A Revolution that Never Comes

In Europe, the Right wins but is never allowed to take power. There's a certain degree of similarity here, where the Republican establishment exists mostly to defang the American Right by giving them someone to vote for, but arranging to lose key votes (see Obamacare, John McCain; or the SAVE Act, John Thune). The powerbrokers claim to be on the side of the people, but they're really on the side of the powerful: that's how they got where they are, and how they stay where they are. 

In Europe, it's worse. At least we get some decent political appointees, until the next election at least. 

Last Sunday was supposed to settle the question of whether Europe’s populist right can govern, and instead it sharpened a different one: Whether the establishment can keep winning without solving anything. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally dominated the first round of municipal elections — finishing first in at least 75 communes, roughly seven times its 2020 number — only to be beaten back in the second-round runoffs by the familiar mechanism of the front républicain, losing Marseille by fifteen points, squandering a thirteen-point lead in Toulon, and watching Paris stay comfortably in Socialist hands for a twenty-sixth consecutive year. The French firewall held, for now.

In Germany, no such firewall exists in the architecture of the ballot, only in the minds of party leaders. In Rhineland-Palatinate, the AfD more than doubled its vote share to 19.5 per cent — the party’s best result ever in a western German state — and among voters aged 18 to 24 it was the most popular party outright. Among manual workers, it reached 30 per cent; in some Westerwald constituencies it approached half of all votes cast. The SPD, which had governed the state for thirty-five unbroken years, lost nearly ten points and was displaced by the CDU. And yet, just as in France, the result will change nothing in the short term: All parties maintain the cordon sanitaire, a grand coalition will be formed, and the voters who chose the AfD will once again be governed by a coalition that exists primarily to exclude them. 

Likewise in the UK.

The same fault line runs through Britain, where the post-Brexit immigration surge – non-EU net migration reaching record highs under the very government that promised to “take back control” – has made a mockery of democratic consent. It runs through Germany, through the Netherlands, through Austria.

At some point this delegitimizes the democratic process entirely; it can't be legitimate if it's just another method of control, instead of a method of self-governance.