The global far right is here to stay .. By ISHAAN THAROOR

The recent European parliamentary elections offered some optimistic liberals a chance to gloat. “The so-called populist wave, I think it was contained,” declared Martin Selmayr, the influential secretary general of the European Commission. Speaking at a Politico panel on Monday, Selmayr was reacting to a slate of results across the continent that saw the far right eat away at traditional centrist parties, but also get checked back by an increased vote for pro-Europe and environmentalist factions. “The real winner of this election is democracy,” he concluded.

But others didn’t share Selmayr’s enthusiasm. Parties that were once part of an extremist fringe are now settling into the status quo. In Italy and France, far-right parties cannibalized the support of the mainstream right to emerge victors in national polls. “This looks more and more like a consolidated base — a reliable bloc of supporters rather than protest voters looking to lash out” at the establishment, wrote Cole Stangler, a Paris-based journalist.

People once “voted against the establishment in European elections to send a message, but no one really wanted these politicians to try their hand at governing. These parties were not seen as serious about policy; they were just playing politics,” Bulgarian commentator Ivan Krastevobserved. “Now, there is no choice but to admit that the populist far right is becoming a permanent feature of European politics.”

The elections also saw a surge in support for the Greens and comebacks for Social Democrats in Spain and the Netherlands. But, contrary to declarations that the “center was holding,” some analysts pointed to how the political terrain was shifting beneath their feet.

“Rather than a victory for democracy, the European elections, and the responses to the results, show how much populism in general, and the populist radical right in particular, has become mainstreamed and normalized,” wrote Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde. “We find it normal that a neo-Nazi party is the third biggest party in a member state … and that the populist radical right is the biggest party in several EU member states.”

Beyond Europe, illiberal nationalists and hard-line right-wing forces are on the march. In India, the world’s biggest democracy, Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party swept back to power last week in a landslide, confounding earlier predictions that they would struggle to cobble together a new coalition. In Australia, the ruling conservative party maintained power in a shock election they weren’t expected to win. And in the United States, the odds of President Trump winning reelection in 2020 — once considered improbable, given the cloud of outrage and scandal permanently hovering over Washington — are narrowing.

“Right-wing populism struggles to govern effectively, but it clearly has a durable political appeal,” Ross Douthat, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, argued in a piece that pointed to the “global fade of liberalism.”

Of course, there’s plenty that separates nationalist rulers like Trump and Modi, or Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. But it’s possible to pick out shared tendencies coursing through all their politics, Princeton political philosopher Jan-Werner Müller suggests. “The populist art of governance is based on nationalism (often with racist overtones), on hijacking the state for the ends of partisan loyalists and, less obviously, on weaponizing the economy to secure political power: a combination of culture war, patronage and mass clientelism,” he wrote in the London Review of Books.

These phenomena are on view, to varying degrees wherever nationalists or self-proclaimed “populists” now hold sway after elections. Immigrants and minorities get bashed and demonized; meanwhile, the leaders’ supporters get repeatedly told they are the authentic representatives of the nation, often to the exclusion of all others. Their opponents are deemed illegitimate and treacherous, guilty of all sorts of corruption, even as backers of the ruling party engage in their own chicanery and graft.

Not surprisingly, many have wrung their hands over the stresses this sort of politics places on democracies. But Müller contends that it’s a mistake for those opposed to the populist far right to get wrapped up in arguments about the return of 1930s fascism or jackbooted authoritarianism.

“Not everything that populists say about elites is necessarily wrong — the talk of rigged economies resonates for a reason,” he wrote, adding that for liberals and the left, “there has to be more to them than being ‘anti-populist’: they have to start to figure out what they actually stand for.”

There’s a diverse spread of politicians and parties attempting to articulate precisely what that may be — from defending pluralism in their societies to championing environmental activism to fighting global kleptocracy and economic inequality at home. But, at least on an electoral level, this sort of agenda has yet to rival the siren song of right-wing nationalists. That may simply be because of the current potency of politics as a culture war.

“It turns out that, if you want to fight nationalist-populists like Modi, you can’t treat them like regular politicians,” Indian columnist Mihir Sharmawrote in a piece that puzzled over how so many Indian voters seemed to side with Modi’s agenda over their economic self-interest. “Nor can you assume away unpalatable truths about your fellow voters. You can’t change their votes by appealing to their pocketbooks, or by big economic promises, or by excoriating a populist government’s record, because they will always trust such leaders more than they will you. You can’t change how they vote until you change their minds about what sort of country they want to live in.”

In the Indian context, that’s at present a lost battle for liberals. Sharma opens his piece for Bloomberg with a chilling line: “It’s a terrible feeling to discover that your country is full of strangers.”

President Trump flew over 14 hours, passed through 13 time zones and crossed the international date line to — essentially — be feted by the Japanese. My colleague Ashley Parker reports from Tokyo:

“On a four-day visit to Japan, Trump enjoyed golf and double cheeseburgers (made with U.S. beef), participated in an imperial gift exchange, attended a traditional sumo tournament and fielded questions from the media at the gilded Akasaka Palace.

“But like many strategies to influence and contain the president, the carefully planned Japanese attempt hit something of a skid on Trump’s first full day in Tokyo on Sunday, when Trump fired off a tweet that, in a single missive, undermined his national security adviser, aligned himself with a brutal dictator and attacked a Democratic rival on foreign soil.

“Then Monday, in a joint news conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Trump continued his headlong plunge into diplomatic mayhem, expressing such eagerness for a deal with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that he backed Kim over his own top aides (notably national security adviser John Bolton), his allies (Japan) and his fellow Americans (former vice president Joe Biden)…

“Still, when Trump wasn’t making unplanned news, he largely basked in his elevated status, with Abe playing humble guide. In some ways, the president’s Japan sojourn revealed Trump as part reluctant tourist, part eager honoree and always deeply perplexed when the spotlight was not squarely on him.”

• You could call it a battle of state media. On Wednesday night, Liu Xin from China Global Television Network will appear on a primetime show anchored by Trish Regan on Fox Business Network, a channel affiliated with right-wing Fox News and favorable to the Trump administration. The duo will spar over questions of trade and the U.S.-China trade war. My colleague Gerry Shih has more:

“The debate might be just another weeknight segment for Fox Business, but it’s eagerly anticipated in China, where nationalism and distaste for the United States are running high as the White House tightens the screws on Beijing in their ongoing trade dispute.

“Hashtags about the upcoming debate have been viewed upward of 150 million times, with some Weibo posts retweeted tens of thousands of times.

“Nearly all of China’s tightly controlled state media outlets have covered the Liu vs. Regan showdown, often framing the anchor as a symbol of Chinese toughness and rationality. Liu’s employer CGTN — the international division of China’s all-powerful China Central Television network, or CCTV — has hailed the clash between the two anchors as nothing less than a ‘historic first.’

“From the Chinese government perspective, the debate may be a small victory before Liu even utters a word on Fox Business. Over the past decade, the ruling Communist Party has invested heavily to push its state media into the global conversation and shape international discourse.”

• At least 55 prison inmates were strangled or stabbed to death in fights at four state facilities in northwestern Brazil, authorities said Tuesday. They planned to move inmates around the country’s overcrowded prison system in the hope of reducing tensions, reported my colleague Marina Lopes:

“The killings, which appear to stem from a power struggle within the Northern Family, Brazil’s third-most powerful gang, began Sunday at the Anísio Jobim penitentiary complex in Brazil’s northwestern Amazonas state. Authorities say inmates stabbed rivals with sharpened toothbrushes and choked them to death in front of visiting family members.

“Forty more inmates were killed in three other Amazonas state prisons on Monday. The death count was so high that bodies were transported by refrigerated meat trucks to other states for autopsies.”

 A deadly confrontation between Pakistani army troops and ethnic Pashtun protesters in a remote tribal region this weekend left at least three civilians dead, sparking a nationwide furor and marking a dangerous turning point in the growing conflict between the military and the country’s largest ethnic minority, my colleagues reported from the city of Peshawar:

“The incident Sunday came after months of rising antagonism between the military and the Pashtun Protection Movement, known as the PTM, which has been crusading since last year against alleged abuses of civilians during the extended military campaign against Islamist militants. The group’s leaders have been arrested at mass rallies and warned by the army to back off their anti-military crusade.

“Military officials and Pashtun nationalist leaders, including a member of Parliament, gave sharply different accounts of the clash near a military post in North Waziristan, a tribal area near the Afghan border where the army has long battled armed extremists…

“Pakistan’s security forces enjoy widespread public popularity and are often praised for restoring security to the northwest region, after years of terrorist attacks and the two-year occupation of the bucolic Swat Valley by local Taliban fanatics who beat, bullied and hanged people in public.

“Pashtuns constitute about 15 percent of Pakistanis and dominate the volatile northwest, where some have violently challenged the state and others have borne the brunt of military pressure. The PTM’s charismatic young leader, Manzoor Pashteen, has awakened national Pashtun anger with fiery speeches that denounce the army as the true source of terrorism.”

Bibi on the brink

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a reputation as a slick political negotiator, but just a day away from his deadline to form a new government, he is floundering, raising the prospect of new elections.

The thorn in his side is Avigdor Liberman, his former defense minister with whom the Israeli leader has had a tempestuous history. Netanyahu needs Liberman, whose party holds five seats in the 120-seat parliament, known as the Knesset, to form a majority after coming out ahead in Israel’s April 9 elections. Without those five seats, his coalition of right-wing and religious parties hold just 60.

But at the moment, the two are at loggerheads as Netanyahu faces the challenge of balancing the demands of the ultrareligious parties, which he needs as partners and which increased their number of seats in the elections, with those of fiercely secular Liberman.

While previous coalition negotiations have come down to the wire, analysts say this time is different, with no coalition agreements finalized and partners trying to leverage Netanyahu’s weakness as he attempts to form a government that will protect him from looming criminal charges. Netanyahu’s pre-indictment hearing on charges of corruption, breach of trust and bribery is scheduled for October.

Under Israeli law, if Netanyahu can’t form a government, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin is tasked with appointing another candidate to do so. However, that scenario would leave Netanyahu unable to shield himself from prosecution, analysts say, while his main rival also has no clear path to a coalition. So instead, his Likud party has forwarded a bill to dissolve the Knesset, paving the way for new elections if Netanyahu can’t form a government by Wednesday. It passed its first reading on Monday.

New elections have the potential to delay both the White House’s long-awaited peace plan and Netanyahu’s October hearing, said Israeli political analyst Dahlia Scheindlin. The release of a political plan for peace with the Palestinians could raise difficulties for Netanyahu, whose potential right-wing government has little room for compromise.

Still, President Trump expressed his support for the Israeli prime minister. “Hoping things will work out with Israel’s coalition formation and Bibi and I can continue to make the alliance between America and Israel stronger than ever,” he tweeted Monday. “A lot more to do!” — Loveday Morris

The big question

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s five-year term in office expired last week, but he’s conducting business as usual. Eager to make history as a peacemaker and further his agenda of reform and modernization, he is holding back-to-back meetings on boosting exports or upgrading the fetid Kabul River. Ghani’s position has been reinforced by a Supreme Court decision extending his tenure until an election is held in September. But opponents charge that he is inviting “chaos” at a time of aggressive insurgent attacks and growing political divisions, and they accuse him of using public patronage and funds to bolster his campaign for reelection. We asked Post Afghanistan bureau chief Pamela Constable, why isn’t Ghani stepping down?

“That depends on whom you ask. The president’s supporters and advisers say he is trying to steer a steady course, keep working on his goals to improve government services and performance, and remain above the fray at a time of political uncertainty and public fears about the future.

« Peace talks between U.S. negotiators and the Taliban don’t seem to be going anywhere, and the idea of putting in a short-term caretaker government could easily deteriorate into a pre-election political brawl instead of leading to a smooth transition. Many people, including diplomats and other foreign partners who are disappointed in Ghani for various reasons, still feel his staying on until the September election is the only realistic option.

« On the other hand, Afghans are all too familiar with electoral fraud, manipulation, and efforts by leaders to cling to power. The country’s democracy is very young, political institutions remain immature, and politics remains dominated by ethnic and personal rivalries. Since the fall of Taliban rule in 2001, there have been four elections, including three for president. Each one was marred by accusations of fraud and official abuse, and the 2014 election that led to Ghani’s presidency was such an inconclusive mess that U.S. officials had to broker a ‘unity government’ between Ghani and his top rival.

« So, it is not surprising that some people think Ghani is trying use the current delays to stay on and shore up his chances for re-election. He took office with a bold and visionary plan to reform and modernize the Afghan state, but he has lost considerable public support because of the dire security situation and stagnant economy.

« Either way, despite widespread concerns among Afghans and international observers over whether the election now planned for late September will be fair and credible, everyone agrees it must take place then. Otherwise it would probably have to be postponed until spring due to harsh winter weather, and another delay would intensify political turmoil, which in turn could further undermine hopes for achieving peace. »

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