BRUSSELS — The shock waves Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have sent through American politics this year aren’t just from their unexpected popularity or their relentless table-thumping. It’s because they’ve totally upended American ideas about what our political parties stand for. Trump’s strange mix of policy ideas casually throws overboard years’ worth of carefully honed Republican talking points about taxes and religion, while Sanders simply ignores the hard-won, generation-long Democratic shift to the political center with his rants against money and power.
What’s going on? As confusing as this might be in the States, it looks clearer from overseas: America is getting its first big dose of European politics.
Trump’s support of the social safety net coupled with unabashed xenophobia and protectionism might not be familiar to American voters, who are used to having their “conservative” politics be strictly anti-welfare, pro-trade, and low-tax. But it is immediately recognizable to supporters of the plethora of right-wing parties topping polls across Europe. Likewise, Sanders’ open embrace of socialism may shock Americans—but hardly raises an eyebrow in Europe, a continent where socialist parties are either in government or constitute the main opposition.
Even the two central character types in the latest installment of America’s hottest political drama are familiar to Europeans. A brash billionaire businessman with populist politics, coarse speech and a knack for self-promotion, who enters the political arena and trumps experienced rivals by pledging to make his country great again? That would be Silvio Berlusconi, a former cruise-ship crooner turned media magnate who set up his own political party in 1994 and within months was prime minister of Italy — a post he held four times.
Donald Trump, a more fully coiffed but equally vulgar American version of Berlusconi, may be contemptuous of Europe: He recently predicted the old continent was headed for “collapse,” and described Brussels as a “hellhole.” But his nativist politics could be lifted straight out of the playbook written by Europe’s increasingly successful populist parties.
Sanders is not as easy to lampoon as Trump, but to Europeans, his elevation to leading man status in the Democratic primaries has a familiar ring about it. Last year, Jeremy Corbyn—a 65-year old, hard-left firebrand with no front-bench experience, the media skills of a Trappist monk and a political philosophy most thought had fallen with the Berlin Wall—became leader of the Labour Party, Britain’s main opposition group. As with Sanders, most commentators dismissed Corbyn as “unelectable”—right until he was duly elected.
American voters are increasingly turning to candidates who owe scant allegiance to the parties whose nomination they are seeking. Trump was once a registered Democrat; Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, once described the Democratic Party he recently joined as "morally bankrupt." A similar phenomenon is happening in Europe, where centrist parties have either been hijacked by politicians on the fringes (like Corbyn), or squeezed by radical groups on the left, such as Syriza in Greece, and the right, like the Danish People’s Party in Denmark. When populists cannot find a mainstream party to accommodate them, they simply set up their own party—such as the nationalist Finns Party currently flying high in the polls.
Populist insurgents on both sides of the pond have tapped into widespread anger at the social and economic devastation left by the recession. In Greece and Spain, almost half of young people are jobless, providing fertile ground for left-wing parties like Syriza in Athens and Podemos in Madrid. The unemployment rate in the United States is only half that in Europe, but Trump and Sanders have each succeeded in channeling the discontent and frustration of Americans who see rising growth but lower household incomes. When 70 percent of American voters tell pollsters they think the country is headed in the wrong direction, it is hardly surprising that candidates representing continuity, like Hillary Clinton, find it a tough slog to persuade electors to plump for them. To complicate matters for Clinton, she’s not merely defending herself from Sanders to her left; looming in the distance is Trump, who is as protectionist as most blue-collar Democrats and a staunch defender of Medicare.
In the U.S., Sanders is considered a firebrand for supporting free higher education and public healthcare funded by tax hikes. But in Europe, these ideas would put him right in the mainstream of a Christian Democrat party. After all, it was center-right Chancellor Angela Merkel who, in 2014, introduced a minimum wage in Germany. In the same year, she abolished university tuition fees.
Read more:
2016 Elections: Welcome to Europe - POLITICO Magazine
