European Populists Who Aped Brexit and Trump Rethink Their Approach
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Many of Europe’s far-right politicians now believe their attempt to associate themselves with the antiestablishment uprisings behind the U.K.’s vote to leave the EU and Donald Trump’s U.S. presidential victory has backfired.
Outright rejection of the EU and the euro was a departure for most of Europe’s far right, which traditionally concentrated more on immigration and identity. What they discovered is that Continental European voters, although hardly content with incumbents or the EU, viewed electoral shocks in the U.K. and U.S. as destabilizing.
Centrist leaders such as new French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel exploited those concerns, and nationalist parties have stopped talking about leaving the EU or the euro—or styling themselves as the local version of Mr. Trump.
Anti-EU nationalists “were so electrified after Brexit and Trump that they thought all of us would be president or prime minister of their country,” says Gerolf Annemans, a leading figure in Belgium’s Flemish-nationalist party and in a group of EU-skeptic parties in the European Parliament. Instead, he says, “to some extent the Trump election has frightened off parts of the center electorate in Europe.”
The tide of far-right and populist parties is still running high in Europe by historical standards, even with the economy picking up steam, and some voters say it wouldn’t take much to see them switch back their support.
Far-right and other populist parties made significant gains, despite recriminations over their tactical decision to up their anti-EU rhetoric. National Front leader Marine Le Pen won 34% of the vote in France’s presidential election, her party’s highest-ever share. Her vanquisher, Mr. Macron, has struggled in his early days with falling poll numbers and some domestic political setbacks.
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Yet in most of Europe, elections and surveys suggest that populism might have peaked—at least for now. Support for European antiestablishment parties rose to just over 30% in opinion polls in 2016, but has declined to around 23%, according to a composite measure of opinion-poll support developed by economists at bank Nomura Holdings .
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Yet many European voters were unsettled by what was happening in the U.K. and U.S. The U.K. has struggled to figure out how to disentangle itself from the EU. Germans’ trust in the U.S. fell from 59% in Nov. 2016 to 21% in February, and has remained at low levels, according to opinion polls commissioned by public broadcaster ARD.
Support for the EU, battered by long crises over debt and migration, began to recover. The EU’s own latest Eurobarometer report on public opinion, published in August, found that trust in the EU has risen to 42%, from 36% a year ago and 32% in late 2015.
Improving economic growth in much of Europe, especially in the 19-country euro currency zone, helped blunt some of the discontent. Eurozone growth reached at an annualized pace of 2.5% in the most recent quarter, high by recent standards. That has helped slowly reduce the unemployment rate, which now stands at around 9% in the eurozone, compared with 12% after the region’s debt crisis.
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/europes-populists-back-on-their-heels-rethink-anti-eu-stance-1503334431
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