2024-08-04 07:35:41
The rise of the far right in Europe, and around the world, is directly linked to a higher risk of poverty. Following the results of the Portuguese parliamentary elections, political analysts are studying the reasons for the rise of these extremist forces.
The Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Germany has conducted a study entitled Prosperity in danger? Causes and consequences of populism They confirm that in regions where there are more people at risk of poverty and social exclusion, the vote for the far right increases. The poverty gap measures the average distance between household income and the poverty line. For these calculations, the authors analysed data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), the microcensus and the results of the federal elections at regional level.
“The more households in a region fail to keep pace with national income development and fall behind, the more likely this is to create a breeding ground for anti-democratic and nationalist tendencies at local level,” said ifo researcher Florian Neumeier.
In this document, Ursula Münch, director of the Tutzting Academy for Political Education, stressed that in view of the European elections “it can be assumed that far-right and populist forces will be strongly mobilised”.
Calculations by Ifo show that if the poverty gap increases by one percentage point, the share of votes for far-right parties increases by up to 1.2 percentage points.
“The German far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) is able to make greater inroads in structurally weak regions of Germany. However, the income structure of its voters is not that different from that of other established parties,” says ifo researcher David Gstrein.
The researchers’ calculations show that the effects of rising poverty are significantly stronger in eastern Germany than in the west. However, they found no significant differences between urban and rural areas anywhere in Germany. While More votes were recorded for far-right parties in all income groupsgrowth is strongest among the poorest 40%.
Although the universe of this study is based on Germany, it can be extrapolated to the rest of the Old Continent, since the patterns of political behavior are quite similar in the different countries in the environment.
According to the latest data from the World Bank (2021), the countries with the highest poverty rate in the European Union were Bulgaria (22.9%), Estonia (22.8%), Latvia (22.5%), Romania (21.2%), Lithuania (20.9%), Spain (20.4%) and Italy (20.1%). In the case of Italy, it is paradoxical because in the regions where there is the most poverty (south) the populist vote shifted to the right, while the northern regions, the most prosperous, gave victory to Georgia Meloni’s party, Brothers of Italy.
In Spain, according to the results of the 2023 general elections, the third political force in the parliamentary arch is Vox, despite having lost more than 20 deputies compared to the 2019 General Elections. If a breakdown is made by province, in the so-called ’empty Spain’ and all of Andalusia they rose as the third political force, as well as in the province of Las Palmas.
According to the European Network Against Poverty and Social Exclusion in Spain (EAPN-ES), four autonomous communities have more than a tenth of their population living in severe poverty: Andalusia (14.4%), the Canary Islands (13.2%), Murcia (11.6%) and Extremadura (10.2%). That is, people who live in households with income less than 6,725 euros per consumption unit per year (560 euros per month)In all of them, Vox emerged as the third force in the last elections.
In Portugal, the far-right Chega party, led by André Ventura, managed to quadruple its number of deputies in the Assembly of the Republic, going from 12 seats in the 2022 elections to 48 on Sunday, and was the leading force in the Algarve, the southern region of Portugal and one of the poorest in the country.
The rewards of pessimism
The world economy is not going through its best moment. Proof of this is the concatenation of economic crises that have occurred since 2020 with the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Ursula Münch says that “this polarization can be seen in all the issues that have occupied us in recent months and years: immigration, climate policy and the protection of species, the war against Ukraine, but also Covid-19.”
When the world opened up after Covid, there was a huge supply problem to meet the enormous demand of the population that had been confined for months. This caused huge bottlenecks in supply chains, driving up consumer prices and making life more expensive. When things seemed to be stabilizing, a cargo ship, the Ever Given, ran aground in the Suez Canal, the main passage for routes from Asia. through which more than 12% of global trade circulatesAt that time, the eurozone closed the year with a record inflation of 5% and the European Union as a whole at 5.3%. Spain ended that fiscal year at 6.5%, a record figure.
Vladimir Putin then decided to invade Ukraine, which made life even more expensive due to the rise in energy prices following sanctions imposed on Russia, which prevented the import of its gas to the Old Continent. This caused a huge contagion effect, driving prices to record double-digit numbers. The eurozone reached its peak of 11.5% in October of that same year. In Spain, in July 2022, the general CPI marked a rate of 10.8%.
All this created a breeding ground full of pessimism. Even though the European Union opened the floodgates on deficits and public spending so that governments could offer aid packages due to the escalation of prices, to the recovery plan with Next Generation fundsskepticism and pessimism took hold of the population of the Old Continent.
“This all-pervasive pessimism, which for some actors also appears to be a means to their own ends, is even outweighed when it comes to assessing the federal government’s ability to act: Criticism of the traffic light parties is increasing rather than decreasing, and the current protests by farmers, craftsmen and transport companies are repeatedly combined with radical overtones and even violent riots,” said Ursula Münch in the Ifo report referring to Germany.
France is a perfect example of this. The French far-right party, National Rally, heirs to Marine Le Pen’s Front Nationale, is currently in the polls as the leading force for the European elections.
The situation in France fits perfectly with the arguments of Ifo. President Emmanuel Macron has had to deal with several protests during his term in office. It all started with the green vest crisiswhen truckers brought the streets of Paris to a standstill demanding fuel subsidies due to massive increases in fuel prices.
The French pension reform then brought several general strikes that further undermined Macron’s government. The discontent over the increase in the retirement age of the 62 to 64 years in 2030. This created considerable division within the party and Le Pen’s far right took advantage of the protests and general discontent, especially because they approved it by emergency decree without consulting the Assembly.
The reform of the migration law then caused another schism in the president’s government, but in this case he did receive the support of the far right to push through the law, which made them rise in popularity. Faced with this situation, Macron made his prime minister, Elisabeth Borne, resign to put Gabriel Attal, a young man with a more conservative profile, at the head of the Council of Ministers, with the sole objective of stopping the rise of the National Rally.
However, in France they are still growing, especially after the rural revolts that paralysed the country once again, demanding more aid and the reduction of the European Union’s criteria for production.
Münch is clear when referring to the mode of operation of this type of parties: “Populists and extremists, that is, those who for their own success need the electorate’s skepticism towards the parliamentary system and distrust towards respectable parties, mobilize themselves with mockery, malice and deliberately spreading false information.”
In this regard, Professor Armin Nassehi of the Institute of Sociology at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich explains that the best definition of what is meant by populism “we owe to a populist, that is, the former and possible next president of the United States, Donald Trump” who said the following at his inauguration in 2017: “Today’s ceremony has a very special meaning. Because today we are not simply transferring power from one administration to another, or from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington DC and giving it back to you, the American people.”
For Nassehi these words “contain everything that defines political populism”, a Strong criticism of the elitea critique of democratic procedures to the claim that real interests represent the people.
To the Milei caste
In Argentina, it was clear how the discontent of the population brought its current president, Javier Milei, to power. Argentina is going through a serious economic situation, with a poverty rate of over 45% in 2023 and inflation that reached 143% in the same month of the elections.
This is the third crisis of this kind that the country has gone through since the restoration of democracy four decades ago. “Milei appears as an alternative where the economic and social situation is even worse than in the two previous opportunities,” Argentine analyst Rosendo Fraga told BBC Mundo.
The promises to end the Peronist continuism in the country, which he accused of leading Argentina to ruin, as well as their promises to close all the public “chiringuitos” that they had set up during the entire time they were in the Casa Rosada with their “chainsaw plan” to cut public spending. Added to the promise to “dollarize” the economy and close the Central Bank, at a time when there was a constant devaluation of the peso and confidence in the local currency was at rock bottom, was what made people trust their vote to Javier Milei in the second round on November 19 of last year.
The Ifo Institute argues that in order to confront the advance of the far right in Europe and of Eurosceptic parties, “the country’s economic problems must be resolved.” At the same time, they say, referring to Germany but applicable to the rest of Europe, the following are “especially important”: structural and economic policies and effective for structurally weaker regions,” explained Florian Dorn.
They also highlight the importance of providing “credible” opportunities and prospects for the future of those most affected by digital change and focus on a structural reform of educational systems to “strengthen” democratic trust.