Political elites in Europe and the United States regard rising populism as an existential threat to their power and wealth. We have witnessed in recent years the establishment’s efforts to defeat its opponents by prosecuting them and banning them from elections when it became apparent that they might prevail at the ballot box. The prosecutions of Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump, the banning of Calin Georgescu in Romania, and apparent plans to ban the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) Party in Germany from electoral competition are all desperate efforts by prevailing elites to protect their interests and power from the people they claim to represent. The real enemy of representative government is the establishment that claims to be its champion and defender.
A gulf divides the people and the governing class in Europe and the United States. For decades now, the ruling elites there have sought an enforced cosmopolitanism and reflect an administrative hubris that manifests itself in their economic policies of managed trade, imported cheap labor, inflationary monetary policy, and “green” energy policies that have led to stagnant wages and declining employment in manufacturing and in social policies that eroded freedom of speech. A majority of the electorate in the United States, and big chunks of the electorate in several European countries, have learned that these policies are not only antithetical to their interests, but aggressively hostile to them. Many of these voters have gravitated to populist parties on the right that advocate reducing the power of the European Union’s regime in Brussels over member-states and their people and reducing NATO’s commitment to foreign intervention.
The establishment’s political and financial interests are vested in the European Union and the NATO military-industrial complex in Europe and the United States. In the U.S., Donald Trump and his followers have taken control of the Republican party, which has severely hampered the ability of his opponents to reduce his power, as they did from within and without his first administration. In Europe, these parties contest elections against the establishment parties, which has strengthened the establishment’s hand against the populists, as I detail below. But in Europe and the U.S., the governing elites serve the same interests. There are the corporate interests that are chosen as winners in managed trade agreements, the central banks whose monetary policies have served banks and wealthy investors, who benefit from money creation, the administrative elites throughout government, whose livelihoods depend upon continued expansion of the state apparatus, and the military-industrial complex of NATO states, which benefits the defense industry, foreign policy, and intelligence establishments of NATO member-states. Together, these are immensely powerful vested interests in perpetuating the administrative, trade, financial, and military arrangements that have prevailed in the U.S. and Europe for decades. The populists of the right challenge these interests and pose an existential threat to the power, privilege, and wealth that elites obtain from them, which is why elites have sought doggedly to keep them from power.
The European establishment’s political parties differ on the margins for purposes of electoral competition but are united in their opposition to populist change agents from the right. This is illustrated by the collusion of the parties across the political spectrum in France and Germany working together to exclude populist parties from power. In France, all parties have worked together to have only one party’s candidate run against Le Pen’s National Rally in each election in order to avoid dividing the vote in ways that would enhance the National Rally’s chances of winning more seats in France’s National Assembly and Senate. In Germany, parties across the spectrum have together erected a “firewall” to keep the AfD from influencing legislation and participating in coalition governments. These parties work together to preserve the status quo in which their political and financial interests reside.
These methods have proven insufficient to extinguish the popularity of the populist right in many European countries, so the establishment has sought to exclude them from elections where they fear they will lose at the ballot box. As soon as Romanian presidential candidate Calin Georgescu emerged as a frontrunner last November, the Romanian government within days canceled the runoff that the “far right” Georgescu likely would have won, vaguely citing foreign support of Georgescu’s TikTok social media campaign. After the Romanian government rescheduled the election, Georgescu remained a frontrunner, so the government banned him from the election altogether.
French National Rally leader Marine le Pen was banned by a court last week from running for president of France, where she was the leading candidate for the election set for 2027. In Germany, the establishment parties are looking for ways to ban AfD, which finished second in parliamentary elections to the Bundestag in February of this year. In the United States, Democrats of the Biden administration and state and local governments launched a wave of prosecutions against Donald Trump that failed in their effort to exclude him from the 2024 presidential election. Although they lost the election, they continue their lawfare strategy to defeat his policy agenda with lawsuits in favorable federal district courts that have imposed dozens of holds on his executive orders to reduce federal employment, terminate grants to nongovernmental organizations, and enforce federal immigration laws, among others.
All of these developments are instructive on the nature of the West’s liberal democratic states. Today’s Western elites have so defined the range of acceptable policy views that only they and their political representatives may govern. They are struggling to exclude the populist right from electoral competition because it threatens the source of their power and wealth.
If anyone in the West destroys “democracy,” it won’t be the populist right. It will be the European and American elites who claim to defend it.
Scott A. Boykin writes on politics and economics. His Substack is free.
Image: cagdesign via Pixabay, Pixabay License.
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