The Populist Moment Has Arrived In Europe

The voters of Ireland and Portugal have shown that they have had enough of their patronising and arrogant elites

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

Last week was a great week for democracy. The people of Ireland decisively rejected the attempt by the political and cultural elites to de-legitimate the moral status of the traditional family. Last week’s Irish Referendum was an elitist project designed to empty the nation’s constitution of its moral content. The people of Ireland saw through the aim of the Referendum and stood up against the attempt to define the traditional family out of existence. A day after the result of the Referendum was announced the people of Portugal went to the polls. There, many citizens decided that they have had enough of their nation’s two main parties and voted for the populist Chega Party. Back in 2019, Chega won 1.3 per cent of the vote. It share rose to 7.2 per cent in the 2022 elections. Now it surged ahead and almost tripled its share of the vote. It received 18 per cent of the vote and it quadrupled its representation in parliament by winning 48 seats.

The electoral success of Chega indicates that finally the populist moment has arrived in Portugal too. The momentum driving Chega forward is mirrored throughout Western Europe.

The current populist moment can be interpreted as a delayed response to the top-down cultural revolution, that occurred during the late 1970s. During the 1970s new attitudes towards marriage, family life, relations between the sexes, the role of the nation and the meaning of citizenship became codified in many western societies. By the beginning of the 1980s new forms of cultural authority were established by the political elites of western society. This, so-called cultural turn is often attributed to the influence of so-called ‘cultural Marxists’ burrowing away in universities. However, what this analysis overlooked, was that right under the noses of Thatcher and Reagan, the new post-sixties cultural values were internalised by the soon-to-be members of the Anglo- American cultural elites.

In retrospect, it is evident that the anti-traditional cultural turn occurred under the watch of the Thatcher/ Reagan influenced political order. The internalisation of the new cultural values by the political establishment in the 1980s was motivated by the need to establish a new normative foundation for their authority. The new cultural oligarchy perceived themselves as mediators and gatekeepers in a globalised world where public life is subjected to influences that supposedly transcend the nation state and national control. Thatcher’s TINA did not merely pertain to the sphere of economics. The corollary of TINA in the cultural sphere was the de-nationalisation of public life and the de-legitimation of the cultural attitudes and values held by citizens. This was the era when the dogma that there is no alternative to globalisation took hold. The belittlement of sovereignty – national and popular- inspired the outlook of the new cultural establishment. In a very short period many people discovered that their long-held view of community, nation, family and the conduct of human relations was now dismissed as out-dated, irrelevant and prejudiced.

The cumulative outcome of the pathologisation of customary attitudes towards family, community and human relationships has been the crystallisation of a powerful sense of cultural insecurity in European society. During the past two- or three-decades significant section of the European public felt that they had become dispossessed of the values that they lived by and made sense to them. Many of them felt silenced and defensive about voicing their apprehensions. Consequently, they were rarely able to raise their concerns and reservations about multi-culturalism, diversity, immigration, and the sacralisation of identity politics. As against, the younger generations, who were often influenced by the cosmopolitan ethos of their schools and universities, older citizens felt defensive and culturally insecure and helpless. And those, who lived outside the culturally privileged, globalist urban neighbourhoods, perceived that their way of life was despised and scorned by representatives of cultural authority. In effect they feel that they have been made strangers in their own homes.

In recent times the cultural authority of the EU establishment and its national counterparts has been undermined by the unrestrained pace and ambition of its project of imposing a cultural revolution from above.

The project of de-nationalising public life was always resented by a significant section of the people. However, in recent times, this response has gained momentum and has become sufficiently widespread for people to realise that their dissident views are shared by a significant section of society The emergence of so called populist movements has provided an opportunity for many people to find their voice. And paradoxically the Establishment project of de-legitimating the values of citizens has rebounded on itself, to the point that it is its own legitimacy that is now under question.

Most pro-establishment commentators are reluctant to face up to the implications of the scope and nature of the current culture war in Europe. Disputes over values are more intractable than conflicts over the distribution of resources. Values pertain to the meaning of life and not even the most skilled negotiator can resolve the tension between someone who upholds a patriotic outlook and a person who despises national sentiments. It is far easier to find a compromise solution in the sphere of industrial relations than to discover a middle ground between two fundamentally different approaches to life. Values have become politicised to the point that there is little room for negotiation between two fundamentally different visions of life.

Having politicised culture in the late 1970s the political establishment has decided to de-politicise it. Why? Because its cultural policies go against the grain of public sentiment. So, it attempts to portray migration as strictly an economic issue. It frames its arguments against national sovereignty entirely in economic terms and overlooks the political and cultural drivers of the Euroscepticism. Eurocrats frequently criticise working class and populists movements for not understanding their real economic interests. Arguments that contend that supporters of populist movements are not able to grasp their true economic and class interest constitute the Eurocratic version of the classical anti-democratic ethos that has prevailed since the days of Ancient Greece. In 2024 this response to populism reflects the fear that throughout the continent – France, Austria, Italy, Span, Sweden, Holland etc – populist movements are likely to make an important electoral headway.

Hostility towards populism is communicated through the language of demophobia. Those who rejects the technocratic political centrism of Brussels are invariably denounced as far-right xenophobes. Patriotic movements are constantly accused of racism and of possessing fascist ambitions. The ideology of anti-populism relies on a rhetoric that portrays those it calls as populists as an immediate threat to a democratic and tolerant way of life. And yet the anti-populist outlook promoted by the Western European cultural and political establishment is driven by a profound sense of mistrust and often of hostility towards democracy and towards the people. The emergence of this anti-democratic animus within elite politics is one of the most disturbing developments of our era.

The Eurocrats control all the important institutions of West European societies. But the one thing that they cannot control is the outcome of referenda and of elections. They may control the media and the institutions of culture, but we have a powerful weapon at our disposal and that is democracy.

The populist moment has arrived and its not going away any time soon!

If you are in Brussels come to the conference ‘Is The Future Populist ?’ —It is organised by MCC Brussels on 21 March

On 26/27 April check out the National Conservatism Conference : Preserving the Nation-State in Europe, in Brussels