The New Normal?

Earlier this week, another sharply diverse pair joined the steadily growing ranks of the New Right. In the Netherlands, the Freedom Party (Partij voor de Vrijheid) led for the past quarter-century by Geert Wilders, won 37 seats, thereby doubling its pre-election total and placing it 12 seats ahead of Labour and the Green Left. Nearly 7,500 miles to the south-west and four hours behind, Javier Milei, an economist and popular talk-show host, won the presidency in Argentina by a considerable margin.

There are at least as many differences between these parties and individuals as there are similarities in their national contexts, histories, and party cultures. But the fundamental lesson these results impart is that the New Right parties are increasingly if often reluctantly and controversially accepted. The cordons sanitaires erected around them when they first emerged was designed to keep them in the political and (more importantly) moral wilderness until their support collapsed. That strategy has not worked, leaving Germany s Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) as the only untouchable major party.

Yet even the AfD s pariah status is waning. The German centre-Right will be forced to concede that there is no alternative to an alliance with the party once it scores over 20 percent in the opinion polls. Wilders has also been saddled with pariah status during his decades in opposition (albeit less definitively than in Germany, where Thomas Haldenweg, head of the country s domestic intelligence agency, called on Germans to boycott the AfD). The other main Dutch parties are now hedging their bets, either remaining silent about coalition possibilities, or saying they would accept Wilders s support, but not as a prime minister.

via quillette.com