How pandemic helped the far right rise to power and what can be done about it
Not only is Donald Trump back in the White House, but the far right is poised to occupy the Austrian chancellorship for the first time in the country’s postwar history, and Germany is hurtling toward a fraught election next month, following the collapse of its "traffic light" coalition government.
Read more about why citizens of these countries are withdrawing their support from traditional political forces and whether there is a common denominator to their dissatisfaction in the column by Jan-Werner Müller, Professor of Politics at Princeton University – Populists' winning edge: how the pandemic still shapes global politics and ways to counter it.
According to the author, while many commentators have settled on the idea of widespread "anti-incumbency" bias in recent political outcomes, this does not tell us why voters have turned against incumbents.
"One explanation, of course, is inflation. But another, largely underappreciated cause, is the fallout from the pandemic, which left many communities not only with a lingering sense of loss, but also with unresolved conflicts and deep-seated distrust," Jan-Werner Müller writes.
As he says, in Austria, the far right has benefited massively from discontent over how the pandemic was managed.
In Italy, 40% of those who voted for Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) in the last election thought the previous government’s decisions about vaccines amounted to "an undemocratic restriction on citizens’ freedom."
And Trump, in his second inaugural address, elicited loud cheers from his audience when he made a point of mentioning that he would reinstate soldiers who had been discharged for disobeying vaccine mandates.
"Libertarian resentment over past restrictions and mandates is one thing; an abiding distrust of scientists is quite another. The latter is bound to affect not just public health, but also climate policies and other highly politicized areas of science," the professor of political science at Princeton University (USA) says.
He underlines that there is nothing wrong with being cautious about scientific findings. As Karl Popper and many other philosophers of science have argued, scientists should be open to having their hypotheses falsified; they should welcome questioning and revisions.
The problem is that very few of us are in a position to assess scientific debate, let alone challenge the prevailing consensus (even if we have "done our own research").
The author states that in today’s information ecosystem, it is easier than ever to dismiss inconvenient facts by making vague references to what supposedly went wrong during the pandemic, or by trotting out conspiracy theories about cover-ups and scientists being illegitimately empowered to govern.
"What can be done? One option is to establish independent commissions to produce a proper historical record of how the pandemic was handled. Who made which decisions, and why? How much uncertainty were they facing, and how did they assess risks and trade-offs?" asks Jan-Werner Müller.
According to him, one potential remedy is a citizen assembly comprising a random selection of adults (like a trial jury). Outgoing German Chancellor Olaf Scholz – who has admitted that pandemic-era school closures probably went too far – recently welcomed such an approach.
Critics will counter that since "ordinary citizens" must first listen to experts, the selection of expert testimony will remain a source of contention for vaccine skeptics or people with a political axe to grind.
But just allowing a public airing of different assessments (though not conspiracy theories) could have a cathartic effect.
At this point, any effort to mitigate the pandemic’s toxic political legacy is to be welcomed.