Which way are the political winds blowing around the English Channel?
At the time of writing, the results in the second round of French legislative elections are not yet determined. But a reasonable guess is that the left wing alliance Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) and the Rassemblement National (RN) will have done well, at least according to the first round results. Across the pond the Labour party won a big majority in parliament, and the right wing upstart Reform UK party did rather well. Well enough that its leader, Nigel Farage, finally became an MP after seven failed attempts. In short, it seems that the centre right is losing ground in western Europe to the benefit of hard right and left wing. What does that say about the political winds in the larger west?
The French elections underscore what politicians in the Nordics have successively learned the hard way since Dansk Folkeparti was elected to the Folketing in 1998, namely that pretending that a hard right party doesn’t exist never works. Whether you call it stuerent or a cordon sanitaire the fact is that parties which are outside the political mainstream rarely suffer from being sectioned off from the established political world. Many such parties, Reform and RN included, benefit from being excluded as their pitch relies on how they are different to the mainstream.
The left has been doing well across Europe lately, first in EU elections in the Nordics and now in both the UK and France. If this is indeed a trend I think it is a sign that the old Blairite compromise is breaking down. After Reagan and Thatcher started the market revolution there was a time when social democrats fought against the premise of neo-liberal politics, namely that the market is the best system for allocating scarce resources. However, by the time Blair was elected in the UK in 1997 Labour had ceded ground on economics and since then there have not been many social democratic parties which have not at least tacitly approved of the market.
That seems to be changing with hard left parties like La France Insoumise and centre left parties like Labour being successful. I think many on the left feel that the rise of more nationalist and populist right wing parties and movements is a result of them having become less tough on traditional class issues which meant that voters who would have voted for them 30 years ago now find champions of the working people in figures like Farage and Bardella instead of in Mélenchon and Starmer. My expectation is that left wingers on both sides of the pond will really start to challenge the Blairite orthodoxy on the market in the coming terms.
It is difficult to make out larger themes out of elections as they are always and everywhere about local concerns, moods, and ideas – as indeed they should be – but I still think that there is enough evidence here to suggest that we are moving towards a more ideologically polarised political landscape where norms and premises will form and be destroyed. If the late nineties and noughties were defined by the idea that the market was fundamentally good, then I suspect the foundational idea which will define the coming terms is that immigration needs to be strictly controlled. That may sound like a depressingly illiberal direction of travel, but sooner or later we’ll come to a moment when that orthodoxy will be challenged too.
Political commentators often like to describe the political winds as being right wing or left wing, but from the perch overlooking the various election results after the first half of perhaps the biggest election year in history it looks more like the winds are blowing away from the centre.
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I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
Cover photo by Matt Brown from Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson
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