A Challenge to European Political Elite

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/27/world/europe/a-challenge-to-european-political-elite.html

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LONDON — When Chancellor Angela Merkel won a stunning third term in Germany’s election this week, she emerged from the fray at the pinnacle of European political power. But great battles — political or military — sometimes cloak small skirmishes that end with more ambiguous results, and so it was in Berlin.

In the shadow of Ms. Merkel’s victory, another less obvious contest was fought by players who, like their equivalents elsewhere in Europe, tapped a vein of discontent that seems too insidious for mainstream leaders to ignore.

In Germany, it was the Alternative für Deutschland party — the Alternative for Germany — that reshaped a corner of the political landscape, much as small insurgent parties from Athens to Amsterdam have brought new calculations and pressures to bear on the political elite.

And the emergence of these gadfly groupings served to highlight a European phenomenon that small protest parties — some of them no more than single-issue alliances of convenience — have come to embody: Even without formal political power, or perhaps because they flourish outside the traditional salons of influence, they exert a disproportionate pull on national political life, to the detriment of larger and more established parties.

In the formal arithmetic of German parliamentary democracy, the most obvious point about the Alternatives’ showing was that they lost, failing by a hair’s breadth to secure the five percent of the ballot required under German law to enter Parliament.

In the process, though, the Alternatives took some 430,000 votes from the liberal Free Democrat Party, Ms. Merkel’s most recent coalition partner, contributing to its exit from Parliament for the first time in over six decades. Voters, it seemed, were drawn in large numbers to the Alternatives’ antipathy toward the euro zone and its embrace of conservative social values on issues like gay rights. And by contributing to the Free Democrats’ woes, the insurgents also created prickly problems for the triumphant Ms. Merkel in her efforts to build a new coalition.

Maybe it was no more than a knock-on effect, driven by a law of unintended consequences, almost guaranteeing that politicians’ best-laid plans will somehow unravel.

But there were parallels with developments in elsewhere in Europe earlier this year, when the euro-skeptic United Kingdom Independence Party, or UKIP, alarmed the dominant Conservatives with a surprisingly high showing at local British elections, winning 23 per cent of the vote, and spurring Prime Minister David Cameron to commit himself irrevocably to an in-out referendum on membership of the European Union if he wins the next national vote.

That came only months after Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement in Italy won 25 percent of the vote in national elections in February to become the most powerful challenger to Italy’s established order for decades.

The very status of such parties as insurgents and rebels reflects their dilemma: By positioning themselves as outsiders, they exclude themselves from the mainstream, which they anyhow revile or mock as emblems of a corrupt and elite establishment that has failed the people.

That, in turn, deepens their vulnerability to the inherent frailty and short shelf life of narrow, issue-driven politics. Indeed, the failure of many to build the kind of political machines that determine Western elections leaves their leaders dependent on sometimes troublesome lieutenants and exposed to squabbles within their ranks.

In Britain, Nigel Farage, the beer-drinking, one-of-the-lads leader of UKIP, has tangled frequently with rambunctious figures in his own party, most recently last week, when one of them, Godfrey Bloom, was suspended after referring to women as “sluts” and using a copy of the party’s political program to beat a television reporter over the head, on camera.

Even Mr. Farage admitted that the episode on the fringes of the party’s autumn conference had been a huge setback. “We can’t have any one individual, however fun or flamboyant or entertaining or amusing they are, destroying UKIP’s national conference and that is what he has done,” Mr. Farage said of his erstwhile ally.

It is no coincidence that such populist tub-thumping parties — often anti-immigrant and conservative, but by no means limited to the far right — have seized headlines as Europe’s economic crisis has bitten deeply not only into pocketbooks but also into the reputation of the political elite.

The range of contenders embraces Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party in the Netherlands as much as parties on the left and right in Greece, including the neo-fascist Golden Dawn.

The insurgents’ record for durability is mixed. Some, like the Greens in Germany, or the more established National Front of Marine Le Pen in France, which long predates the latest wave of start-up rebels, have settled into the political spectrum. Others, like Germany’s Pirates, whose main issue is Internet freedom, have fizzled.

Britain’s maverick Respect party has one lawmaker in Parliament. UKIP has none, relying for representation on council seats at home and, paradoxically, on 13 of the 72 seats allocated to Britain in the European Parliament — a tally Mr. Farage wants to expand in next year’s European elections as a platform to broadcast his euro-skeptic views.

“Populist parties pit the good, the honest, ordinary voter against the out-of-touch, liberal mainstream political elite,” the writer Jamie Bartlett said in the left-wing New Statesman weekly in Britain. “They claim to represent the former against the latter, an authentic and common sense voice in a world of spin and self-interest.”

“It is not the extreme right that is on the march across Europe,” he said, “but a much wider rejection of mainstream, established politics.”