The populist revolt is not a ‘whitelash’

The rise of Eurosceptic, nationalist, populist parties, which are now making the running in France, Italy, Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands and Germany, has horrified Europe’s political elites.

Take the sneering response by one Berlin-based think-tank to the populist revolt that was so evident in the European Union (EU) elections in the summer.

The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) lamented that ‘the EU’s “whiteness” was on full display’, despairing that ‘drivers of discontent [are] behind [a] drift to ethnic European-ness’.

The elections showed, the ECFR concluded, a ‘dangerous xenophobic drift’, as many Europeans signalled their attachment to national politics and a hostility to multiculturalism, especially manifest in opposition to unquestioning acceptance of uncontrolled migration.

By painting the result as the triumph of ‘whiteness’, the European elites are smearing the populist revolt as something dark – as the unleashing of deep, irrational ethnic forces that have, until now, supposedly been held in check by institutions such as the EU.

The term ‘whiteness’ is used to imbue the practice of politics and civic culture with a toxic ethnicity. Apparently, when Europeans – who are, quelle horreur, largely white – vote against the establishment, they are asserting their basest ethnic interests.

This is much more than a cordon sanitaire, firewall or Brandmauer – the tactics used by political elites to keep populists out of government. This is an attempt to redefine voters as revolting, toxic, moral inferiors. This is an attempt to redefine European democratic politics itself – as practised by millions of Europeans – as intrinsically ethnic in character, putting millions of voters on the bottom tier in a new hierarchy of superiority.

Western multiculturalists regard Europe’s asylum system as an axiom of political virtue, whatever its degree of dysfunction. Criticism, whether it is of knife attacks in Mannheim or Solingen or the uncontrolled entry of millions of people over the past nine years, is equated with xenophobia.

A big concern among the elites is that the ‘whiteness’ of European political culture makes Muslims feel uncomfortable, requiring new limits on speech and ideas to prevent ‘Islamophobia’. This dovetails neatly with the hostility towards Israel after 7 October, which is regarded in Europe’s universities and cultural sector as a ‘white’, settler-colonial project.

It is no longer possible to deny, certainly for many voters, that many European institutions, especially the post-national EU, have failed to sufficiently safeguard, protect or align with the public interest – as defined by the public themselves, as opposed to officials, judges, NGOs or the elites.

Any attempt to put the national – the democratic – above the supranational EU is seen as xenophobia, as whiteness; as ethnic in character, rather than a civic impulse.

This is all nonsense. After all, the EU’s migration debate is an overwhelmingly civic question. It is about control, about who decides who should come and the rules or obligations for people living on a territory that is ruled by, and accountable to, a nation – a public. Anger at the failures of the system – and they are legion, and sometimes deadly – is overwhelmingly directed at political elites via the ballot box, rather than aimed at migrants themselves.

The populist and nationalist revolt is, essentially, a civic backlash against institutions and policies that have undermined democracy. For today’s elites, democracy is not to be celebrated as an end in itself, but only as a means to legitimise an institutional order – such as central banks, neoliberal economic models and refugee conventions. These things are celebrated precisely because they are post-national and anti-democratic.

The populist revolt is not a march to achieve white supremacy. It is actually a backlash against elitist notions of superiority and inferiority. Against a prejudiced elite that places decision-making above the reach of the public, the people. Against the treatment of citizens as uneducated, xenophobic, ‘white’ moral inferiors.

Of course, European elites are themselves ethnically white, on the whole. But they signal virtue by attacking ‘whiteness’. In turn, they maintain a paternalistic posture towards Europe’s Muslims, who are portrayed as in need of protection from free speech and ‘whiteness’.

What is striking about the populist revolt – despite the roots of some of the parties who have benefitted from it in anti-democratic ethno-nationalism – is its civic character. Voters are backing once fringe parties not to endorse racism or authoritarianism, but to constitutionally ensure that social questions long ignored or dismissed by elites are dealt with.

This is a civic revolt at the ballot box, not paramilitaries or skinheads breaking up meetings or beating up those who disagree with them. In fact, when it comes to shutting down debate and public meetings, or banning political dissidents, that is far more likely to be done by the avowedly ‘liberal’ elites these days.

The elite attempt to racialise, to make ethnic, this civic revolt is reminiscent of the 1930s. In this period, politics was redefined, by fascists, as being driven by deeper, irrational identification with ethnic or racial groupings, by enmity towards others, in a political state of violent nature.

In the 21st-century, multiculturalist version of this dystopian racial politics, the population is also divided up. A shared civic culture is replaced by safe spaces, barriers and the separation of people defined on the grounds of identity. White ethno-nationalists – insofar as they exist outside the fevered imagination of elites – are playing a different version of the same, divide-and-rule game.

How easy it is to pigeonhole voters as a dangerous, racialised mass rather than to answer the democratic challenge. When civic politics is painted as an expression of poisonous ‘whiteness’, it is clear that the crisis of democracy is not being created by the populists.

Modern European political culture, indeed our civilisation itself, is founded on democracy and the freedom to express interests – to demand that institutions of authority are accountable to the public. All important decisions forming the national interest should be taken by representative institutions, controlled by a popular vote, with universal suffrage of citizens. That is what democracy means to most people.

It is a domain of freedom and free speech. There are no protected ideas – whether Eurozone austerity, refugee conventions, the doctrine of the Catholic church or Muslim mosque, let alone the shallow pieties of wokedom. It is not about left or right, but about the defence and advocacy of civic and democratic culture as an end in itself, regardless of ethnicity, or faith, or whether someone is a socialist, a Christian democrat or a nationalist.

In the realm of democratic politics, there are no moral inferiors, no whiteness or brownness or blackness. We all, equally, have one vote, we all have the right to speak, to decide. This is the domain of equality – one citizen, one vote. It is, especially, equality between men and women – one of the greatest gains of the democratic era.

The civic revolt holds out the hope of democratic renewal. The racialised reaction to it from the elites risks snuffing out both democracy and freedom.

This article is based on a speech given at this year’s Battle of Ideas festival. See the full debate, ‘Populism: a response to two-tier rule?’, here.

Bruno Waterfield is a journalist and Brussels correspondent. He has been reporting and commenting on European affairs for over 20 years.