While the Brexit debate rages on, it continues to ignore entirely a more important European political battle: the search for the best way to defeat populists on the continent within the next eight months — the time left before the European parliamentary elections.
That little of this seems to get factored into internal British discourse is not surprising: For all the headlines about British Prime Minister Theresa May’s “Salzburg humiliation” or “EU dirty rats,” Brexit is essentially the British talking to themselves.
Across the Channel, a new line of attack against Europe’s populists is taking shape: It focuses on breaches of democratic rule of law, rather than the issue of immigration. That is why the most important piece of EU news this month was not the Salzburg situation — which was entirely predictable — but the 12 September vote in the European Parliament on the rule of law in Hungary — which was much less predictable.
Illustration: Louise Ting
For the first time, an EU institution that is hard to describe as “anti-democratic” — it is elected directly by the union’s citizens — called for the launch of an Article 7 [of the Treaty on European Union] procedure against a member state’s government because of the way it has been disemboweling essential democratic institutions and rights.
For a long time now, Europe’s liberal democrats have been struggling to curtail political forces that threaten core principles, but since the 2015 refugee crisis, they have let themselves get dragged into precisely the debate that populists can thrive on: migration.
Not only was the EU at a loss over how to deal with the arrival of 1 million people in 2015, but its liberals have mostly failed to convince large swaths of the population that immigration is needed, that it need not upend social services and that it does not spell the end of a certain sense of European or national identity.
Migration conjures up fears that rational argument struggles to cope with. Avowedly “illiberal” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Salvini have secured major electoral breakthroughs by relentlessly pounding away at migration, depicted as a “Muslim invasion” (Orban) or as something that requires “mass cleansing, street by street” (Salvini).
With that rhetoric, they are now preparing to launch their bid to take control of the European Parliament, along with like-minded European politicians. With that rhetoric also, the Swedish far right has won a position that allows it to foster political instability, as shown by last week’s no-confidence vote in Stockholm in which Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven failed to obtain a parliamentary majority following the election of a new parliament.
Pushing back at these forces with talk of multiculturalism and inclusiveness will go only so far. A better strategy is to nail them on the democratic rule of law. That is where the populist Achilles heel is found; and it is where the EU has tools to act, such as Article 7, which can suspend EU voting rights, or rulings by the European Court of Justice and European Court of Human Rights.
By this, I certainly do not mean that the moral and legal argument for saving people fleeing war and persecution should not be made, but it might be too late now, before the vote in May next year, to shift those parts of public opinion in Europe that have come to believe that asylum is shorthand for demographic upheaval or “replacement.”
Studies have showed that European citizens overestimate the percentage of migrants in their countries: Italians believe it is three times higher than the real figure.
The bare fact that migration flows have dropped steeply since 2015 does not register in perceptions. It is no coincidence that anti-immigration narratives have now spread from Europe’s hard right to its hard left — with German Left Party cochair Sahra Wagenknecht and French Legislator and former presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon arguing that the arrival of migrants is a capitalist European plot to suppress workers’ wages.
At this point, to shift the argument against Europe’s extremes away from migration makes much better sense.
Saying that the democratic rule of law is under siege holds more political potential. This is what happened on Sept. 12, when two-thirds of European lawmakers drew a line marking what is acceptable and what is not. Think of it as a case of European checks and balances at last kicking in.
The resolution voted through that day is a clear indictment of everything that Orban has done to violate democratic standards, from restricting freedom of the press to undermining the electoral system. It ought to serve as a template for a wider grassroots European campaign to protect the democratic rule of law.
Rather than lambasting Orban for rejecting the 2015 EU refugee redistribution scheme — compulsory quotas that never translated into reality — cornering him on the dismantling of mechanisms that give citizens a proper say in democracy, and allow them to make informed decisions, is likely to be more rewarding.
A better way to counter Orban and Salvini is to focus on how they threaten what protects citizens. Populists aim to destroy the safety that comes from being able to count on an independent judge if you have been the victim of abuse; the safety that comes with getting pluralistic information, not state propaganda; the safety that comes from being confident that your shop or your business will not be choked by kleptocratic, corrupt power networks.
It helps to picture populists as a bulldozer over which a large banner reading “Migrants Out” has been slapped to hide the grinding wheels and huge metal shovel that are busy dismantling the democratic rule of law. It is happened in Hungary and Poland, and it is threatening to happen in Italy if Salvini gets his way.
Ask a European citizen if they want more migrants and they might answer uneasily. Ask them if they want their government to deprive them of the tools that give people a say and the protections that come with democratic rule, and the response will be more forthright.
Rule of law — as a shield against abuse of power and corruption — should be the signature theme of next year’s election.
Choice of vocabulary matters too. Framing the debate as a battle of “progressives versus nationalists” has limits, because populists will push back by equating “progressivism” with enforcing “open-border” or “anti-Christian” policies. A shrewder approach would be to cast this existential battle for Europe’s soul as “democrats versus authoritarians.”
At the end of the day, our common enemy is autocracy. Arbitrary rule leaves citizens unprotected; Europe’s body of law protects them. Populists want that to come undone, so they can redraw the continent as they like. That is where the real, immediate danger lies — not in all the fantasizing that, from Brexit to Orban, has surrounded migration.
Natalie Nougayrede is a Guardian columnist and leader writer.
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