the left.
From 2009 to 2012, Professor Berman served as chair of the Barnard Political Science Department and then again in the fall of 2021, as well as chair of the Council on European Studies.
Her most recent book is entitled, quote, Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe.
"From the Ancient Regime to the Present Day," published in 2019.
And she is also the author of a op-ed that was published just yesterday entitled, "How Serious is Europe's Anti-Democratic Threat?" published in Project Syndicate.
So it's very obvious that she is in a very excellent position to help us understand these elections and the dynamics that led to them Professor Berman, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.
I know there's a lot of confusion, a lot of uncertainty about this election, and we are thrilled to have you here.
Thanks for taking the time.
My pleasure.
So let me just start by asking this.
There's obviously a lot of discourse surrounding this election, a lot of attempts to try and understand it, but at the same time, EU parliamentary elections are notoriously sparsely voted for, just like a lot of primaries and off-year elections are.
How much meaning do you think can be derived from these results?
So that's a great question because you're right.
Up until fairly recently, these elections got many fewer voters to the polls than national elections did.
That's begun to change.
And in fact, anyone who was following the news in Europe would have seen much more attention paid to these elections Much more attention on the news, much more attention online, much more debate among the parties themselves about the election and its consequences.
So that has begun to change.
And so these elections are somewhat different than previous ones.
And the election participation level was up somewhat.
I do not think it is any longer correct To see these elections as distinct from national elections.
As you said, it's no longer the case that folks will often vote one way in the European elections and then another way in the national elections.
The kind of standard line was that You more often saw protest votes at the European elections because the stakes were lower and more moderate votes at the national level.
That has begun to change.
And so I think these election results are not bad reflection of public opinion in the countries overall.
One of the points you made in the article that you published that I just referenced, and I should say, as I said, it's important not to overstate the tumultuous nature of these results because the kind of status quo party did eventually get a majority, although clearly it's important not to overstate the tumultuous nature of these results because the kind of status quo party One of the things you emphasized was that at least in Germany and France and the Netherlands, These election results didn't come out of nowhere.
They were kind of a part of events leading up to it that you could almost predict.
And I just want to read this one paragraph that you wrote.
Quote, right-wing populist forces have indeed enjoyed remarkable success in recent years.
In 2022, the Brothers of Italy became the largest party in Italy, elevating its leader, Giorgia Maloney, to the premiership.
The Sweden Democrats have become the country's second largest party and now have a dominant position in the right-wing government.
In France, national rallies Marine Le Pen achieved her best result yet in the 2022 election.
And then you refer to Geert Wilder's victory in the Netherlands and the Finns party placed second in the Finnish election.
Now, I want to get to in a minute whether there are differences in the dynamics driving this in each country.
But before I get to that, Can you say whether it is concerns about immigration or concerns about economic difficulties or kind of a general animosity toward EU leadership that is driving the rise of this right-wing populism?
What do you see as its causes?
So, So I'll take that last question first.
So I think the answer to that question is all of the above.
So if you look at the issues that European voters are most concerned about, the ones that you mentioned very much come out on top in almost all European countries.
That is to say immigration and economic concerns, jobs, Economic insecurity, social welfare state, those kinds of things.
So people are concerned about both economic and about immigration related issues.
But also, you know, sort of on top of that is the other factor that you mentioned, which is a kind of resentment of or a disillusionment with the ability of what you might call mainstream or establishment Politicians and parties to deal with these issues.
So it's one thing to say, look voters have a series of concerns and demands.
And then it's another thing to say, well, those concerns and demands lead them to vote for, let's say, right-wing populists as opposed to traditional Social Democrats or Christian Democrats.
Clearly, they are voting for populists because they believe that the parties that, you know, have that establishment history were not doing their job.
That is to say, they were not dealing with the economic and immigration-related challenges that they see their countries facing.
Just to focus in on that point a little bit, in terms of the role immigration is playing.
Because I do think it's often assumed by American analysts, looking at it through kind of American lens, that the reason right-wing populism is increasing is because of concern about, and even hatred for, this increase in immigration that we've seen in Europe.
And that that concern of, or anger toward, immigration is in turn fueled by racism, white nationalism, and the like.
It is interesting because as recently as, you know, 15 years ago, the standard left-wing position in the U.S.
and throughout Europe was to be a little bit opposed or even a lot opposed to immigration on the grounds that it would drive down wages for American workers and the like.
And it's sort of recent that this fear of immigration has been put through a kind of racism prison.
But one of the things you also wrote in this article that I just want to ask you about, you say, There is not much cross-national correlation between levels of racism or xenophobia and populism success in a given country.
Some countries with low levels of racism and xenophobia, like Sweden, have large populist parties, whereas some countries with higher levels of racism and xenophobia, like Ireland and Portugal, do not.
And as a general matter, racism and xenophobia have declined in almost all Western societies over the past decades, while support for right-wing populism has grown.
So is, in your view, and it seems like it is, but maybe you can elaborate on this, the view in the United States that anti-immigration sentiment is primarily driven by racism, do you think that's overstated?
I do think that's OK.
That's not to say that racism and xenophobia don't exist and that it's not driving some voters in Europe and certainly in the United States.
But stopping there really misses, as you mentioned, both the cross-national differences in support.
There are countries that, you know, no matter how many polls you take, come out quite low on these sentiments and yet still have very large levels of support for right-wing populist parties and also the overtime dynamic, which a lot of people also don't seem fully aware of.
That is to say that, you know, almost everywhere in the West, these kinds of sentiments have declined, not as much as they should, of course, but they have declined at the same time as support for these parties is going on.
So to stop your explanation there is just, it's too easy and it's also empirically inaccurate.
So what we have to do is we have to layer on a more sophisticated understanding of what voters' concerns really are.
And if you dig deeper into concerns about immigration, in particular, they tend to focus on two-year-old voters.
Two types of things that you've already mentioned.
One is straightforward economic concerns, which is why, as you said, the left was really quite hesitant about immigration up until a generation ago.
Jobs are scarce.
Economic insecurity has increased.
Access to government resources has become more difficult.
And in those kinds of situations, it's very easy to make people look at newcomers to the country and see them as taking up resources and using community institutions that they feel very concerned about.
So there is tons of research that shows that in these kinds of difficult economic situations where people feel that they're in some kind of zero-sum competition, it's much harder to gain acceptance for immigration.
There is also some other concerns that while I would not consider to be racism or xenophobia straightforward, do relate to...
sort of levels of social change.
These are concerns that I would put more correctly, I would say, under the rubric of assimilation or integration.
There's much easier for people to accept newcomers when they feel like those newcomers are willing to respect national traditions, play by the rules of the game, accept the rules rule of law, these kinds of things.
So these are not, should not be, I think, conflated with racism and xenophobia, both because they are not and also because understanding these differences points to different ways of dealing with them.
Absolutely.
One of the points you've made, both in that article and I've seen you make it elsewhere in other writings and things you've done, that actually surprised me a little bit just based on press coverage in the US is that other than the AFD in Germany, which is just its own, you know, sort of very extremist manifestation that by and large sort of very extremist manifestation that by and large these, what we once call fringe, far right, even proto-fascist parties in Europe have to a large extent moderated.
And even kind of integrated themselves into mainstream.
I remember when Georgia Maloney was elected and it was the headlines everywhere in the United States where she's a new Mussolini, she's a fascist, Italian democracy is over.
And then in a very short amount of time, she announced support for the war in Ukraine, kind of embraced a lot of EU policies, made clear she doesn't intend to be revolutionary, at least internationally.
And you don't hear that anymore.
In what respects have these right-wing parties generally, other than the one in Germany, moderated?
So many of them, but not all, and the AFD is the key, most important example, many of them have moderated.
Meloni is a good example.
I mean, as you mentioned, when she was elected, there were headlines on both sides of the Atlantic about a new fascism in Italy.
That term is still used, fascism, with regard to Marine Le Pen and the national rally.
I think this is inaccurate.
And also dangerous.
Dangerous because when you call someone a fascist, there's no real way to sort of cooperate with them and their supporters become beyond the pale.
That is to say people that it's not worth reaching out to.
The fact that these parties, some of them, I would say Maloney is a great example.
Marine Le Pen's party.
Anybody who's old enough to remember Marine Le Pen's father knows that there has been a very significant shift between her and her father.
Now, that doesn't mean that one shouldn't be concerned.
It does mean that one should recognize that shift.
And if one is a small d Democrat, one should welcome that and want to encourage it.
You may still very much disagree with the policies that she stands for, but that's fine democracy.
The question is, is she still pushing for racist, unconstitutional policies?
If she's not, then, you know, she is part of a legitimate democratic field of competition.
There's a big difference between, as I said, Marine Le Pen and her father's party, the National Front.
There's a big difference between Maloney and some of the neo-fascist movements her party grew out of.
There's a big difference between the Sweden Democrats today and the neo-fascist movements that they came out of.
Again, I'm not saying one should not be wary But one should also recognize the difference.
Throwing them all under the label of fascist or even far right, for that matter, I think at this point obscures more than it clarifies.
Yeah, it's so interesting how Marine Le Pen has very aggressively, very explicitly distanced herself, not just from her father, but from his ideology.
They've expelled some of those old members and really worked hard to create this new identity.
The passage from the article that I referenced talked about these events that led up to this EU election that kind of were a harbinger of the results that we saw and probably more future events.
When I think, though, about animosity toward Brussels and to EU institutions and just kind of a general anger towards them, I, of course, first think about the 2016 vote in the United Kingdom where they approved Brexit, where they just left the EU.
They didn't even, like, limit the control of Brussels over it.
They just left.
I know in some sense British politics and the UK itself are a little bit different from European politics because of geography and history and the like, but did you see, do you see Brexit as a similar dynamic to what is driving this rise of populism that we're now discussing as well?
Well, I think first, as you said, it's important to note that the British have always been a little bit different.
They joined the EU very late and somewhat reluctantly, and so that they were the last in of the big countries and the first out is perhaps not that surprising.
Personally, I think that was a mistake on the part of the Brits, but I'm not British, so my view is completely and utterly irrelevant.
It was not an anti-democratic decision.
It may be one that some people think is unwise, but it is not anti-democratic.
I would note that parties like the National Rally in France, Marine Le Pen's party and the further right parties in Italy, including Maloney initially, were quite EU-skeptical.
They have moderated on that as well because it serves their interests.
They recognize that their citizens As much as they complain, often legitimately, about EU policies or about the continued democratic deficit, as some people refer to it in Europe, generally people benefit more than they do not.
And so while criticism may be quite sharp, demands to actually leave are really quite low.
So they are reflecting their population's Ambivalent, I would say, attitude sometimes towards the EU, but they're no longer calling for leaving the EU.
And that is in line, I think, with what their populations, by polling all over many years, seems to indicate.
Let me ask a little bit about the differences, if there are even any non-trivial ones, between right-wing populist parties throughout Europe, other than, again, the ADF.
As you might know, I live in Brazil.
I've lived in Brazil for a long time.
My husband was a member of the Brazilian Congress, so I became very involved in Brazilian politics.
And I remember when Jair Bolsonaro was first running for president, and then it began looking like he would win.
The American press labeled him the Trump of the tropics.
And although I understood why they kind of needed shorthand to convey to Americans who this person was, and there were some obvious similarities.
Stylistically, Bolsonaro clearly was copying Trump strategically and rhetorically in a lot of ways.
It was driving me crazy because in reality, their ideology is so radically different in so many ways.
Bolsonaro is kind of this throwback to the Cold War right, obsessed with communism, very, very focused on social conservatism in a way that Trump isn't.
And, you know, those differences get lost because it's hard to convey the nuances.
What about in the EU, again, other than Germany, is there some kind of very common connective ideological tissue that connects these parties in a way that makes the local parts of them almost trivial?
So, the parties do vary quite a bit by country, as you would imagine.
As you said, you know, sort of, it was wrong to conflate Bolsonaro with Trump.
It's wrong to conflate Gert Wilders with Marine Le Pen.
But sure, there are some similarities.
I would say one thing that really does differentiate most, not all, but most of these right-wing populist parties from their, you know, counterpart in the U.S., if you want to throw Trump and the Republicans in there, is that these parties, most of them, move to the left on economic issues A generation or two ago.
So Marine Le Pen's party is not a far-right party on economic issues.
Her father was.
He was a Thatcherite or a Reaganite.
But she is a center or center-left figure, as is her party, on economic issues.
She sells the party very much as the champion of the left behinds.
Whether you agree that that's true or not is irrelevant.
That's how she presents herself.
That's where her policies on economics.
The Sweden Democrats in Sweden criticized the Social Democrats for having abandoned their defense of the welfare state.
These parties are really quite different from their American counterparts on economic issues.
You know, they do have some connective tissue.
I would say their issue, the issue that they are most associated with is immigration and their opposition to it.
And having changed the way that opposition is phrased over the years, having moved away from sort of direct racial or xenophobic opposition to immigration to claiming, in any case, that their opposition to immigration is based on a purported unwillingness by immigrants to assimilate and conflicts over economic resources.
Whether that's true or not, that is what they say.
And that is clearly a connective tissue among almost all these parties.
Again, with the caveat that there are some like the AFD and certainly the East European counterparts, which I would put in a separate category, that are really much on these issues than the mainstream, if you can call it that now, far-right populist parties in Western Europe are.
One of the, I think, really fascinating aspects of these election results, especially in the two biggest and most important countries, France and Germany, is just how kind of segregated and separate the various political groups are.
Not unlike, I think, the United States, where the vast middle of the country and the south are hardcore red states, and then the coastal states are blue states.
If you look at the German map of the voting, I think we have this on the screen, What you see is that the AFD's popularity was overwhelmingly from what was once called East Germany.
In fact, I think they were pretty, by a good distance, the most popular party if you just looked at East Germany.
And they had a lot less support in Western Germany, especially in Western cities.
What explains the ADF's extraordinary popularity compared to the other parties in East Germany?
So that's right.
I mean, the AFD is exceptional in a number of ways.
And in the German context, it's exceptional because it still retains a very, very heavy eastern base.
Its support has expanded somewhat to the western parts of Germany, but it remains a party that is disproportionately successful in the east.
In fact, it is the most popular party in many of those eastern states.
And that is because folks in those states, A, have a very different history than folks in the West.
They did not live through West Germany's post-war history, the reckoning with the Nazi past, the democratic norms that developed during that time.
And they also feel very much still like they have been sort of, to use a common term, left behind over the past decades or two.
That, you know, these are regions that have suffered a lot of They are regions that still remain to some degree poorer than the West.
And so this is a place where anti-establishment kinds of voices gain much more resonance than they do in the West.
But that map is really quite telling.
But note that in West Germany, the most popular party, the plurality, not the majority party, is the very traditional Right, that was Angela Merkel's party, for example.
Just to tie this a little bit to the United States, and it's oversimplification, I realize, but I think there's a lot of validity to it, which is that in these places that are kind of far from the nation's capital and far from the concentrated centers of power like Wall Street and Silicon Valley,
There is a very strong perception, the anti-establishment sentiment comes from this notion that the people in power basically harbor contempt for the beliefs and values but also the material interests of all these people in the middle of the country who have this anti-establishment sentiment.
Is that true as well in the EU writ large and in East Germany specifically?
Oh, absolutely.
That kind of resentment at highly educated cosmopolitan elites is a central part of the appeal of these parties.
So in the German case, for instance, again, I'll pick that one, even though it has, you know, some exceptional qualities.
The AFD's main target is always the Greens.
Not so much the Social Democrats, the sort of traditional, albeit now really diminished party of the sort of working class, but the Greens, right?
Why?
Because the Greens are the party of the highly educated, cosmopolitan urban elites.
So they make a very strong effort to kind of constantly attack the Greens and their policies.
They say that they are out of touch.
They don't care about the quote-unquote, you know, sort of average People and you know, so if you could imagine the United States with a proportional representation, as opposed to a majoritarian electoral system like we have, the Greens would be the party of, you know, the sort of educated elites living in coalitions.
in university towns, that kind of thing.
So you see this very much play itself out in Europe.
It's just that these people have now segregated themselves in different parties as opposed to being clumped together into big ones as they are in the United States.
Let me ask you a similar question about France, where it seems to me at least, you know, having not studied this nearly as in depth as you to put that mildly, that there is a similar dynamic, especially when it comes to the United States.
I think the conventional wisdom of the United States is that the Democratic Party is becoming much more the party of affluent suburbanites and wealthy centers of power, lots of exceptions obviously, whereas the Republicans are really trying to become, let's call it the party of a multiracial working class.
Not just the white working class, but the multiracial working class.
But you can't really say that poor people in general have abandoned the Democratic Party because there's a lot of very poor people for all kinds of different non-economic reasons, including race, who traditionally vote Democrat.
There was this interesting passage from an article in The Guardian, and this is September 2023, obviously before yesterday's election, by Julia Cage and Thomas Piketty trying to explain French politics from that perspective of who it is that is anti-establishment and in favor of Marine Le Pen and who still supports Macron.
And they said the following, quote, "The French political landscape can be described as follows: low-income urban voters, who tend to be mainly service industry employees and tenants, vote prominently for the left, while working-class voters outside the main cities, who are mainly blue-collar workers and homeowners, are more who are mainly blue-collar workers and homeowners, are more likely to vote for parties of the far right."
If that's true, if you agree with that, how is it that kind of working-class people, who, at least in the United States, the Democratic Party always claimed to represent, obviously the EU party, the British party is called the Labour Party.
How is it that so many of these working-class voters are now turning to the far right because they believe they represent their interests?
Well, we see, as you noted, a very similar dynamic in the U.S., right?
So, the white working class, if we stick to just the white working class vote in the U.S., is also white, right?
So, the Republicans are getting disproportionate working class votes from folks who are living in non-urban areas, and evangelical voters, right?
If you are to look at sort of white working class voters who are secular, who live in whatever, New York or Los Angeles, those folks still have a fairly strong tendency to vote for the Democratic Party.
But so then the question becomes, well, why?
Why do we see the tendency of, you know, whatever, low income, low educated voters and others to vote for, you know, these right wing populist parties?
I mean, we could go back to the issues that you brought up at the beginning.
I mean, I think they're applicable generally, right?
People who have economic and social and cultural grievances.
I would say when you're looking at working class voters, though, The other thing to throw in is the changing profile of the left, right?
Which is these people, you know, a generation ago would have disproportionately voted for in Europe, as Piketty and his colleagues say, they would have voted for whatever, socialist parties, labor parties, social democratic parties.
Those parties now no longer have those voters at all.
They really lost them gradually over time and then suddenly after the 1990s when they really kind of abandoned their traditional economic profile and ran headlong to embrace a kind of softer, gentler version of neoliberalism, right?
What was called third-wave politics in Europe or progressive neoliberalism in the United States.
And what you see after that is that working class voters no longer see these left-wing parties as standing for them, as their champions, as their natural, so to speak, political homes.
And so, you know, these parties no longer have the ability to capture or attract particularly these working class voters the way they would have during the postwar decades.
And so those voters were particularly up for grabs.
And now in Western Europe, even more so than in the United States, I would add, many of these right-wing populist parties are the largest working class parties in their countries.
That is to say, the parties that receive a plurality, sometimes more, of working class votes.
Yeah it's fascinating and same in Brazil where you have all these left-wing parties and politicians who speak incessantly about representing the poor people and the working class and yet all their votes and donations come from highly educated primarily white sectors of the city and the country.
There's this big breach between the left on the one hand and the people they claim to represent on the other throughout the democratic world.
I want to ask you about that because we've been spending time and we usually do in other contexts as well when we talk about how And of course, the question is, why can't it lead to left-wing populism?
Or at least, why isn't it?
And there are some figures in Europe who I find really interesting.
One of whom is the longtime German leftist, Sarah Wagenknecht.
We've had her on our show several times and interviewed her.
Who basically went to war with the left, of which she was always a part.
In fact, you could call her the leader of the left in Germany if you wanted.
And she basically split from the left over things like attacking them over an obsession with very kind of academic and obscure cultural issues that alienate ordinary people.
Not necessarily because they're hostile to it, but because they don't find it relevant to their lives.
She's become more anti-immigrant for sure.
She's against the war in Ukraine and NATO and institutionalist policies.
And she started a new party.
It just got almost 6%, won six seats in the EU, a fairly decent showing.
But then you even have in Slovakia, the prime minister who just got almost killed and assassinated, Robert Fischer, who was a longtime left liberal of the very mainstream kind, who also did a similar trajectory against immigration, against the war in Ukraine.
I mean, And then you could kind of put maybe Jean-Luc Melenchon in France in that pile as well though with lots of differences.
Is there any real viable path for the left to capitalize on populism and anti-establishment sentiment using this sort of politics?
Well, I will say that, you know, especially since you're, you know, based in Brazil, you know that left-wing populism is the standard or the more popular, so to speak, form of populism historically in Latin America.
So the fact that we're talking about right-wing populism because we're focused on, you know, sort of the aftermath of the European elections, that makes perfect sense because that is the dominant form of populism.
in Europe and indeed the West today.
But it's not the only form of populism, although that term is really very broad.
So one wants to be careful what one means when one says it.
But generally when one talks about left-wing populism, there are many parts of the world where that would be, again, the dominant form of populism.
And historically that was indeed the case in Latin America We recently had an election in Mexico where a party that many people consider to be a left-wing populist party, you know, its presidential candidate won and won.
To get back to the question of why, I mean, look, there's a lot of reasons for that.
Figures like Wagenknecht and Melenchon, they are problematic for a variety of reasons for voters, which, you know, you may or may not want to discuss further.
But I I would say a lot of this does... Actually, sorry to interrupt, but I would love to hear a little bit about that, actually.
So, look, if you look at Wagner Connect, she has been a better noir for both parts, you know, many parts of the left for, you know, a generation now.
And I think there's a lot of distrust of her and her motives, both on, you know, among mainstream parties and, of course, among now her former colleagues in The particular package that she is trying to put together, which is not just far left on economic issues, but also really very conservative on a variety of social and cultural issues.
If you look, for instance, at the votes for the EU election, which they now have out, you can watch the vote streams.
She's really trying to and did pull a significant number of votes from the AFD.
Now, that may be good because she is certainly more of a small D Democrat, I would say, than the AFD is, but it does give you some sense of What kind of profile she is giving to voters and why, therefore, that might be of somewhat limited reach.
I think there is a strong, there is a very strong plurality, perhaps even majority support for limiting, let's say, immigration in Germany, particularly illegal immigration.
But dog whistling towards some of the things that I think folks think she is.
This is all super illuminating.
I just have a couple more questions out of respect for your time.
I actually have a ton more, but I'm just gonna ask a couple more.
Ursula von der Leyen, who is the president of the EU, is seeking a new term, re-election of five years.
And it is interesting that we're spending so much time talking about this growing anti-establishment sentiment, when to me, in so many ways, she's kind of like the living, breathing embodiment of establishment politics.
Not only in her ideological beliefs, but just in her kind of trajectory and her comportment, all of that.
She's just like, you couldn't invent in a lab a more establishment politician than she.
What do you, even though these status quo mainstream parties do have a majority, it's not, it's much bigger than the amount of votes she needs.
Do you regard her re-election as close to certain or is there a decent chance that she won't be able to get those votes?
So she, I mean, as you mentioned, the coalition that had supported her in the past is somewhat diminished, but still has the votes in Parliament to elect her.
But, you know, these coalitions are not completely stable, right?
So before the election, she was already kind of, you know, making nice with Maloney in particular, who has been You know, a fairly strong supporter of the EU, you know, fairly strong supporter of the EU's efforts in Ukraine and elsewhere.
And so she's clearly understands that, as is the case in national parliaments, as the party spectrum has fragmented, it's no longer enough to kind of get The support of the mainstream parties behind you, right?
So you want to have some sort of insurance policy, so to speak.
So if she could potentially rely on support from some of those far-right parties that are seen to have moderated, that would give her an alternative way of passing policies that she might not be able to get support for otherwise.
So for instance, the Green The Greens section of the EU Parliament said they simply will not, under any circumstances, work with far-right parties.
So if she is trying to pass something that, for instance, she cannot get support from the Greens on, you know, she may have no choice but to look to parties in that kind of, you know, whatever you want to call it, far-right grouping.
In particularly, what is going to be contentious going forward is that Green New Deal, because the Green parties really did suffer a significant loss at this election.
And those environmental policies have been the subject of some very serious national level protests, farmers' protests, things like that.
So figuring out what to do about that is going to be a major challenge for her going ahead. - So you mentioned Ukraine.
I just want to ask you about that because the German Green Party, for example, is one of the most vocal supporters of NATO and U.S.
financing of this war, prolonging the war.
And so is van der Leyen.
She's been steadfast in her views on that.
But it seems like A common thread of almost all of these right-wing parties is growing opposition to involvement in the war in Ukraine for whatever their motives.
I mentioned Robert Fischl in Slovakia, who really ran on a platform of ending support for Ukraine, even though Slovakia, with its proximity to Russia, has been so pro-Ukraine.
What do you see the role of that war and opposition to continuing NATO's involvement in it to have been a factor in this election?
So there are some parties, as you mentioned, like FICO in Slovakia, that have been very wary, indeed opposed to continuing support for Ukraine.
Obviously, you know, Orban is the kind of, you know, cheerleader of this particular group.
That particular position is less popular in Western Europe, as you know, has been mentioned already.
Melania is sort of, you know, whatever, on board with supporting support for Ukraine.
Even Marine Le Pen's party is kind of now relatively neutral on that, whereas before, you know, she had been accused of being a sort of, you know, closet Putin supporter.
That does not go along with her desire to moderate her party.
has essentially disappeared from prominence in her platform.
The Scandinavians are pretty hysterical about Russia because it's on their border.
So there are definitely parties that are wary of that.
And the person that you mentioned before, Sarah Vagunknecht, would be a great example of that.
She has been, along with the AFD, the most prominent voice for rolling back support for Ukraine, trying to push for a ceasefire, that kind of thing.
And I would say in the German context, that does put, along with the comments that I mentioned earlier, in a very specific slice of the German electorate that might limit her ability to attract more votes from the, let's say, mainstream left.
All right, my last question, just quickly.
President Macron, in response to this election, dissolved the legislature, the parliament, and called for snap elections.
It kind of seems counterintuitive right after an election where your own party gets crushed to then want to have another election.
I'm sure he's very well aware of that.
That question has good motives for doing so.
What are those motives?
What is he hoping to achieve with these elections?
Well, I'm a political science professor.
I am not, you know, I do not have a crystal ball.
So I do not know what was going on in his mind.
I will say that is quite a risky move that he had made, that he made.
He did not need to do this.
Why he did this, I again, I cannot see inside his head.
So I will try to, you know, sort of conjecture as best as possible.
He is a risk taker and has a lot of faith in his ability, I think, to convince the electorate that he is the best choice and that the national rally represents a bad choice.
I think he is hoping to be able to once again as he has in the past, although with diminishing effectiveness over time, rally all the pro-Republican, what you might call in the United States pro-Democrat, small-D Democrat, forces behind him when it comes to a choice between, you know, sort of allowing the national rally to gain a dominant sort of allowing the national rally to gain a dominant place in the parliament and therefore to be able to name the prime minister.
I think he thinks that he can still convince people that that would be a bad idea.
But, you know, as the quote that I think you put up earlier in the broadcast says, should he lose that bet, he himself does not lose the presidency.
He is a president who is elected independently.
He will have to cohabitate with the prime minister from the national rally, most presumably Jordan Bartela.
And, you know, that won't be the first time that has happened.
He is somewhat paying a price for having a party that is a party more in name only.
He is a party that is really a vehicle for him individually.
And he does not, you know, it does not have a platform or a profile significantly separate from him.
So insofar as people are fed up with him, his party is going to pay that price.
Professor Berman, this was super illuminating, so refreshing after being subjected to days of American punditry that has a knowledge of these issues that are worse than superficial.
So I really appreciate your taking the time to come on and help us understand all of this.
Thanks very much.
It's my pleasure.
Have a good evening.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all their major podcasting platforms.
If you rate, review, and follow our show there, it really does help spread the visibility of the program.
Finally, every Tuesday and Thursday night, once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble platform, where we have our live interactive aftershow, where we take your questions, prioritize people who have critiques, and try and respond to those.
We also hear suggestions for future guests and for future shows.
And that after show is available only for members of our local community.
So if you want to join, which gives you access not only to those twice a week after shows, but also to multiple interactive features we have there that permit us to engage with you throughout the week.
It's the place we first publish or the only place where we publish the written professionalized transcripts of every program we broadcast here.
It's where we publish first our original written reporting as we did on Friday with our new story about Dr. Fauci and his role in drug experimentation, dog experimentation.
And most of all, it is the community on which we rely to support the independent journalism that we do here every night.
Simply click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly to that community.
For those of you watching this show, we are, as always, very appreciative and we hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m.
