As America’s Democratic presidential candidates promote programs borrowed from Europe’s traditional left, Europeans are increasingly pushing back against them.
Following an election last Sunday in Germany’s Thuringia state, members of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic party accused the chancellor (in power since 2005) of dragging the party too far leftward, blaming her for the loss to the far-right Alternative for Germany party. A top contender for the Christian Democratic leadership, Friedrich Merz, called on Merkel to resign now, rather than wait for 2021, when she plans to retire.
In last May’s European Parliament election, France’s National Rally party handsomely beat President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist faction. Formerly known as the National Front, the current right-most French party is dominated by Marine Le Pen, whose father and party founder, Jean-Marie, was a Holocaust denier. But now Le Pen’s party concentrates on conservatism and retail politics, and its increasingly seen as a formidable challenger to Macron, whose poll numbers, despite a recent uptick, remain low.
In Poland, Hungary and Italy, to name a few, politicians of various right-wing parties are now in power, while anti-leftists, including some ugly and racist ones, are on the rise. Meanwhile, in Canada, another perceived utopia among progressives, former golden boy Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is striving to stay in power after his Liberal party suffered painful parliamentary seat losses in the Oct. 21 election.
One of the major reasons for Trudeau’s setback was his environment-friendly campaign, highlighting strategies to combat climate change. While restricting reliance on fossil fuels is popular in Canada’s urban east, its oil-drilling Western provinces voted against the Liberals in droves, opting for the right instead.
Then there’s the United Kingdom, which this week decided to conduct a national election on Dec. 12. Brits have had it up to their stiff upper lips with Brexit talk. And yet, while smart Londoners pooh-pooh the flamboyant Conservative prime minister, Boris Johnson, polls show that even Euro-remainers may hold their noses and vote to keep him in power.
Why? Johnson’s top rival, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, is widely seen as the Ghost of Leftwing Past, a throwback to an era when British intellectuals idolized the Soviet Union and other enemies of the West. If Corbyn wins, it won’t be on the strength of his socialist ideas or his obsession with Jews and Israel, but despite them.
So what drives Europe’s right turn? A pushback against the continent’s migration policies is a common explanation and it certainly is a reason — but far from the only one. It’s the economy, stupid.
While the newly minted front-runner for the Democratic Party, Elizabeth Warren, says wealth tax will finance all her “I have a plan for that” ideas, Europe has tried, and largely dismissed, that scheme. Of the dozen countries that have levied taxes on the ultra-rich, all but three repealed them: Promised government revenues never materialized, and the well-to-do found ways to exploit loopholes or, worse, moved out of the country to escape confiscatory taxes.
Meanwhile, in March, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley took to Twitter to challenge another Democratic front-runner, Bernie Sanders, for lavishing praise on Finland’s health-care system. “Comparing us to Finland is ridiculous,” Haley wrote, as a chorus of fact-checkers — and Finland’s UN ambassador, Kai Sauer — rushed to Bernie’s defense.
Yet, in the same week, Finland’s government resigned en masse after a plan to overhaul the national health-care system collapsed, aptly demonstrating the nation’s inability to meet universal health care’s high costs.
In debates, top Democratic candidates typically explore ideas that would steer America leftward, as in the European Union. But in that same European Union, 33,000 people became unemployed in September. Unemployment rates there hover around 7.5 percent while America enjoys its lowest unemployment numbers in half a century. America’s GDP, according to the latest numbers available, grows at almost a 2 percent annualized rate while the Eurozone’s growth remains sluggish at under 1 percent.
Yes, Europe’s left is trying new things: The Dutch, for one, want to shorten the workweek to four days to raise productivity. These ideas are yet to be tested. But if America’s contenders want to beat President Trump next year, they better develop new ideas of their own — or at least reexamine their stalest, oldest European ones.
Like, you know, the Europeans are doing.
Twitter: @BennyAvni