Europe's Center Slowly Rediscovers Politics - Wall Street Journal
Warsaw
“If you love Europe, stop dreaming of more Europe.”
That bracing comment comes from Mark Rutte, the embattled prime minister of the Netherlands who’s facing defeat at the hands of his country’s euroskeptics in parliamentary elections in March. It’s a remarkable plea—a cry for help, really—from a politician in what used to be the mainstream of a country that has been at the center of the so-called European project since the beginning.
Is anyone listening? Mr. Rutte was speaking to the annual convention of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats in Europe (ALDE), the EU’s ragtag grouping of pro-European classical liberal and center-left parties that don’t fit into Brussels’s far bigger center-right and center-left groups. His call to “stop dreaming” got only scattered applause from the several hundred delegates assembled for that plenary session. The force of European integrationism is strong here.
The bigger impression one gets at the three-day convention is of a dawning, if belated, realization in the European center: A fundamental failure of politics gave rise to antiestablishment movements of the far-right and far-left. If pro-European politicians want to defend something resembling the EU as it currently exists, they’ll have to do politics better. It’s a simple point that nonetheless has eluded many politicians facing antiestablishment insurgencies (see, U.S. Democrats).
“The people of Europe are screaming at us through the ballot box, ‘You are not helping us!’ ” Mr. Rutte says. “Those people are not wrong.” He singles out economic failure and a migration crisis that has exposed Europeans to new security fears, and exposed an EU where no one seems to be in charge.
Albert Rivera, leader of Spain’s centrist reform party Ciudadanos, puts it more bluntly in a side interview: “In Europe, we talk about ‘Europe,’ not the European people.” It’s no way to win an election decided by human beings who worry more about putting dinner on the table than vague notions of European unity.
A corollary of this principle is that one should understand who the voters are. The media caricature of those who support Brexit, Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen as being economically and mentally impoverished bigots is a cul-de-sac. Mr. Rivera’s opening volley in our conversation is to note that the key to electoral success against parties such as Spain’s far-left Podemos is to offer solutions to the middle class. Wait, the middle class? Not the disenfranchised poor?
“The middle class and youth have not been successful with globalization in recent years,” Mr. Rivera says. Globalization may be irreversible, but the policy failures that leave the middle class behind aren’t. Hence Ciudadanos’s obsession with labor-market reform. Europe doesn’t need more redistribution. It needs more jobs for the bourgeoisie.
It might not all come back to jobs, but most of it does. Mr. Rutte isn’t uniformly anti-EU, but he’s more vigorously pro the bits that can create jobs. Top of the list, at long last completing the single EU market in services that would boost economic growth.
Taking voters seriously also means not surrendering to one of the more pernicious myths classical liberalism spreads about itself: that its ideas are too high-minded ever to gain currency with a wide tranche of voters, who therefore are susceptible to courting by “populists.”
Ryszard Petru has some ideas about that. Founder of the new Polish party Nowoczesna (Modern), Mr. Petru now leads one of the two main opposition parties as measured by support in opinion polls. Voters last year elected the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party on a platform of unrealistic welfare promises and nationalist taxes on foreign businesses. Mr. Petru believes voters see through those gimmicks. “People are fed up with populism overpromising” economic miracles, he says. They voted for PiS out of frustration with the center-left incumbents, not credulity.
Classical liberals don’t need to abandon their principles, Mr. Petru says. They need to pitch them to voters more credibly. He keeps repeating themes that at first sound unpopular but that are right, such as a pledge to reverse PiS’s reduction in the retirement age. Over time, he hopes, voters will reward politicians who understand voters’ economic concerns but don’t promise them implausible solutions.
The underlying message from many politicians here is that liberals can compete in a more vigorous political marketplace, but they have to be prepared to try harder. This style of real politics is foreign to a European Union founded on liberal elites’ distrust of the voters who careened between ineffective idealists and murderous nationalists in the first half of the 20th century.
Mr. Rutte sums up the new mindset: Europe’s elites must “ask if you are following the right path, not if the people are following the right leaders.” The question now is whether this insight has come in time to save Europe’s liberal politicians, and the EU with them.
Uncategorized
#Uncategorized
No comments: