The Disease Is Spreading

Paul Koring writes that Trumpism has gone viral:

An ugly contagion of xenophobic populism threatens to poison democracies, turning them inward-looking just at a moment in history when the crises of global warming and massive migration demand collective international solutions.

In India, the world’s largest democracy, Narendra Modi nailed down an increased and absolute majority this month with a Trumpian-style campaign that featured naked appeals to Hindu majoritarianism and barely-concealed Islamophobia. Modi’s 352-seat majority includes not a single Muslim MP, although India’s nearly 200 million Muslims form 20 per cent of India’s population.

In Indonesia, President Joko Widodo cruised to an increased majority in the world’s largest Muslim nation after callously embracing a nasty and exclusionary brand of Islam. Widodo’s pick of Ma’ruf Amin, Indonesia’s prominent and openly intolerant Muslim cleric, as his running mate, was a deliberate shift away from the acceptance of diversity that was Indonesia’s hallmark for decades.

In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro boasts he is “Trump of the Tropics” and ran a Trump-like nativist campaign in his successful bid for the presidency last fall. His derogatory remarks about women and especially Brazil’s Indigenous peoples make Trump look like a paragon of decency. Bolsonaro once voiced regret that Brazil had failed to exterminate its Indigenous people as efficiently as did the U.S. cavalry. “They say he’s the Donald Trump of South America,” Trump enthused when he hosted Bolsonaro this spring. 

So, the world’s four largest democracies all have Trumpian leaders, all tinged with racist and xenophobic tendencies, all mutually admiring of each other and all instinctively contemptuous of collective international co-operation.

But there is some hope on the horizon:

The results of the EU elections are more complex than the headline victories for xenophobes and ultranationalists would indicate.

Far-right parties fell short of anticipated gains. The centre of political gravity and thus the coalition that will emerge in the Parliament in Strasbourg has shifted to the left, not the right.

While centrist parties — which have dominated European politics since the Second World War — suffered a drubbing as voters turned out in record numbers to make clear they were tired of the same old offerings, the biggest shifts were to forward-looking, internationalist, and social democrat parties to the left of centre.

For instance, a Green tsunami washed across Europe. In Germany and Finland, Greens came second, Les Verts placed third in France. In Britain, the Greens edged the ruling Conservatives and closed in on Labour. Green parties also gained ground in Ireland and the Netherlands and Les Ecolos may finish first in the symbolically important city of Brussels, Europe’s de facto capital.

Young, diverse, internationalist voters, mostly concentrated in Europe’s vibrant and growing cities, powered the surge of support for Green and liberal parties. From Helsinki to Lisbon and Dublin to Berlin, new generations of Europeans share a common identity and a distinctly un-Trumpian view of the world. It’s focused on multilateral and co-operative solutions to the planetary perils of climate change, rampant inequality, and swelling migrant flows.

We are clearly at an inflection point. The upcoming election will be part of the emerging international picture.

Image: barewalls.com