“Far-right populists gain traction in Europe,” reads the headline in today’s print edition of the weekend Wall Street Journal (WSJ, p. A-9). Curiously, the on-line version of the story runs under the headline,
In Europe, the Center-Right Is Losing Its Battle Against Populism.
Which is it? Merely gaining traction or winning the battle? Here is how the WSJ alternately describes the phenomenon in just this one article: Far-right populist, populist/ism, far-right, right-wing populists, the populist right, radical far-right, and right-wing extremist.
Oh, my. What extreme, radical ideas do these parties hold? I’m only partially kidding when I say their big issues sound like the positions held by mainstream U.S. Democrats from 15-30 years ago.
The WSJ describes the infamous Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) with this sentence, that I have annotated in bold with citations,
It is stridently anti-immigration (Bill Clinton, 1996), wants Germany to leave the EU (Dick Gephardt, anti-NAFTA, 2003), and has called for rapprochement with Russia (Hilary Clinton, 2009).
So, what’s “far” about “far-right” other than media scare tactics?
From what I can piece together, here is the European political spectrum, from left to right,
- Communist
- Socialist
- Liberal
- Center-Left
- Centrist-Moderate
- Center-Right
- Far-Right
The spectrum of acceptable ideologies is skewed heavily to the left, with nothing on the left considered to be off limits.
