Nostalgia and the power of the far right
Chancellor Friedrich Merz's CDU has obtained the worst result in its history in regional elections this weekend in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. A "disaster" admitted by the chancellery and a humiliation for a Merz who, upon coming to power, promised to reverse the strength of a far-right that has been tailing him for some time. The popularity of Alternative for Germany, for the moment, has no ceiling. In Saxony-Anhalt it was on the verge of governing, for the first time, in a German state, and on Sunday it won the elections in the land of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, in eastern Germany, and came in third in Berlin. While Merz's political survival is increasingly threatened, the AfD continues to grow in the shadow of economic and industrial decline, which has slowed the German engine, and a feeling of insecurity that is fueled by the criminalization of rising immigration in the last decade. But, above all, the far-right has demonstrated a great capacity to exploit voters' disillusionment with the political establishment of the Grand Coalition.
As happened in Saxony-Anhalt just two weeks ago, turnout has increased (79% in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and 75% in Berlin), which shows, once again, that the AfD knows how to mobilize abstentionists and win votes from former voters of centrist parties. Dissatisfaction with plans to reform the pension and social protection system, accompanied by an increase in defense spending, has spurred turnout, and the big loser has been, once again, an increasingly weak political center.
Fragmentation is taking hold and making it even more difficult to carry out the necessary reforms for Germany to overcome structural stagnation. It is a shared ill. France, which is also facing an uncertain electoral cycle, is in the same situation.
Economic insecurity and growing inequality have become the determining factor reconfiguring the European Union politically. In fact, research by political scientist Susan C. Stokes—who is presenting her latest book in Barcelona these days, The Regressives, on political leaderships that erode their own democratic systems—demonstrates how wage inequality is the key factor of the economic risk that fuels democratic erosion.
The weight of the new radical majorities, however, is not only redefining policies and alliances but also the very identity of the EU as a supranational power. There is an Europe that is being built from the revision of the past.
The Sweden Democrats (SD) ran in the September 13th elections with the slogan “make Sweden great again”. An exaltation of nostalgia for a country that no longer exists. An idyllic image in the hands of a political agenda that carries the risk of dismantling the very values that historically made Sweden distinctive. The AfD also says it wants to “reclaim” its country and, for this reason, is deploying a policy of persecution of culture and proposing the abandonment of the Erinnerungskultur —culture of memory—: leaving behind the awareness of the crimes of the past in favor of a different and prouder future.
At the same time, however, nostalgia has become a political engine. Across Europe, the far right embraces this idea of the past as a refuge from an uncertain present. An imagined or whitewashed past, which minimizes fascisms or economic and rights-based inequalities. In many cases, imaginaries of a past that was never as clear, idyllic, and homogeneous as they want people to believe are being constructed. A distorted idealization built as a shield against social uncertainty and economic insecurity, against real and imagined threats. It is a redefinition of national identity that is aggressively exclusionary. Like the anti-immigration agendas that underpin government coalitions, from Denmark to Italy.
The result is an explosive cocktail of emotions: from the most primary ones —fear, anger, or depression— to socially and culturally conditioned emotions —from guilt or shame to resentment, disappointment, and nostalgia.
As Michael Ignatieff, rector emeritus of the Central European University of Vienna and Budapest, explained last week in Barcelona at a Cidob event, “radical nostalgia” is a collective and political sentiment, which feeds on denial, and is radical precisely because it refuses to accept loss and attempts to “return to a past that it imagines as safer, more glorious, and more virtuous”. Radical nostalgia has become, above all, an offer of certainty in the face of a world, present and future, that is increasingly difficult to understand.