President Trump Inspires the European Anti-Elite Movement

After the victory and inauguration of Donald Trump in the United States, the presidential election season is underway in France, as well as national parliamentary elections in The Netherlands and Germany. And, the big change is that the national-rights, populist, conservative parties all over Europe are revitalized by Trump's election and becoming more active publicly. • • • THE EU ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT MEETS IN GERMANY. The most right-wing of what the Europeans call the "Alt-Right" movement is in The Netherlands. Geert Wilders, a member of The Netherlands Parliament and head of the Party for Freedom in The Netherlands, said of the Alt-Right movement : "The genie will not go back into the bottle again, whether you like it or not." Geert Wilders says a growing number of Europeans are rebelling against decades of a European Union government that imposes multiculturalism, politically correct speech codes and mass migration from the Moslem world. Wilders says that Europe's establishment parties, instead of addressing the concerns of ordinary voters, have tried to silence dissent by branding all opposition as xenophobes, islamophobes and neo-Nazis. Nigel Farage, former head of Britain's UKIP party, who led the effort for the United Kingdom to leave the EU, says of the EU : "There is a genuine feeling that Trump taking over the White House is part of a bigger, global movement. Our critics, looking at Trump's candidacy and his speech yesterday, would call it the rise of populism. I would say it's simply a return to nation state democracy and proper values....This is a genuine political revolution." Roger Köppel, editor-in-chief of the right-leaning Swiss newspaper Die Weltwoche : "This disruption is fruitful. The taboos of the last few years are now fully on the agenda : illegal immigration, Islam, the nonsense of open borders, the dysfunctional EU, the free movement of people, jobs, law and order. Trump's predecessors did not want to talk about it, but the majority of voters did. This is democracy." Of course, in America, the first country that gave the job of governing back to its citizens, Ambassador John R. Bolton, former US ambassador to the United Nations offered this : "In many respects, France and Germany are proving they do not understand the meaning of Brexit. They are reflexively, almost religiously, following exactly the path that has provoked the EU's current existential crisis." • And, this past weekend, inspired by the inauguration of President Trump, the leaders of Europe's main anti-establishment parties held a pan-European rally in Koblenz, Germany, aimed at coordinating a political strategy to mobilize what they hope will be millions of disillusioned voters in upcoming elections in The Netherlands, France and Germany. The meeting was organized by Marcus Pretzell of Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, under the slogan “Freedom for Europe.” Appearing together in public for the first time, Al-Right movement leaders spoke out about the problems of the EU. Marine Le Pen, leader of the French National Front, Frauke Petry, leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV), Matteo Salvini, leader of Italy's Northern League and Harald Vilimsky of Austria's Freedom Party gathered to call on European voters to participate in a "patriotic spring" to topple the European Union, reassert national sovereignty and secure national borders. • At the rally, France’s populist presidential candidate Marine Le Pen called on voters across Europe to “wake up” and follow the example of US and British voters. Speaking at the unprecedented Alt-right meeting in Koblenz, she said Brexit would unleash an unstoppable wave of “all the dominoes of Europe,” and, after Brexit, she added, before an audience of several hundred, the election of Donald Trump was a : “second coup...His position on Europe is clear. He does not support a system of the oppression of peoples. 2016 was the year the Anglo-Saxon world woke up. I am certain 2017 will be the year when the people of continental Europe wake up.” Le Pen condemned Angela Merkel’s refugee policy as a catastrophe, saying the German chancellor had “let hundreds of thousands of refugees into the country against the will of the German people,” mirroring remarks made by Trump earlier. • The Koblenz meeting was intended to strengthen connections between Europe’s populist parties and Geert Wilders, leader of the PVV, had promoted the meeting on his Twitter feed, using the hashtag #WeWillMakeOurCountriesGreatAgain – in a clear reference to Trump’s promise to “make America great again.” The populist parties from across the EU have previously been cautious about meeting in public, with cooperation limited by their individual nationalist policies. Often, if cross-border meetings did take place, they were held in private or kept very low-key. The meeting last weekend was the first time AfD leader Frauke Petry and Le Pen had appeared together in public. The two met for dinner last summer, but when news of the meeting was leaked in the French media, Le Pen denied it had taken place. The new AfD party, formed just four years ago, is hoping to secure 14% of the votes in Germany’s federal elections in September, and enter the Bundestag for the first time. For Le Pen, appearing to distance herself from the extremist positions of her father, Jean Marie Le Pen, the founder of the party, has been vital ahead of the presidential election. • • • THE 'ANGLO-SAXON' BREXIT-TRUMP EXAMPLE. But, what has clearly changed, and brought the other European leaders out of the shadows to present a common front, is the election of Trump. Le Pen, Petry, Wilders and Matteo Salvini of the Northern League have all expressed admiration for the new US president. Last Friday, Petry sent Trump a telegram in which she congratulated him on behalf of the AfD : “May your hopes as a person be fulfilled and may you achieve your goals as president of the USA.” Petry told Trump that she was encouraged by the statements he had made, and added : “We as Germans and Europeans will follow your foreign policy position with hope, because it is refreshingly different from the course of the past decades.” Last Monday, in a joint-interview with the Times and the German Bild, Trump said the EU had become a “vehicle for Germany,” and predicted that more EU states would vote to leave. • Wilders, who is ahead in all leading opinion polls as the Dutch prepare for national elections in March, told the cheering Koblenz meeting attendees : “Yesterday a free America, today Koblenz, and tomorrow a new Europe.” The loudest applause came when he told the crowds : “Europe needs Frauke, not Angela.” Protesters outside the venue included prominent politicians Sigmar Gabriel, leader of Germany’s Social Democrats and Merkel's Vice Chancellor who is expected to challenge Merkel in the German national elections this September, and Jean Asselborn, Luxembourg’s foreign minister. • • • FRENCH SOCIALISTS BEGIN THEIR NOMINATING PROCESS. François Fillon, the candidate of the Conservative French party Les Républicains, has been widely touted as the next President of France, but French voters are far from making their decision. RTL, a major French media group, sees the French-German EU partnership as being weakened by the poor relations between Merkel and French Socialist President François Hollande because of Merkel's migrant policies and the "dumping" of cheap eastern European labor into France and other EU nations. Bruno Retailleau, Fillon's right hand, told an interview with RTL, Le Figaro and LCI this weekend that Fillon's goal is to reshape the EU project while affirming the EU's power in the face of Trump's protectionist America that is not particularly supportive of Europe. But, Retailleau sent a signal that Fillon sees a new way forward for the EU -- one that gives power back to the nations that are EU members while reducing the power of unelected EU bureaucrats, a position held by former UK prime minister David Cameron. Had the EU elits accepted his proposed changes, Brexit would never have occurred. • Fillon's repositioning is occurring while French Socialists are beginning their two-stage primary election process to choose their presidential candidate. And, whoever the Socialists choose will be the distinct underdog in April when the presidential voting begins. A survey by Ipsos-Sopra Steria taken between January 10 and 15 found that Marine Le Pen is in the lead at 25-26%, with Fillon at 23-25%. Challenging both is Emmanuel Macron -- a Socialist Minister under Hollande who left his post and formed a new movement to pull together the center Left and Right in France. Macron had 17-21% in the Ipsos survey -- but he is not on the primary ballot Sunday because he is running as an independent party candidate, not tied to the Left. The highest polling numbers for a Socialist went to Hollande's prime minister who resigned recently to run for president, Manuel Valls, who got 9-10%. [The spreads in the polling results reflect the fact that French polls usually pit any given candidate against various opponents -- for example, Macron gets 17% against Valls combined with another centrist while he gets 21% against Valls alone.] • And, then, there is Benoît Hamon, who could be about to scoop up the left of the Socialist Party faithful with his slogan : “Vote for this man and you will see the real France.” Hamon is a Parisian and has been campaigning in the Paris suburbs where he feels right at home. Hamon, 49, has been considered an outsider, but he is gaining ground. To some, he is the French Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn – but younger. Hamon’s anti-capitalist program includes a “universal wage” (a form of basic income), work sharing, the use of referendums to decide policy and the legalization of cannabis. It has been dismissed as utopian by centrist critics, but that does't seem to worry Hamon, who is trying to pull populism and protectionism into the Socialist camp in his effort to weaken Marine Le Pen's hold on working class Socialists. Benoît Hamon wants to reinvent the idea of the Left by transforming society. Hamon’s team argue that as long as political parties on the center Right and Left keep offering the same ideas that have done nothing to reduce unemployment and poverty in France, voters will continue to turn to the Front National's Le Pen. Hamon’s program, they argue, is about thinking out of the box. At his last rally, Hamon, a small man in suit and tie, was greeted like a rock star by almost 4,000 mostly young people. They were chanting: “Benoît président.” • • • DEAR READERS, the EU socialist movement is fighting to show that it can do populism and protectionism better than the far right. France’s Front National leader, Marine Le Pen, is profiting from dissatisfaction among working-class voters who feel abandoned by both the Left and the Right. And, so far in France, Socialist candidates are making the same mistake that Hillary Clinton and the Democrat Party made against Trump -- they are moving more to the left although their traditional 'working class' voters are clearly moving to the right. In fact, the fight among current candidates is a fight for the French Socialist Party, in much the same way that there is now a British battle for the Labour party -- after they, too, moved left during the Brexit debate while their traditional 'working class' voters were moving right. • Bruno Cautrès of Cevipof, the political research unit at Paris’s elite Sciences Po university, told the Observer : “François Hollande has disappointed many leftwing voters. Today, the left is divided between those who want to continue the same line as François Hollande and Manuel Valls, and those who say these are the very people who have created the economic situation we are in and we have to move to the left. The question arises of where is the line that marks the left these days. For many people who are asked, it’s the relationship with the working class, the poor and those with precarious jobs. But for a number of years now we have seen that it is Marine Le Pen who appeals to the working class.” • The votes were counted Sunday evening in the first round of the Socialist presidential promary, and Benoît Hamon came in first with 35% of the vote, followed by Manuel Valls with 31%. So, the run-off next Sunday will be a contest between the left-centrist Valls and his traditional Socialist views and his opposite Benoît Hamon and his far left populist views. But, whichever of them wins the French Socialist Party nomination, it is unlikely that the Socialist platform, confused and searching for a foundation, will lure the working class away from Le Pen. One French expert told the Guardian : "There is no popular vote for the Socialist party.” Most observers believe the Socialist party candidate will be defeated in the first round of the spring presidential election. The current money is on a second-round run-off between the populist Le Pen and the conservative Les Républicains candidate François Fillon. • This should remind American Progressives that the more they move to the left and away from mainstream American political and social thought and and economic reality, the more they will galvanize their shrinking part of the electorate, but the more they will lose elections. Cautrès says : “The situation is very comparable to that in the UK. The Labour party could have chosen a mainstream, some would say more realistic, candidate and instead it chose Corbyn. It could be that the PS will do the same. The left wing of the left could win the primaries, but it won’t win the presidential. That seems impossible.” If Europe wants to know what the political future looks like, it should study Donald Trump's and Teresa May's speeches, and also the summaries coming out of their reported Thursday meeting this week. Europe can listen and learn, or be left behind. There do not seem to be other choices.