The center-right German Christian Democratic Union, CDU, broke the taboo and its leader Friedrich Merz’s own public pledge not to cooperate with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) by jointly supporting an anti-immigration resolution in the German parliament. This even provoked a reaction from Angela Merkel, who criticized the abandonment of the line of non-cooperation with the far right.
Although this move by the German center-right is a political calculation ahead of the February elections and the fact that the far right is currently the second largest party in the polls, it can hardly be considered a coincidence that it is happening just days after Donald Trump was sworn in and pledged not only to “seal” his country’s borders but also to carry out mass deportations of migrants.
It was obviously not Trump who created the far-right agenda. Nor was he the one who spearheaded its implementation – in some ways Europe had already closed and militarized its own borders.
However, what Trump seems to be doing in this second term is completely exonerating this rhetoric and this policy.
We saw it in our country too, where the Prime Minister also discovered that the problem is the woke agenda.
Obviously this is also based on an assessment that all of this also resonates with the electorate, although it is certainly interesting that in Greece, when citizens are asked in polls to spontaneously answer what they consider to be the most important problems, they very rarely mention immigration, preferring the cost of living crisis as a much more immediate problem.
And this is precisely the problem we face today. Policies like Trump’s do not arise so much because there is some acute problem or because some critical social interests are at risk. In fact, sometimes the exact opposite is true: in the US, it is very likely that all these mass deportations will have a very high cost and even affect economic sectors, while in our country it is good to remember the discussion of recent years about the shortage of workers and the huge demographic problem, not to mention the more general issue of the aging workforce in Europe. Nevertheless, these views have resonance and are gradually shaping the “common sense” of broader social parties.
However, politics is not simply the continuation of the economy by other means. And in today’s political landscape, the center-right can hardly find a way to become “hegemonic” again simply on the basis of “growth” and markets, apart from everything else and because, especially in Europe, there is no growth at all, but rather economic stagnation.
In such a situation, the shift to issues of identity or the substitution of a sense of common origin for social cohesion seems the only way to address those who feel “outside the walls”.
Because we must not forget that people want the security of a community with a common identity and a world where everyone is an individualized unit and everyone can do whatever they want, in reality scares them because it is a world without guarantees and therefore without security.
Furthermore, Trump’s charm also has to do with how he meets another need – always on a rhetorical level. People want to feel that there is a strong state: one that guarantees their security, one that can defend them against enemies and threats, one that supports the national economy and jobs and does not sacrifice them in the name of “free trade.” When Trump says “we will make America great again,” when he declares that he will even wage a trade war for American interests, when he insists on projecting this image of strength, he is appealing to this reflex.
Of course, neither Trump nor his admirers are going to strengthen the state in relation to what really concerns the lives of citizens, namely wages, housing, health, education, pensions. On the contrary, Trump wants to massively lay off federal government personnel and cut spending in critical areas. Nor is there any question of income redistribution or of truly strengthening the position of workers – the modern far right is deeply liberal.
But at the same time, logics like Trump’s will continue to resonate in many countries, because very often it is as if they have the whole field to themselves. And this is something that will continue to be true as long as those who want a different democratic path do not make serious elaborations of proposals on how the necessary solidarity and expansion of rights can be combined with social cohesion and a sense of security, on how the cost of living crisis can be addressed, on how the state can truly become an instrument of social justice.
