Rise of populism renders obsolete the old political duopoly of ‘left’ and ‘right’

Members of the European Parliament during a voting session in Strasbourg, France, on 12 July 2023. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Julien Warnand)

By J Brooks Spector

19 Jun 2024

The convention of politics being measured along a left/right continuum now must take into account the impact of populism in many nations. The full consequences are only beginning to come into focus.

It is an accident of history that the terms “left” and “right” symbolise one of the fundamental themes of modern political life. However, that trusty duopoly may now be less than totally helpful or complete in explaining what is happening now. Some readers may find this a heretical idea, but hear me out.

The very concept of “left” and “right” in politics is a legacy from the early days of the French Revolution. Back then, the revolutionary National Assembly, in breaking free from the ancien régime’s ineffectual Estates General, seated its more radical parliamentarians on the left side of the venue they were using for their meeting and the more conservative royalist members were placed on the right. (See further exploration of the history here.)

In the ensuing years, this consequence of history and language has taken on a life of its own — and the two terms have become the locked-in-concrete shorthand for defining political life everywhere.

Over time, the concept of a left/right duopoly has spread further and is now used for nearly any discussion about politics, political change, economics, religion or ideology, and probably for cuisine and fashion as well. So much so is this idea hardwired into our brains that the very phrases “the left” and “the right” have become instant signifiers of two contrasting sets of ideas presumed to be internally consistent, nearly universal, virtually timeless — and forever at odds with one other.

Anybody not wedded to one or the other of them tends to be criticised as a principle-less moderate — someone with less than firm, internally consistent ideas and values; in essence, a shapeshifter and flip-flopper. In short, they are someone without serious convictions and values rather than an individual prepared to consider issues and questions on their merits, regardless of where they fall on the left/right spectrum.

In thrall to that left/right duopoly, protests and movements against the prevailing order of a state often end up being defined as creatures of the left — seemingly without serious thought about their specific demands, concerns or issues. But, nowadays, the challenges of populist movements are nearly impossible to peg on that simple left or right scale bequeathed to us by France’s revolutionary struggles.

Consider, in recent times, those convoys of French farmers descending on roads into Paris, driving their massive tractors, harvesters and combines. The drivers don’t seem to be demanding the familiar litany of left political, economic or social changes. There is no “Danny the Red”-style leader à la 1968.

Instead, they press for cheaper transport for their crops, less costly financing and subsidies, less expensive fuel and, above all, better prices for their crops — but certainly not the nationalisation of banks or expropriating the land of the rich. Their issues are hardly part of the standard litany of left-wing student protests everywhere or the “woke” posters in marches in the US.

And so, in our current political universe, we now need something more useful than that one-dimensional left/right continuum. If we think of the left/right line as a mathematical expression, we could put economic views on an X-axis ranging from classic communism and socialism at one end of the graph and laissez-faire capitalism at the other end, with US “New Deal” reforms and Scandinavian social welfare capitalism somewhere in the middle.

But then, we would also need a vertical Y-axis to measure values such as a greater embrace of personal human and civil rights or allowing or not allowing government restrictions on freedom of expression. Things like that.

Matters, however, get still more complex. We also need a third axis, call it the Z-axis, to measure the strength of support (or lack of it) for the cauldron of ethnonationalism, identitarianism and populism — including a declining faith in classical liberal values. While it is easy to think historically of populism as a version of left-wing protest or advocacy, things are not so simple, as populist protests by French farmers or the values of the Donald Trump-supporting, grievance-bearing Maga mobs help make clear.

That brings us to how we can best interpret the rise of the right in our own time. It will be clarifying to understand that what is occurring is a simultaneous rise of many varieties of populism — each embracing an assortment of beliefs and values found in both of those economic and human rights X- and Y-axes.

European Parliament

populism left right Members of the European Parliament during a voting session in Strasbourg, France, on 12 July 2023. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Julien Warnand)

In the most recent election for the European Parliament for the 720 members of the 27-nation assembly, a mix of parties in many of the member nations with right-wing economic views as well as ethnonationalist populist agendas have made significant gains — at the expense of centrist parties, as well as those of the left and among green parties as well.

As The Economist described the results, “Elections across Europe in recent years have often been a case of gauging the dwindling ability of centrist political forces to contain the rise of parties on the hard right. The continent-wide European Parliament elections held between June 6th and 9th marked another twist: a strong rise of nationalist support in France and Germany, even as their allies in the rest of the bloc made few inroads. The political centre has been dented, but it still holds. [Of course, ethnonationalist parties are already in charge in Italy and several other nations like Hungary, while France and Germany are the core of the EU.]

“As the results trickled out on June 9th, the focus was on France, thanks to Emmanuel Macron’s decision to call national parliamentary elections after the National Rally (RN) of his arch-rival Marine Le Pen routed Mr Macron’s liberals. The RN had already topped the EU vote in 2014 and 2019; its margin this time was so wide that its 30 MEPs will be the biggest delegation to the 720-seat parliament in Brussels.

“But the result in Germany was also remarkable. The nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD), a party which unlike the RN has done little to moderate its xenophobic views to appeal to mainstream voters, took 16%, beating all three parties in the ruling coalition. The Social Democrats of Olaf Scholz, the chancellor, fell to their worst score in a national election in over a century of existence. The centre-right Christian Democrats had a good night, relatively speaking, topping the poll easily with 30% — making them favourites ahead of federal elections next year.

“There were other pockets of hard-right support beyond France and Germany. In Austria the Freedom Party, which belongs to the same hard-right Identity and Democracy parliamentary group as the RN and (until it was kicked out recently) the AfD, also came top. In Belgium the more notable result was in national elections also on June 9th, won by a Flemish nationalist party, the New Flemish Alliance — a far more moderate force than the nationalist Vlaams Belang that had been favoured in the opinion polls. The leader of the Alliance, Bart De Wever, is the most likely future prime minister. That would mean another EU national leader drawn from a party in the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) bloc, which takes in Eurosceptic and hard-right parties in the Brussels parliament.”

Taken together, this can be read as the EU version of grievance voting. While it is not sovereign on the continent, the European Parliament does have a real voice on many economic, financial and domestic policy issues that are transnational (and which can be politically unpopular), even if it does not govern individual national foreign policies or individual economic and social policies that remain the purview of the member governments.

The rise of what are labelled as right-wing parties in the EU Parliament elections is less an endorsement of traditional right-wing conservative values (Edmund Burke, the patron saint of classical conservatism, would not have been at home with the rhetoric of those parties and people) than a repudiation of open borders/immigration, the costs of policies by the various green parties, and, above all, an expression of grievances against those elites and anonymous transnational institutions ruling in those distant towers in Brussels.

A winning political strategy

A real test will come soon enough in France’s two-tiered snap election for its National Assembly. As Reuters reported after star footballer Kylian Mbappé spoke out against political extremism, “[Jordan] Bardella’s Eurosceptic, anti-immigration party [the RN] has its first real chance of winning national power in the June 30 and July 7 ballot. Opinion polls have consistently placed the RN first since President Emmanuel Macron’s shock decision this month to dissolve parliament.”

Bardella, in criticising national football stars who are urging the French to eschew extremist views in their electoral choices, said, “When you’re lucky enough to have a very, very big salary, when you are a multi-millionaire ... then I’m a little embarrassed to see these athletes ... give lessons to people who can no longer make ends meet, who no longer feel safe, who do not have the chance to live in neighbourhoods overprotected by security agents….”

Bardella is obviously not a classic Burkean either. His party is hoping to ride the discontent of people who feel left behind so as to seize the day.

Curiously, in Great Britain, the long-running Tory ascendancy seems likely to come to an end on 4 July. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak surprised the nation by deciding on an unexpected snap election for the country’s parliament to forestall an electoral disaster further down the road and a loss to the Labour Party. However, the smart money, the polls and many of the country’s politicians are anticipating a massive Tory defeat.

Although this defeat would come from the left; here too, it is arising out of deep dissatisfaction with declining public services relied upon by ordinary citizens. This is firing up Labour, rather than deep demands for massive social, economic or political changes. Another version of that Z-axis, perhaps. Added to the mix, the perpetual political gadfly and Brexit proponent Nigel Farage is running for parliament under the banner of the Reform UK party, also in an effort to tap into populist dissatisfaction.

And, of course, in the US, there is the tide of grievance-laden populism by voters who believe they have been short-changed or abandoned by the country’s elites and internationalists (and whose anger is being fed by and feeding Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric). This may well give Trump a nearly unprecedented return to office and the White House after losing a previous election (it only happened once before, in the political career of Grover Cleveland), despite all those indictments and court judgments piled up against him.

Or, put another way, as Fareed Zakaria wrote recently in Foreign Affairs in giving context to such feelings, “Most Americans think their country is in decline. In 2018, when the Pew Research Center asked Americans how they felt their country would perform in 2050, 54 percent of respondents agreed that the U.S. economy would be weaker. An even larger number, 60 percent, agreed that the United States would be less important in the world. This should not be surprising; the political atmosphere has been pervaded for some time by a sense that the country is headed in the wrong direction. According to a long-running Gallup poll, the share of Americans who are ‘satisfied’ with the way things are going has not crossed 50 percent in 20 years. It currently stands at 20 percent.

“Over the decades, one way of thinking about who would win the presidency was to ask: Who is the more optimistic candidate? From John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, the sunnier outlook seemed to be the winning ticket. But in 2016, the United States elected a politician whose campaign was premised on doom and gloom. Donald Trump emphasized that the U.S. economy was in a ‘dismal state,’ that the United States had been ‘disrespected, mocked, and ripped off’ abroad, and that the world was ‘a total mess.’ In his inaugural address, he spoke of ‘American carnage.’ His current campaign has reprised these core themes. Three months before declaring his candidacy, he released a video titled ‘A Nation in Decline.’”

Drawing from these examples, if one wanted to craft a winning political strategy, as well as the experiences in some Central and Eastern European nations such as Hungary, a politician who cleverly blended voter grievance, appeals to ethnonationalism and tantalisingly simple solutions to complex problems might well have a successful electoral formula.

Of course, when all else fails, there is nothing like stirring up a war — like Russia’s against Ukraine — to get the patriotic juices flowing and simultaneously relying upon a sense of international grievance.

But a word of caution: One must pick one’s adversary carefully with such a strategy. Otherwise, just as the Ukrainians have done, the aggressed-upon may strenuously resist and manage to draw upon the help of friends in their hour of need. Taken together, these developments are not good for the preservation, let alone the expansion of liberal (or even conservative) democracy. DM

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A winning political strategy