THE NEW TREND OF EXCITING BUT LARGELY MEANINGLESS ELECTIONS

Time to get excited, disappointed, and angry: more unpopular populism

by Daniel Barge

Election results seem to be getting generally more "exciting." A year or so ago we had the victory of "ultra nationalist" Giorgia Meloni in Italy, while a few days ago, a pretty wild dude won something out on the Pampas. The latest example is Dutch "friend of Israel" Geert Wilders coming out on top in Holland.

But do any of these thrilling expressions of the democratic will mean anything?

When Meloni was elected in October 2022, because of the fascist roots of her party, it was expected that, finally, at long last, something would be done to stop the steady flood of migrants washing up on Italy's shores with the help of various NGOs.

Then this happened:

Who knows, maybe it would have been worse without Meloni...

Argentina's new president is a colourful and indeed radical character, but, really, what can he do on his own? The "Extreme Libertarian Party" that he appears to represent, doesn't have any members in Argentina's parliament, and parliament can impeach any President who steps too far out of line. 

Next, on to Holland, where Wilders and his populist anti-Muslim PVV Party became the biggest party with 23.6% of the vote, while the other 76.4% of the vote split between 14 other parties. 

Two things will now happen: either the PVV will enter a coalition government (less likely) or the other parties will create a coalition to exclude the PVV (more likely).

If the former, then the PVV's anti-immigrant and Islam-sceptical positions will be rapidly watered down, especially as Holland is enmeshed in the wider, borderless Eurozone, with all its transnational agreements.

The problem, as always, is not politics but structure.

This is something that Meloni is finding out, and even what the UK's one-month Prime Minister Liz Truss quickly found out in the UK last year, when she tried to impose radical economic policies and got instantly slapped down.

Basically, things have been set up over decades in certain ways by elites, financial and geopolitical interests, and various deep states or perma-state civil servants.

On top of this, politics and the fickle and fleeting choices of the voters is largely a thin veneer. It is powerless to really change anything, unless people vote constantly and angrily in great numbers in a fixed direction, and also threaten in some way to get revolutionary. That is simply not the world we live in anymore. 

As for the electoral victory of Geert Wilders, the usual idiots on the dissident right are claiming, plausibly, that his anti-immigration positions will quickly be gutted or watered down. But they are also claiming, inconsistently that his other positions -- less support for Ukraine and more support for Israel -- will somehow be immune. The first of these, cutting support for Ukraine, they approve of, while the second, more support for Israel, they don't approve of. 

Here is washed-up ex-BNP leader Nick Griffin expressing this dissident right position on Twitter:

"The only thing guaranteed is that he'll put Holland even more firmly behind Israel, & that the result will push all Europe in the same direction. Which will mean MILLLIONS more Muslim refugees. He will NOT stop immigration.[....] Who gains from that? The Anglo-Zionist bankers who own the US Dollar Empire, the neocons who want to detonate Europe to stop it teaming up with Russia and China, and the Greater Israel Zionists - the very people who have done so much to promote mass immigration in the first place!"

People like Nick Fuentes are saying practically the same thing.

But all political policies are subject to the same pressures of structure. If Wilders's anti-immigration policies (the reason most people actually voted for him), are going to quickly wither because they are not aligned with the pre-existing social superstructure, why would his less popular anti-Ukraine and pro-Israel policies survive? 

The dissident right is long on paranoia and conspiracy but short on logic and analysis. Indeed, this seems like just another example of the dissident right's co-option by Russia, which has a long history of promoting paranoia, anti-Semitism, and shilling for Russia.

The fact is that nothing much will change that the system and the wider structure of politics and society does not wish to change. Politics and elections is very much a minor part of that. Dissident movements succeed when the analyse reality correctly, not when they cheerlead for transient political figures and use their failures and compromises to stoke a sense of perpetual victimhood.