Europe’s Right and Left on March to Populism
By JIM YARDLEYMAY 23, 2014
ROME — For weeks, Beppe Grillo, the Italian political insurgent, has crisscrossed the nation in what might be called his vitriol tour. He has let loose zesty, bellowing insults against journalists, businessmen, Italian politicians and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor and avatar of European austerity. He has even taken a swipe at Dudu, the fluffy white poodle belonging to former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
“I come across as a guy who yells,” Mr. Grillo admitted recently on a television talk show, “Porta a Porta.” “It’s true. I am angry and sometimes I exaggerate, but it’s an anger that has united the dreams of 10 million Italians.”
Or so Mr. Grillo hopes. With voting for the European Parliament to conclude on Sunday, the elections will provide the best indicator yet of the depth of disillusionment and anger in southern Europe. The belt of Mediterranean countries has borne the worst of the five-year economic crisis and churned with seething resentment and outright fury over the austerity policies imposed by the elites perceived as running Europe.
People lined up to receive free merchandise at a market in Athens.
For months, media attention has primarily focused on far-right, euro-skeptic parties making gains in northern Europe, including the National Front in France and the United Kingdom Independence Party, which showed strongly in local elections Friday and now seems poised to shake up the politics of Britain.
Even so, the stakes are arguably higher in the south. Especially in Italy and Greece, poor showings by the governing parties could increase pressure for early national elections, and make it more difficult for the fragile coalition governments to carry through on political and economic reforms. This type of instability worries European leaders and could also rattle financial markets.
“We are exporting instability,” cautioned a political commentator, Antonio Polito, in a front-page editorial this week in Corriere della Sera, a leading Italian newspaper. “What is abnormal — because it does not happen elsewhere — is that such a result might blow up the entire, very fragile balance upon which acrobats like the government and Parliament are hanging on.”
Europe’s parliamentary elections are still a relative novelty, with a low turnout expected, which is why many analysts warn that voters might use the races to send a protest message that they have had enough.
In Italy and Greece, voters have a pick of choices to express their anger: from the left, there is Syriza in Greece; from the right, there is the neo-fascist Golden Dawn in Greece or the anti-immigrant Northern League in Italy; and there is the pox-on-all-their houses ethos of Mr. Grillo, an anti-establishment wrecking ball.
In Spain, the two dominant parties, the Popular Party and the Socialists, are expected to lose seats to smaller parties, some with anti-Europe positions but most to the political left of the Socialists.
“There is no one populism in Europe,” said Brigid Laffan, an expert on European politics at the European University Institute. “Populism and the neo-right predated the crisis. But the crisis gave a new opening.”
At a “State of the Union” conference this month in Florence, European leaders convened to discuss the coming elections and the recurrent theme of voter anger. In a midday speech, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi of Italy warned that only a few years ago, during the height of the financial crisis, Italy’s problems centered on lending rates — known as “the spread.” Now, he said, the problem was the spread of angry, political populism.
Mario Monti, the professorial technocrat who served as Italy’s prime minister at the height of the crisis, said Mr. Grillo’s rise had also pushed mainstream, center-right parties such as Mr. Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and the New Center Right to become more anti-Europe, anti-Germany and anti-European Central Bank.
He said that nationalist parties in northern Europe wanted to reclaim sovereignty from Brussels, but Mr. Grillo wanted to destroy the status quo.
“Grillo’s movement came up essentially as a challenge to the establishment, to traditional politicians and political parties,” Mr. Monti said. “The real enemy for him is the politician.”
Supporters of the Golden Dawn Party at a rally.
Mr. Grillo’s political organization, the Five Star Movement, unexpectedly finished a strong third in last year’s inconclusive national elections, with 25 percent of the total vote. His momentum then seemed to stall as lawmakers from his party began to bicker, with some complaining that Mr. Grillo was acting like an autocrat.
The infighting also coincided with the emergence of the charismatic Mr. Renzi, who wrested control of his Democratic Party and became prime minister in February on promises of sweeping reforms.
But now Mr. Grillo is reinvigorated, traveling the country and posting tirades on his blog. The most recent polls have shown the Democratic Party with a lead, but Mr. Grillo has been drawing large crowds as he vows to finish first, gleefully lashing out at the establishment and promoting a vaguely defined system of direct representation through online referendums. Those, he says, will also allow voters to punish what he calls the three “destroyers:” journalists, industrialists and politicians.
“This horrendous trio has to be judged via a popular media trial that will start after the European elections,” he wrote on his blog. “It’ll take place on the Internet, where there’ll be a reconstruction of a virtual castle, with prison cells.”
A surge by the Five Star Movement could undermine Mr. Renzi, who is trying to push an economic and electoral reform package through Italy’s Parliament as European officials are increasing pressure on the government to move faster to reduce the country’s massive public debt and reduce its fiscal deficit.
In Greece, Prime Minister Antonis Samaras is trying to rally support for his coalition government, arguing that a victory by the left-wing Syriza, which is narrowly leading in polls, could threaten the country’s slightly improving economy — a charge Syriza dismisses as a desperate scare tactic. He has stepped up his attacks in recent days, even as Syriza’s leader, Alexis Tsipras, has continued to challenge the terms of the financial bailout that saved Greece from bankruptcy but inflicted punishing austerity.
Two years ago, Mr. Samaras’s New Democracy pulled out a slim victory in national elections, as the rest of Europe was fraught with concern that a Syriza victory might threaten the stability of the euro.
Now, Mr. Samaras must contend with Syriza on the left as well as Golden Dawn on the far right. Last year, the government declared Golden Dawn a criminal organization, not a political party, and arrested several party leaders, including some elected officials.
The party’s electoral status was unclear until this month, when Greece’s Supreme Court ruled that Golden Dawn could participate in the European elections. Now many analysts predict that the party could finish third, or better. At a rally this month, about 300 flag-waving supporters gathered in an outdoor basketball court in a leafy, middle-class neighborhood of Athens. Golden Dawn’s local candidates stood together on a platform — mostly heavily muscled men with close haircuts, wearing black shirts and pants.
“Positive, extremely positive,” answered Ilias Panagiotaros, a Golden Dawn leader watching the rally, when asked about his party’s electoral prospects. “We are going for second place, if not first.”
“Two years ago, we had a debt that was 129 percent of gross domestic product,” he added. “We were dying. That’s what they were saying. Now we have a debt that is 170 percent of G.D.P. And they say we are going well. That is unexplainable.”
He relished the thought of not only destabilizing Greek politics but sending his party’s candidates to Brussels.
“For the first time, the next European Parliament will have something different to deal with,” he predicted. “There will be 10 or 15 nationalist parties, plus euro-skeptic parties. And they will change the agenda.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/24/wo...lism.html?_r=0