Why are Liberals losing worldwide; is it a fad to go Right or has the cycle of political bullshit finally come full circle – PB/TK
How Liberals Are Blowing It Worldwide—and How Macron Might Not – By Will Marshall / May 27 2017
Europe seems to be containing the fever of resurgent nationalism that propelled last year’s Brexit vote as well as Donald Trump’s improbable election here. Emmanuel Macron’s landslide victory over Marine Le Pen in France’s presidential election is just the latest sign that continental Europe isn’t catching the populist bug.
Not yet, anyway. Nativist and illiberal nationalist movements continue to make headway in many democratic countries. They could break through and take power—as they did in the United States last November—if mainstream parties can’t channel popular grievances toward constructive change.
As populists push political debate to the right, however, center-left parties are floundering on both sides of the Atlantic. Yoked to stale ideas and change-averse constituencies, they are failing to offer restive voters a radically pragmatic alternative to populist panaceas like cutting off immigration, seceding from the global economy and reverting to zero-sum nationalism.
The progressive malaise has left a vacuum that is being filled either by traditional conservative parties, or by young upstarts such as Macron and Italy’s Matteo Renzi, who are challenging the status quo from the radical center.
As the year began, the populist tide was rising. But Dutch voters threw up the first dike in March by rejecting anti-Muslim crusader Geert Wilders, who like Le Pen conflated immigration and terrorism, elevated ethnic solidarity above “cosmopolitan” values and vowed to take Holland out of the European Union. “The Netherlands said ‘Stop’ to the wrong sort of populism,” declared the incumbent Prime Minister Mark Rutte, whose free-market oriented People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy led the voting.
Next up on the continent is Germany, which holds a national election in September. Polls and local elections indicate that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats are pulling away from the Social Democrats (their junior partner in the governing coalition.) Germany is exceptional in that its post-war political order remains largely intact, while populist forces are relatively weak. The xenophobic and ultra-nationalist Alternative for Germany party languishes in single digits.
Continue to thedailybeast.com article: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/05/27/how-liberals-are-blowing-it-worldwideand-how-macron-might-not
