Political repression gives a boost to populist parties; Liberty Valance
In time-honored fashion, those elites in government and media blame “extremism” and “far-right” agitators when, having been excluded from mainstream public discourse, voters turn to political parties that do articulate their views.
The reason parties like the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France are surging is precisely because the opinions they represent—hostility to uncontrolled immigration, support for traditional social and religious values, rejection of environmental eschatology—have been delegitimized by mainstream parties.
You would have thought by now that political leaders would have grasped a basic reality of democratic politics
—that you can’t beat an argument by marginalizing or silencing it, and that when you try you only make the weakness of your own arguments all the more apparent.
Gerard Baker Wall Street Journal 17 February 2025
Allison Pearson Telegraph 18 February 2025
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/18/jd-vances-hard-truths-migration-shamed-europe/
Serious Europeans were ready for tough medicine on defense spending and relations with China, and for a frank discussion of the approach to negotiations in Ukraine.
They received, instead, a lecture about the dangers decadent European democracies pose to themselves,
followed by a meeting between Vance and the leader of Alternative for Germany — the anti-NATO, anti-US, extreme-right party — just ahead of national elections next week.
All this revealed the utter contempt with which Trump views the Europeans. But it also revealed the awkward fact that Europe has made itself strategically contemptible.
The post-Cold War decline in European defense spending continued even after Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 produced but a modest uptick.
French President Emmanuel Macron summoned an emergency meeting of European leaders after the Munich debacle — only for that meeting to end in characteristically fractious, inconclusive fashion.
Hal Brands Bloomberg 19 februari 2025
Hal Brands is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.
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