The Imposition Of A Quarantine Against Populism Must Be Resisted !
For them populism is a disease for us it is democracy in action
Placing elected representatives of populist political parties under an ideologically inspired quarantine is the principal response of the European Union establishment to the recent electoral success of their opponents.
They call the imposition of their politically inspired attempt to cancel populism, ‘cordon sanitaire’. The aim of a cordon sanitaire is build a firewall around political parties that they wish to isolate and deprive of influence. For example, recently the mainstream centrist and leftish political parties decided to place political representatives belonging to the Patriots for Europe, and the Europe of Sovereign Nations party fractions in the EU Parliament under quarantine. Through drawing a cordon sanitaire against these populist parties they aim to prevent them from possessing any influence over the running of the institutions of the EU.
The justification for imposing a cordon sanitaire against opponents is that they represent a threat to democracy. The imposition of a cordon sanitaire sends out the message that it targets are not fellow parliamentarians or colleagues but enemies who have no place in the EU Parliament. In the name of protecting democracy the authors of a cordon sanitaire claim they have the right to adopt a form of behaviour that seeks to expel democratically elected representatives from public life. They believe that they have the right to correct the behaviour of millions of citizens who made the mistake of voting for the wrong kind of parties.
The irony of cancelling democratically elected politicians in the name of democracy is rarely considered by advocates of cordon sanitaire.
The cordon sanitaire was originally used in the 19th century to protect a healthy region from contamination by people who lived in a disease-ridden region nearby. They were seen as ‘extreme and exceptional forms of isolation by land and sea in the threat of an epidemic’[i]. The use of a metaphor associated with the need to insulate a healthy population from being infected with a dangerous disease to refer to a political manoeuvre against opponents is not incidental. It is motivated by the impulse to frame populist movements as the vehicles of a disease to the body politic.
The target of a cordon sanitaire are not merely the elected representatives of populist parties but the citizens that voted for them. A cordon sanitaire aims to send out the signal to the millions of voters that it is pointless to vote for populist parties because they will not be able to exercise any influence in parliament. In a sense a cordon sanitaire seeks deprive the citizens who voted for populist parties from being able to give voice to their concerns.
Advocates of cordon sanitaire possess a deep mistrust of democratic decision making and believe that they possess the right to correct the behaviour of the people who voted the ‘wrong way’. Their use of a disease related metaphor calls into question the integrity of democracy itself. That is why when they express their hatred for populism they frequently regard denounce populism as akin to a virus.
The diseasing of populist parties is systematically promoted by the mainstream media and their political supporters. ‘I think what we have at the moment is a populist virus’, complained former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s spin doctor, Alastair Campbell[ii]. According to a professor of politics, populism is a ‘recurrent autoimmune disease of democracy’[iii]. In recent times, populism is sometimes portrayed as a virus that is no less of a threat than Covid-19. Australian Labour politician, Andrew Leigh’s book, Existential Risk And Extreme Politics is paradigmatic in this respect. Leigh claimed that the threat of existential threats like climate change, pandemics and nuclear war are not unlike the threat posed by populist adversaries. In this scenario populism works as destructive virus with a fascist face!
The maintenance of a cordon sanitaire in the EU in underpinned by the intellectual and ideological support of the mainstream media. This media constantly communicates the claim that populist parties represent the outlook of the authoritarian movements of the 1930s. They routinely describe conservative an patriotic parties as far right or extreme right or the hard right. Some go so far as to claim that these parties are fascistic throwbacks to the bad old days of the 1930s.
The ideological demonisation of populist parties has been until recently relatively successful. However, in recent years populist parties have made serious headway throughout Europe. That is why several media outlets have started to consider if there is another way of insulating the body politic from the influence of populism. ‘Europe’s cordon sanitaire against the far right may not work’ is the title of an opinion piece in The Financial Times[iv]. The author of this article noted that the cordon sanitaire ‘has not prevented Europe’s nationalist right from building up its voter support over recent decades’.Â
A cordon sanitaire can prevent sovereigntist parties from access to positions of responsibility within the EU parliament. But evidence indicates that it cannot prevent these parties from gaining influence over the European electorate. Gone are the days when the mere invocation of the threat of the far right was sufficient to isolate populist political parties. However, voters are beginning to see through the narrative that seeks to disease the aspiration for the exercise of patriotic politics.
Sooner or later the narrative of anti-populism will lose its hegemonic influence. But we do not have time to wait for its unraveling. To really challenge the ideology that supports placing populist aspirations under a quarantine it is necessary to challenge the narrative promoted by media and the EU political establishment. Their attempt to use the label far right to discredit opponents must be challenged and neutralised by supporters of democracy.
For them populism is a disease for us it is democracy in action!
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[i] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6113753
[ii] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jul/14/alastair-campbell-on-the-populist-virus-and-why-bill-shorten-lost
[iii] John Keane ‘The Pathologies of Populism’, 29 September 2017, The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/the-pathologies-of-populism-82593
[iv] https://www.ft.com/content/30cb3fc8-b4d5-4e31-a2a4-9d47bab7b5ee
For them it is like a virus, because they constitute an ideological organism that is ill suited to its environment (reality), an organism that can easily fall apart from the intrusion of truth.
I find the term 'cordon sanitaire' particularly obnoxious. Truth has little to do with it and nor will it's now wide spread use easily abate. These two words have been weaponized.