Opinion
With approximately half the world to go to the polls over the next year, the left-media are wringing their hands in despair at the march of the “far right”. By which, of course, they mean anyone slightly to the left of Marx, Marcuse and Fanon.
From Argentina to Europe, voters are moving decidedly “right”-ward. What’s really happening, of course, is that they’re moving back to the centre, while the left go careering over the abyss. To a media plummeting left-ward over the cliff, everyone standing back from the edge appears to be “moving right”.
Nevertheless, the trend is clear.
The past few years of electoral results across Europe have confirmed, without a shadow of a doubt, that Europe is swinging right, from Hungary, Italy and Greece to Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden and Finland. The tendency is not completely uniform – for example, Spain’s strongly nationalist and conservative Vox party did poorly, Poland’s conservative party lost its absolute majority, and no alternative right party has yet taken off in Ireland – but it is dominant enough to reshape the European political landscape as a whole.
It is now widely accepted that this June’s European elections will shift the balance of power rightward in the European Parliament. Just how far-reaching the shift will be, of course, is yet to be seen. However, the rightward swing in public sentiment is almost universal across Europe, so the momentum is by now unstoppable.
Nothing is ever unstoppable. As the American right discovered to their shock in 2020, hubris will be your downfall. The one real edge the left have always had over the centre-right is that they admittedly know how to organise — and their voters are easily herded like the sheep they are.
Still, the momentum is undeniable.
And it’s hardly surprising that the media and the political establishment are finding it so hard to comprehend.
The ideological centre of gravity of Europe’s traditional parties has shifted to the left, leaving traditional right-wing voters homeless.
The Old Right in Europe has swung left, embracing distinctively leftist and woke policies such as hate speech legislation, intrusive climate regulations, and lax immigration rules. So those who are voting for so-called ‘alt right’ and ‘far right’ parties are often just attempting to reclaim political ground that has been abandoned by the Old Right.
Policies now associated by mainstream commentators with the ‘far right’ are, in reality, policies that were, for the most part, standard fare on the right a few decades ago.
Not just on the right: on the centre-left, too. 90s-era Bill Clinton Democrats, or 80s-era Hawke Labor would be screamed at as “far right!” by today’s chattering classes. Immigration detention, for example, was established by the Hawke government. Bob Hawke and Paul Keating also embarked on a wave of privatisation to rival Margaret Thatcher in the UK. Border protection and law and order were both Clintonian policies.
Such policies include defending national sovereignty, celebrating national culture and ethos, opting for free market solutions to social problems over State-imposed solutions, exercising fiscal restraint, defending law and order, clamping down on illegal immigration and welfare fraud, and promoting socially conservative values like traditional marriage, biological markers for gender identity, and parental choice in education.
Of course, the details vary from country to country, and the ‘right’ has never been ideologically uniform. Nonetheless, this is a fair sketch of the general ideological tenor of the traditional political right in Europe. There is no doubt that this ‘right’ is currently making a comeback, with impressive electoral gains for so-called ‘far right’ parties that now occupy the ideological ground the Old Right occupied a few decades ago.
The Conservative Woman
Even more alarming for the chattering left, the trend in Europe is being led by younger voters. How can this happen? Have the Boomer left wasted their lives on the Long March through the Institutions, only to have their little Red Guards throw off the shackles of twelve years of leftist indoctrination?
Across the continent, the image of the radical-right voter – typically white, male, non-graduate and, above all, old – is changing, and studies suggest that in several countries, support for the far right is growing fastest among younger voters […]
In Spain, the ultra-conservative Vox party’s share of the under-35 vote soared from 22% in April 2019 to a record 34% that November, echoing its rollercoaster performance with the electorate as a whole. It fell back in July this year but still stands at 27%.
In the Netherlands, the PVV surged to become the largest party among 18- to 34-year-olds, winning 17% of their vote against 7% previously. In Sweden’s 2022 ballot, 22% of the 18-21 cohort voted for the far-right Sweden Democrats, against 12% in 2018.
In the 2021 Saxony-Anhalt state election in eastern Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) came top among voters under 30, while young voters were likewise predicted to help Austria’s far-right Freedom party (FPO) win next year’s national ballot.
There are several factors at play in this seismic shift. Firstly, sooner or later, indoctrination runs aground on the rocks of reality. As former actress Holly Vallance puts it, “Everyone… wakes up at some point after you start either making money, working, trying to run a business, trying to buy a home, and then realise what crap ideas they all are. And then you go to the right.”
Secondly, young voters are realising that the left has shafted them. Everything from mass immigration to economic policy is screwing the younger generation over, leaving them without hope of ever owning a home or raising a family.
Finally, much as it drives the Boomer left nuts, it’s just true that “Conservativism is the new Punk”.
Other factors include some far-right parties “managing to position themselves as a ‘cool’ electoral option”, [Pawel Zerka, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations] said. “They are increasingly offering younger voters equally young, often charismatic politicians – people who speak their language.”
The Guardian
Punk was about many things, but its over-arching ethos is anti-Establishment — and now the left is the Establishment.
“Never trust a hippy,” as the saying went. Well, it was the hippies who gave us the Long March. Now it’s time to Smash It Up.
The kids are dancing to a different song, all right.