Thread by @GoodwinMJ

What is happening to politics in Europe?

A rather long thread/

Italy looks set to host the first openly populist government in post-war Europe

This is happening after an openly populist and also a hard right party took more than half of the vote

And a dismal result for the centre-left

It's always been tempting to view Italy in isolation
A political system forever in crisis

That would be a mistake

Here are only a few things that have happened in Europe over the past few years

In 2015, the highest ever vote for a populist right party in the entire post-war era was recorded ... in Switzerland (over 29%)

That is, unless you include Hungary's Viktor Orban and Fidesz in the populist family, in which case they took 49% this year

In 2016, Britain became the first member state to voluntarily leave the EU

And that vote came between the 2015 and 2017 general elections, which were two of the most volatile elections in British political history
With more voters switching from one party to another

A few months later, the highest ever vote for a populist right presidential candidate in Europe's postwar history was recorded

This came in Austria, where the Freedom Party candidate took over 46% of the vote

Though few commentators noted, the Freedom Party has been a major force in Austrian politics since the 1980s...
surrounded by some of the lowest levels of unemployment in the Western world...
But, you know, that doesn't fit the austerity=populism narrative

These moments followed other populist breakthroughs in three democracies that we used to be told were immune to populism

1. Britain (because of strong institutions/first past the post)

2. Sweden (because of liberal culture/strong identification to main parties)

3. Germany (because, well, you know, the Nazis)

That earlier unwritten law has now been overturned
And in rather dramatic fashion

In Britain, UKIP was ridiculed but then somehow finished ahead of all the main parties in 2014 and took 4 million votes in 2015

In Sweden, the Sweden Democrats have broken through in the south, mainly among workers, by offering a similar message to the populist right across Europe.
'Choose welfare, or choose immigration'

In Germany, the Alternative for Germany emerged as the most popular party of all among men in the Eastern half of the country

And polled strongest among 30-45 year olds

Not exactly your 'angry old white man'

The pace and impact of generational change is being routinely exaggerated by the liberal left

These breakthroughs coincided with record losses for the centre-left

The Austrian centre-left has just had its two consecutive worst results in the entire post-war era

The Dutch centre-left just crashed from 25 to 6% - a new low

The French socialists just slumped from 30 to 7% and had to sell their headquarters along the way to keep the lights on

The Czech social democrats just tumbled from 20 to 7%

Their lowest since 1992

The German centre-left just fell to 20% of the vote

It's lowest since 1933

Back in 2000, centre-left parties were in governments in 10 of the then 15 EU member states

Now? They're in only 6 governments of the much larger 28 member states that are now in the EU (soon to be 27)

And most of these are not exactly what you would call major players

Malta, Slovakia, Portugal, Romania, Sweden

There is no law that political ideologies must live forever

Social democrats are no longer facing the question of how to remain electorally competitive but how to survive

It's been a dramatic collapse

The centre-left has fairly consistently failed to adapt to the new political reality
Redistribution is no longer the only game in town

Many centre-left elites regard their traditional voters with disdain
As we have discovered throughout the Brexit and Trump debates

Social democracy is rapidly turning
from a middle class into a working class project

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These parties have almost nothing to say about the new issue agenda
that is now dominating Europe (and will increasingly do so)

Immigration. Security. Belonging. Identity. Community.

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The liberal left attacks populists and portrays their supporters as ignorant or misinformed bigots
But they ignore the possibility that our increasingly individualised societies are no longer meeting people's communitarian needs

Sure, some social democrats are still clinging to power

Like in Germany

But they are polling 17%

That would be their worst result since 1887

In fact, Germany's two main parties just polled their lowest combined share of the vote since the Second World War

And I do not believe that the AfD will collapse anytime soon

Name me one democracy in the West where populists have broken through and then disappeared

You might say UKIP. But of course they only did so after they got all that they ever wanted. A referendum and then the vote for Brexit.

I am increasingly confidence that a UKIP-style party will be back within 5 years

Britain is losing its moment of opportunity to reform the social and economic settlement

So, across Europe we are witnessing some truly profound and deep shifts

Some of which academics started to point to in the mid-1980s and 1990s

Others -like the rise of new value divides - they started to document seriously in the early 2000s

The fundamentals are fairly clear

Fewer people today are loyal to the established main parties

There is widespread and entrenched concern about the pace and scale of ethnic change in the West

That will only accelerate as Europe deals with low birth rates, high immigration, new flows from north Africa and divided EU member states who hold irreconcilable views on these issues

And that in turn reflects how we now have, across the West, some entrenched value divides, underpinned by a educational divide, that are for the first time being actively mobilised and brought into politics

And values -as any social psychologist will tell you- don't tend to change

We also have a political/media class that has been regularly outflanked by these political changes and still struggles to make sense of the underlying drivers

The deeper structural shifts in the West are being glossed or ignored in our public debates

That's largely because people are obsessed with the short-term 'surface' factors, and people like to manipulate evidence to fit with their prior beliefs

So we have lots of 'analysts' and think-tankers who are misreading the mood in a big way, either because heads are in sand or strong sympathies with the left muddies their thinking ('if only we end austerity!')

This is clearly not (just) about austerity

The collapse of social democracy goes hand in hand with way in which the liberal left continues to fundamentally misunderstand how the tectonic plates in politics are shifting -how we are entering a new era

Russia, Cambridge Analytica, what was written on the side of a bus....
These are basically comfort blankets

So the really interesting question is what, exactly, are the long-term, deep shifts that are producing all of this churn and change?

If you begin to answer that question you can begin to get to the right answer and stop faffing about with a lot of that stuff that does not really matter all that much

What's driving the volatility?

I think a really interesting macro question is
Do things like Brexit, Trump and populism in Europe represent the end/the last howl
Or the beginning of something new

And that is something that we explore in this book, which is out in a few months
Which we humbly contribute to a debate that we think is getting a LOT wrong !
amzn.to/2INYy2c

or vice versa, apols. A movement once heavily dependent on workers is now quickly vacating that space. The "model" of Corbyn in the UK is a good example. Strongly middle class/London activist base but draining working class votes to apathy/conservatives