While waiting for Trump's retirement
Definitely, the authoritarian delirium that threatens democracies has moved to Europe. Meanwhile, in the United States, Donald Trump, with polls clearly on the decline, is losing his cool, probably unable to understand that the continued display of his indecency has ended up discomforting some of his own. There are reasons to think that Trump—despite still having two years left in office—has entered a downward slope. We will have objective data soon, when the midterm elections arrive, which, if the polls are not wrong, augur a serious defeat for the Republicans.
Trump's latest feat has been the expulsion from the White House of CNN, MSNBC, and Politico, which has caused other media outlets such as ABC and Fox News (ideologically very close to the president) to withdraw their representation. Naturally, Trump has responded with his proverbial insolence, announcing that “other fake news media” will also be expelled.
It is not a minor event. It confirms what already seems to be a widespread conviction across the country: that the Trump model has hit rock bottom and that, effectively, the citizenry will react by putting the tycoon in his place. We were discussing this on Monday with Susan Stokes, the author of The Regressors, about the leaders who erode their own democracies. Stokes declared herself convinced that the American electorate will punish Trump, who will have failed in his attempt to lead the country astray toward post-democratic authoritarianism. She did not rule out, of course, that Trump might respond to the electoral failure by turning the institutions upside down, but she considered that he has exposed himself too much to be able to find complicity within the institutions. This does not prevent that in the two years he has left in power, Trump might try everything, even extending his mandate by decree. But Stokes thinks he will not succeed: he has abused too much the desire to make people believe that everything is permitted to him.
This American episode resonates in Europe with the election results of these days in Germany. While the AfD, the far right, has scored another victory, in Berlin we have seen the emergence of a winning social democracy, until now blurred by its coalition with the right in Merz's government and at a time when the left is losing ground across Europe. This fact could be indicative for other European elections. And it has the value of suggesting that not only the far right is capitalizing on the bewilderment of the traditional right and that the reactionary hegemony could be awakening the left, alarmingly absent in recent years. What has become of the fastidious parties to the left of the socialists, Podemos and Comuns, for example, which seem to have lost their voice and presence?
Has the turn towards right-wing populism reached its peak? Or are they just small signals of limited reach? If we look at the landscape as it seems to be taking shape now, it is not evident that the liberal rights are recovering from the attraction that the far right has achieved over them. We have a major test nearby: will Marine Le Pen be president of the French Republic next year? Right now, there are not many signs that allow us to rule it out. And in Catalonia, to what extent will Junts resist the offensive of Aliança Catalana?
No matter how much voluntarism Pedro Sánchez puts into it, it seems difficult to stop the Vox-PP coalition in Spain. Right now, the unknown is which of the two parties will hold the key to the Moncloa. It is hard to understand what impulses move the Spanish right, when instead of generating expectations with some powerful leadership that could stop Abascal and company, it keeps the dullard Feijóo, as if it were living the potential victory as a fatalism. In Catalonia, Sílvia Orriols has found a highway while Junts does not decide what it wants to be when it grows up, that is, when it has gotten rid of Puigdemont.
These are all symptoms that lead to the same point: the state of European confusion, the result of Donald Trump's influence. And it will still be a while before we are free from it. His success in the United States was gasoline for the European far-right. His decline could lower expectations, offer liberal conservative rights—if they even still exist—the mental space necessary to reactivate European democracies, and allow social democracies to regain their autonomy. The face of the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, after Sunday's elections is expressive of the grief he is carrying. And even if no one remembers, the social democrats are hidden under his image governing together. All of this reflects an absent Europe at a crucial moment. And it seems there is no room left. Must we wait for Trump to fall to consider what we want to be when we grow up?