The Retreat of Western Liberalism

by Edward Luce

In continental Europe, the more generous the welfare system, the more bitter the reaction against immigrants. The Danish People’s Party now takes more than a quarter of that country’s once reliably social democratic working-class vote. In Holland Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom takes an even higher share. (Much as people prematurely celebrated the Austrian Freedom Party candidate’s defeat in December as a blow against populism, Wilders’s Party for Freedom’s poor second-place showing in Holland in March came with a sting. The whole political spectrum had shifted towards Wilders’s Islamophobic agenda.) France’s National Front used to speak for the farmers and small businesses of La France profonde, which opposed high taxes. After Marine Le Pen took over the leadership, she converted it into a party of the working classes. In a sharp rupture from her Holocaust-denying father, Le Pen has set herself up as the defender of France’s social contract against ‘the Islamic occupation’ – a phrase that instantly brings to mind the Nazi occupation. ‘National solidarity is for the nationals,’ she said.36 Le Pen knows her market.