The Dutch Elections

Now that the German Constitutional Court has approved the ESM, the next hurdle for the EU is the Dutch election, held today. Here is a good summary of the debates (the article is worth reading in full):

Debates should be great opportunities for populists. Although normally boring, the populist may spark some fire in a debate by making bold and harsh attacks on the mainstream. A debate gives an opportunity to stick out and to juxtaposition the elite interests of traditional politics with the ones of the man on the street. Furthermore, populists get unedited access to a fairly sizable portion of the common people they want to represent. With little journalistic intervention, what is being said gets straight to the audience. This begs the question of how the two populists on the far right and the not-so-far-anymore left anymore of Dutch politics have actually been performing over the past weeks. Did the debates help their campaigns?
The simple answer is no. So what happened, and why did Geert Wilders from the Freedom Party (PVV) and Emile Roemer from the Socialist Party (SP) apparently fail to seize the opportunities provided by a sheer debate marathon?
Wilders, like him or not, he is a great debater. With largely prepared one-liners and bold attacks on multiculturalism and Europe, Wilders is always good for laughter and for spectacular debate moments. No different this time, Wilders certainly had his moments. For instance referring to the Labour Party – the Partij van de Arbeid – as the Partij van de Arabieren, the Party for the Arabs, or in a debate about health insurance costs saying rising costs should be paid for by the Greeks, not by the sick people – de rekening bij de Grieken, niet bij de zieken. But there were also moments when this strategy appeared to be working less well. A moment in the RTL debate for instance, when, although the topic was a different one, Wilders slipped in this year’s mantra, a strong anti-EU message. People started laughing, not about his statement but about the ridiculous boldness with which Wilders repeats this message in the most unsuitable situations. They were not laughing with him, they were laughing at him. The campaign did not help Wilders in the polls, but did not damage him either, showing a stable 12 percent of the electorate supporting him. It seems as if people are getting tired of his style, his rhetoric, so more than the core of his voters would not be mobilized (which is not to say that he was irrelevant – the PVV and Wilders were just not the big players in the campaign).
Former primary school teacher Roemer in terms of appearance and expression is much closer to ordinary man than Wilders. The campaign showed dramatic consequences for the SP. In the debates, in particular the first debates, Roemer had to face a strategic problem. The positioning as the populist left opposition had boosted the SP into hitherto unknown heights in opinion polls. For some weeks during the summer it looked as if the SP would become the biggest party, with Roemer having a good chance of becoming Prime Minister. So he had to look “prime ministerial”. By going in that direction, Roemer lost authenticity in the first debates and dramatically lost support in the polls after the first debates. The SP electorate wants a populist, and if they don’t get the populist they can just as well go with the more serious alternative on the left. And with PvdA candidate Diederik Samsom there was an alternative that became more and more viable, closing a 10-percentage point gap between the Labour Party and the Liberal front-runner VVD within a matter of two weeks.
If one were to advise the PVV and the SP on the strategy for the next campaign, on basis of what we saw over the past weeks, one should probably tell Roemer to go back to who he was when he was successful, a left-wing populist, and tell Wilders to go out and re-invent himself if he wants to continue playing a significant role in Dutch politics. But let’s see whether the polls are in fact reflected in the outcome tonight.

The "Populist" View of Emigration

Bernard Arnault is in the news as France's most famous potential émigré. But Tibor Skardanelli thinks that most people who emigrate from France do so in search of opportunity rather than tax avoidance. He expresses well a certain "populist" resentment of the kind of "elite" that France promotes, while deterring in his view ambition of other kinds:

Demandez à ma coiffeuse (il n’existe plus de coiffeurs pour ainsi dire) pourquoi elle n’embauche pas une personne pour l’aider : elle vous répondra qu’elle ne veut pas se trouver pieds et poings liés par les lois du travail ; si elle s’aperçoit que la personne qu’elle a embauchée fait fuir sa clientèle, est trop souvent absente ou tout bonnement insupportable, elle devra la conserver comme employée ou s’épuiser en démarches administratives et judiciaires sans fin. Ne parlons pas des simples périodes de gros temps où il faut savoir réduire la toile.

La France n’aime pas la réussite individuelle. Elle est le pays des administrations, des entreprises d’État et des grands groupes. La France méprise l’artisan, qui le lui rend bien et arnaque ses clients autant qu’il peut, se disant que c’est toujours ça de pris. La France regarde de haut les petits patrons, ces êtres mesquins qui ne pensent qu’à leurs fins de mois et essaient de faire travailler leurs employés (dans tous les sens du terme).

La France préfère les médecins, les professeurs et les artistes, ces gens désintéressés qui, eux seuls, mériteraient finalement des salaires décents. La France a un respect instinctif pour les beaux messieurs des grandes administrations et des grandes entreprises formatés par nos Grandes Écoles finalement devenues endogames.

[emphasis added--ag]

Monti Worried About Rise of Populism

Mario Monti has called for an extraordinary session of the European Council to confront the rise of populism in Europe:

"Nous sommes dans une phase dangereuse", a-t-il dit en marge du Forum Ambrosetti, organisé à Cernobbio sur le lac de Côme, après avoir rencontré le président du Conseil européen, Herman van Rompuy.
"Il est à la fois triste et paradoxal qu'au moment où l'on espère achever l'intégration, voici que se forme un contre-phénomène dangereux qui vise à désintégrer" l'Union européenne, a noté M. Monti dont les propos étaient rapportés par l'agence italienne LaPresse.

Will "Pas Voté" Win the First Round?

The abstainers may outnumber the supporters of the winning candidate in the first round of voting. That is the depressing finding of an IFOP poll, which predicts a sharp decline from the 84% participation rate of 2007:

Le sondage de l’Ifop publié dimanche dernier a mis le doigt sur le risque majeur de cette élection : le retour d’une abstention forte. Seuls 68% des électeurs se disent « certains d’aller voter ». Il est bien possible que, parmi les 32% restants, des hésitants se rendent finalement aux urnes. La certitude est néanmoins là, confirmée par d’autres indicateurs comme ceux de la Sofres : on sera loin des 84% de participation de 2007, très probablement en dessous des 78% de 1995, sans forcément descendre jusqu’aux 62,6% de 2002.

Philippe Guibert, the author of "Plaidoyer pour une gauche populaire," diagnoses a campaign that has failed to address the concerns of the popular classes. This has become a familiar refrain in a part of the left. It's the obverse of the critique that holds that the problem of many modern democracies, and not just France, is "populism," that is, a revolt of the popular classes based on a belief that the powers of government to oppose, thwart, or reverse potent economic forces is greater than it actually is and therefore a refusal to accept certain types of reform (the fight over retirement reform in France is a good example, but one can find equally telling examples in the United States with a right-wing political valence, such as the refusal to raise the debt ceiling).

The problem with Guibert's critique of the establishment left, and of other similar critiques, is that it assumes that "elites" could in fact address the concerns of "the popular classes" without compromising their own core beliefs. In short, it's clear that many voters are disaffected with "elite" solutions, but it's not at all clear what Guibert thinks should be done about that. More pandering and fudging, as Hollande has done with his pseudo-rollback of Sarkozy's retirement reform, which only changes the rules around the margins? In any case, here is his characterization of the failing of even the "populist" candidates of the extreme left and extreme right to mobilize the disillusioned:

Jean-Luc Mélenchon développe une très belle indignation, accompagnée d’une radicalisation dans les propositions sociales – Smic à 1 700 euros net et retraite à 60 ans pour tous. Mais cette radicalisation sociale semble ignorer l’ouverture de notre économie aux autres pays européens et aux émergents, alors qu’elle existe de façon bien réelle dans la vie des milieux populaires du privé. C’est sans doute pour cette raison qu’il ne parvient pas, pour l’instant, à effectuer de percée décisive dans le vote populaire, même si il y a gagné des points. A l’inverse, M Le Pen a construit sa campagne, elle, sur une radicalisation économique : sortie de l’euro et protectionnisme national. En y perdant en crédibilité personnelle et en oubliant du coup les « fondamentaux » de son électorat, immigration et islam. Depuis l’automne et la velléité de référendum grec, les Français sont massivement favorables, à près de 85%, à l’euro : le retour au franc a nettement reculé dans l’opinion, tout particulièrement dans les milieux populaires et ce sont les Grecs qu’on verrait bien sortir de l’euro...

He's right that Mélenchon simply ignores France's deep implication in the global economy. I don't quite know what to say about his contention that Marine Le Pen is losing ground because she forgets "the fundamentals" of her base, "immigration and Islam." Would he have her take an even harder line on these subjects? What would our neo-populist social critic recommend?

So, is the problem politicians who are not worthy of "the people," or a "people" reluctant to face the harsh realities of a changing world? Sometimes the call for a more radical approach is really a call for a more intransigent conservatism. Sarkozy actually recognized this in 2007, when he organized his campaign around the concept of "rupture" and "overcoming all conservatisms." This year, however, he has given in to the "populist" diagnosis that his advisor Patrick Buisson shares in many ways with Philippe Guibert. And to judge by the high forecast abstention rate, this strategic choice has only demobilized the target audience, which doesn't believe in his change of heart.