Aspecter is haunting Europe. It has many names, and none of them fits. It is neither left nor right, and neither revolutionary nor reactionary, although it is a bit of all these things. It has many diverse and sometimes incongruous manifestations; it seems to spring from a single fountain of malaise and discontent.
It should be given a name, but labeling it “populist,” “extreme,” or “anti-European” is much too facile and imprecise, for by doing so one discounts it a priori as something unworthy, subversive, and pathological. Yet it is quickly becoming the norm, and in its turn it rejoices in labeling traditional politics as obsolete, irrelevant, and counterproductive. As the Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev wrote recently, “It’s hard to judge if the majority of the Europeans are moving to the left or to the right, but what is obvious is that almost nobody is left in the center.” The very definition of left and right is now being called into question, in the same way the national socialist movements did before World War II. But today’s specter is certainly anti-establishment in every sense of the word. Its enemies are the traditional political elites, the Washington consensus, and the Eurocrats. It is anti-American if not anti-capitalist, anti-Israel if not anti-Semitic, and anti-Brussels if not anti-European.
It speaks of the helplessness of a man in the street, who feels he has no control over the policies made in Brussels, Frankfurt, and Strasbourg, not to speak of Washington, and whose political power, enshrined in his vote, has been devalued to the point of irrelevance. It speaks of the frustration of the blue-collar workers, whose jobs have been taken over by foreigners from other parts of Europe and whose unemployment insurance and social benefits must be shared with foreigners from outside Europe. The influx of immigrants makes it more difficult to find a job in times of crisis and keeps the wages low in times of growth. It is thus easy to blame the unemployment and stagnant wages on them, although the root causes may lie elsewhere.