The European Union and Euroskeptic Populism

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

In the past decade, the European Union (EU) has been hit by three crises -- a financial crisis, a refugee crisis, and the results of the 2016 Brexit referendum in Britain. 

These have increased voter pessimism with the EU, creating a favourable context for Euroskeptic populist parties expressing anti-establishment positions.

The French National Front (FN) is a prototype of the populist radical right in Western Europe, exhibiting its key characteristic features -- nativism, authoritarianism, and populism. 

Since its electoral breakthrough in 1984, the FN has established itself as a major actor in French politics, and a vehicle for Euroskepticism.

It has made significant electoral gains since 2008, especially after Marine Le Pen took over the party in 2011.

In Germany, the rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) from its inception in late 2012 to its unexpectedly strong performance in the 2017 federal election, when it came third, has moved the party beyond opposition to aspects of the European integration process into a more profound critique of German society and politics.

For the first time since the early 1950s, a political party has occupied viable political space to the right of the Christian Democrats (CDU).

The AfD was founded by German conservatives who were unhappy with the centrist direction of the CDU under Angela Merkel’s leadership.

The economic and financial crisis in Europe, and Germany’s central role in leading responses to it, provided the mobilizing narrative for the AfD. The party successfully presented a clear political message to a distinct set of German voters. It has shaken up the German political system.

Greece has been an EU member since 1981 but its relationship with the organization has always been problematic.

More recently, it was one of the leading protagonists in the Eurozone crisis, which not only put the future of the euro in question but even the country’s membership of the monetary union. 

Greece was also one of the frontline states during the refugee crisis due to its proximity to sender regions, such as the Middle East and North Africa.

This resulted in the perception among the Greek population that the EU was not doing enough to help the country manage the crisis. 

As a consequence, support for the mainstream pro-EU New Democracy declined, whereas the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), a previously minor populist party, effectively replaced the mainstream pro-EU Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) as the main left-wing contender for power.

The Italian party system includes populist parties that have opposed the pan-European project.

The Italian Northern League (LN) is in the populist radical right party family, while the Italian 5 Star Movement (M5S) started out as an anti-establishment party with left-libertarian concerns, but increasingly adopted nativist tones.

The LN has, ever since its establishment in the early 1990s, centred its political activity on the defence of the “common man” against the elites. 

It has progressively moved towards a politics of nativism and authoritarianism by including xenophobia and “law and order” in its discourse.

The M5S, organized as a full-fledged party in 2009, gradually developed a pronounced Euroskeptic profile. In the 2018 election, it received the largest number of votes, and formed a coalition government with the LN.

In the Netherlands, the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV) has become the main contender on the populist right since its entry into parliament in 2006. 

It blames political elites for an array of social problems, related to the spread of multiculturalism and the supposed “‘Islamisation” of Dutch society. It also describes the EU as an undemocratic “super state.”

The 2008 recession also moved the Portuguese and Spanish party systems in a populist Euroskeptic direction.

The Portuguese Left Bloc (BE) jumped from 5.2 per cent of the vote in the 2011 general election to 10 per cent in 2015; and the newly born Podemos in Spain received 21 per cent of the vote and became the third largest party in the parliament in the 2015 election.

In the Swedish election of Sept. 9, the ultra-right Sweden Democrats won 17.6 per cent of the vote, and ended the day as the country’s third largest political party. 

In 2010 they had entered the Riksdag, Sweden’s parliament, with just 5.7 per cent. 

An anti-immigrant spectre is haunting Europe, and traditional parties have failed to respond to the sense of discontent that exists.

Pakistan's New Leader Feuds With Washington

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The election of Imran Khan as Pakistan’s new prime minister following the country’s parliamentary election on July 25 has increased the country’s military power as never before.

Since its creation in 1947, after the partition of British India, Pakistan has had 30 years of military rule, over three periods: 1958-70, 1977-88 and 1999-2008. 

But for the past 10 years, the military has stayed in the background, allowing civilian politicians to take turns in power after elections that were always marred to some extent by electoral irregularities.

In fact in 2013, for the first time in Pakistan’s history, a democratically elected government completed its full term and there was a democratic change of government, with the centre-right Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) succeeding the centre-left Pakistan Peoples Party.

This strengthening of the democratic process was bound to disturb the military, which is known by its opponents as the ‘deep state’ because of the key role of its intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). 

Indeed, some elected PPP and PML-N leaders tried to pursue policies that ran counter to the military’s wishes, especially towards India, which it regards as its principal enemy. 

Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party won 151 of the 342 seats in the lower house of parliament, defeating the PML-N party of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. Khan has cobbled together a coalition government.

The Pakistani military is widely accused of skewing the election in favour of Khan, but it denied the charge. Most observers, including Sharif, believe they wanted Khan to win and rigged the vote.

The new prime minister indicated that he would move away from what he called a “clientalistic” relationship with Washington, whose drone attacks and war on terror he blames for fostering extremism within Pakistan, towards countries closer in the region. 

To make this point, he welcomed the Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif, as his first diplomatic guest and stated his support for the nuclear deal that U.S. President Donald Trump recently cancelled.

Irritation with this led the U.S. military to announce that it would be cancelling $300 million in aid to Pakistan.
 

It stated that this was over what it called Islamabad’s failure to take action against militant groups.

The State Department also has criticized Pakistan for failing to deal with terrorist networks operating on its soil, including the Haqqani network and the Afghan Taliban.

Pakistan has been accused of providing covert support to the Haqqani network, a militant group that focuses most of its activities on neighbouring Afghanistan.

Kabul has complained for years that Pakistan allows it to operate unimpeded from its soil across the border. The group is linked to the Afghan Taliban. 

Trump in January accused Pakistan of deceiving the U.S. and suspended nearly all of the $1.3 billion in annual security aid given to Pakistan.

In May, the two countries even placed travel restrictions on the diplomats based in their respective capitals.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made his first official trip to Pakistan on Sept. 5, saying that he hoped to “reset the relationship” with the new government after a period of sharp disagreements.

Pompeo met with Khan and Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Javed Qamar Bajwa. Washington is anxious to enlist Pakistan’s help in its efforts to end the war in Afghanistan. 

Pakistani commentators had been denouncing the United States as a hectoring bully that seeks to force Pakistan to do its bidding and fails to appreciate its efforts to fight Islamist terrorism.

One thing is certain, though: the Pakistani military will continue to hold the levers of power.

In the words of Mohammed Ayoob, a South Asia expert at Michigan State University, they will “keep Prime Minister Khan on a very short leash.” They always have the last word.

The Anonymous Attack on Donald Trump

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

An unsigned opinion column, titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” appeared in the Sept. 5 New York Times.

The writer, a senior official, claimed to be part of a secret “resistance” inside the government protecting the nation from its commander in chief, who was portrayed as incompetent and dangerous.

Not surprisingly, calls for Donald Trump’s removal from office reached a crescendo pitch from his many enemies inside the political establishment.

Trump supporters fired back. “The official complains about the president’s supposed lack of principles,” wrote Kevin McCarthy, the Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives, two days later, in a response in the Times. 

“However, it is clear that his real grievance is that the president does not share his principles, on issues like trade and foreign policy.

McCarthy contended that “there is a permanent political class in Washington that believes that it has a divine right to rule the American people.

“The members of this political class claim to love democracy, but they are ‘working diligently’ to ‘insulate’ the government from democratic decisions. They claim to love the norms that protect constitutional government, but shatter constitutional norms of executive power. They claim to be above party and ideology, but are in fact so blinded by groupthink that they cannot tolerate any challenge to their 1990s-era consensus on trade, immigration and foreign policy.”

Nikki Haley, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, in her own Sept. 7 op-ed in the Washington Post, argued that what this anonymous author was doing was very dangerous.

“Everyone in government owes a greater loyalty to our country and our Constitution than to any individual office­holder. But a central part of our democracy requires that those who work directly for the president not secretly try to undermine him or his policies. What the author is describing is an extra-constitutional method of addressing policy disputes within the administration.” 

Haley called the action “cowardly” and “anti-democratic.”

Issues like free trade and foreign policy “were hotly debated and thrashed out publicly in the campaign,” National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty observed, in a Sept 6 piece, “No, This is Not How You Run a Resistance.” And the writer’s side “lost the popular debate.”

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat agreed. In “Thwarting Trump, or the Voters?” published Sept. 6, he suggested that the most troubling thing about the anonymous op-ed was that the author didn’t seem to acknowledge “any distinction between protecting America from Trump’s erratic personality and extra-constitutional whims and frustrating the agenda that won our president the White House.”

Trump’s opponents are making it the “new normal” to investigate, interrogate all known associates and acquaintances and relatives of a president. This has now been extended to anonymous attacks.

In a major piece of irony, as Rutgers University historian Jackson Lears noted in “Aquarius Rising,” in the forthcoming Sept. 27 New York Review of Books, today “the dream of impeaching Trump has driven much of the Democratic Party into an uncritical embrace of the FBI and the CIA. 

“The institutions that have conducted illegal surveillance of American citizens for decades have been suddenly transmuted into monuments of integrity.”

Trump may be “amoral,” ill-tempered, erratic and narcissistic – I’m an American citizen and I didn’t vote for him – but these are not criminal, or impeachable, offenses.

Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon pursued an unwinnable war in Vietnam that resulted in more than 58,000 American deaths. Bill Clinton bombed Serbia for 78 days in a campaign not sanctioned by the UN. 

And George W. Bush destabilized the entire Middle East and caused the death of some 4,500 soldiers in Iraq. How much blood is on Trump’s hands?

The November Congressional elections in the United States will, in a sense, be a do-over of the 2016 presidential election.

Because if the Democrats capture the Congress, they will impeach Trump and remove him from office.

But removing a president should be done through the ballot box, by the American public -- or American democracy will never be the same again.