National Populism

Transcript National Populism Professor Matthew Goodwin Politics and International Relations, University of Kent, Associate Fellow, Europe Programme, Chatham House 24 October 2018 The views expressed in this document are the sole responsibility of the speaker(s) and participants, and do not necessarily reflect the view of Chatham House, its staff, associates or Council. Chatham House is independent and owes no allegiance to any government or to any political body. It does not take institutional positions on policy issues. This document is issued on the understanding that if any extract is used, the author(s)/speaker(s) and Chatham House should be credited, preferably with the date of the publication or details of the event. Where this document refers to or reports statements made by speakers at an event, every effort has been made to provide a fair representation of their views and opinions. The published text of speeches and presentations may differ from delivery. © The Royal Institute of International Affairs, 2018. 10 St James’s Square, London SW1Y 4LE T +44 (0)20 7957 5700 F +44 (0)20 7957 5710 www.chathamhouse.org Patron: Her Majesty The Queen Chairman: Stuart Popham QC Director: Dr Robin Niblett Charity Registration Number: 208223 2 National Populism Professor Matthew Goodwin First part, thanks [applause]. Well, thank you very much. There’s the book, it’s over there, and it’s very cheap. My mother loves it. Let’s get into what we’re talking about. So, mainly Europe and the US, and I think we all accept that Europe’s in a very fragile position at the moment, that we are seeing significant political changes, you might argue, unprecedented political change, and I wanted to start with Sweden. If you were following the recent election in Sweden, I think it really reflected three key trends that are sweeping through many Western democracies. The first was the record result for the national populist Sweden Democrats. The second was that this was the worst result for the Social Democrats, since 1908, and the third is that we saw a lot of smaller parties doing well, as the party system begins to fragment. And those three things you can see in a lot of other states, but, in particular, it’s this issue of national populism that we’re looking at in the book and we think is particularly significant, when you consider where Europe and North America are heading in the coming years. These are familiar faces: Marine Le Pen, Heinz-Christian Strache in Austria, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Matteo Salvini, who have each done very well, at recent elections, challenging conventional wisdom. But what’s interesting for me, at least, as someone who’s worked in this area for quite a while, we’re now also seeing these movements breaking through in democracies that we were told, in the 1990s, we’d never really have successful populist movements. The Netherlands and Sweden, they were historically liberal, very tolerant societies. The United Kingdom, strong institutions, the civic culture and Germany, because of the legacy of the Second World War and what we thought were strong social norms against populism. But each of those democracies has seen a significant national populist rebellion, the AFB being now in 15 or 16 State Parliaments, more than 90 seats in the Bundestag. Geert Wilders having quite a clear impact on the policy agenda in the Netherlands, if not winning an election himself. Jimmie Åkesson and the Sweden Democrats and, of course, here, we had the UK Independence Party, that may now have collapsed, but only after really achieving everything that they had always wanted, namely a referendum and the vote for Brexit. And I think sometimes we forget how quickly political change can happen, especially when we’re living in a period of significant political change. That might sound rather odd, but if you looked at the front cover of the Economist a year ago, it told us that the new political order in Europe was Emmanuel Macron, with Angela Merkel standing in the background. Of course, Macron, now, has approval ratings of about 24, 25% and very much finds himself as an outlier on the European landscape. That was the front cover of Time magazine about a week ago. Matteo Salvini, the new face of Europe, somebody who has approval ratings of around 60% and who is quickly cannibalising much of the vote in Italian politics. In fact, the only political party that’s growing, in the recent opinion polls in Italy, is the Lega and, interestingly, now, growing quite seriously outside of its northern, quite prosperous, bastions. And, of course, as that change has kicked in, some of our traditional parties have really had a bad time. Social democracy is, essentially, in freefall. We’ve seen Social Democrats in Germany reach their lowest share of the votes since 1933. Sweden, since the beginning of the 20th Century, similar losses for Social Democrats in the Czech Republic, Austria, the French Socialists, the Czech Social Democrats. And the question, I think, increasingly, that’s facing social democracy, is not so much how can you get back into a position of electoral competitiveness, but without sounding, sort of, too polemic, how can you survive over the longer-term? Because your coalition is really being torn apart, as liberal middleclass professionals, in some cases, like Germany, are going over to the Greens, but those socially Conservative workers are sometimes either going into apathy or defecting over to national populist. And, of course, some Social Scientists spotted this coming – this trend, in the mid-1980s, where they pointed to some of the irreconcilable conflicts within social democracies electorate between those groups. 3 National Populism The interesting macro question for me, at least, is when you look at all of this change and you look at the rise of national populism, in particular, Brexit and Trump and so on, does this signal that we are at the end of a period of political volatility and change? Or does it, instead, actually signal that we are nearer the beginning of a period of volatility and change? And I ask that question, just as a framing device, it’s quite a simplistic framing device, because it gets us into some of the arguments in our public debate. So if you think that we are, sort of, leaving a period of churn and change, you’re probably won over by arguments that, essentially, say this is all about generational change and angry, old, white men. This argument is routinely wheeled out in some of our newspapers and magazines, that, as one generation, effectively, dies out and is replaced by tolerant, liberal university graduates, all of this, sort of, awkward stuff will go away. An Economist friend of mine even calculated that in the UK, by 2022, enough leavers will have passed away to give remain a solid majority, which is a slightly curious way of looking at things. But if you actually interrogate the evidence, as we do in the book, and you just look at the profile of who is voting for these parties, that argument quickly falls apart. In Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the UK and the US, these movements that have challenged, what you might call, the liberal consensus have drawn much of their support from the under 40s, in some cases, the under 30s. If you look at Marine Le Pen, one of the things that few people spotted last year was that she was just as successful among young women as she was among young men. The Austrian Freedom Party, very popular among the under 40s, the alternative for Germany, very popular among the under 50s. In the UK, too, the argument pushed by people like Vince Cable, that, effectively, Brexit was a, sort of, old, white man revolt among people that wanted to return to the days of empire., doesn’t sit easily with the fact that about half of 35 to 55-year-olds voted to leave, or that, indeed, one in three black and minority ethnic voters in Britain, voted to leave. Brexit was not exclusively a populist revolt, by the way, but it did contain some overlaps and the US, 41% of white millennials turned out for Donald Trump. Again, a stat that we don’t really talk too much about, and, in fact, it also ignores, what you would call, lifecycle effects. There’s some really nice research in the UK now, by James Tilly at the University of Oxford, who tracked the same voters over time and he found that, actually, as people go through their lives, or as you go through your lives, you will become 0.38% more Conservative as each year of your life passes. It’s usually at this point that somebody looks at me shaking their head, saying, “I will never go Conservative.” Well, trust me, you’re an outlier ‘cause most of us will. And the interesting point about that is our societies are also ageing and older folks are more likely to vote, and that begins to help explain why we see these really big generational differences between the young and the old. For example, my first year students at Canterbury, born in 2000, they don’t remember Tony Blair, they don’t remember the financial crisis, they weren’t even eligible to vote in the 2016 Referendum, but they’re passionate Corbynistas. 74% of that group are going to vote Labour at the next election. But, of course, there’s a big, striking 20 point gap between them and the over 65s.

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