Germany: The far right PEGIDA holds two year anniversary rally in Munich. NurPhoto/SIPA USA/PA Images. Press Association. All rights reserved.The 2008 financial crisis opened up a window of opportunity for challengers to the political status quo: there was the Icelandic pots and pans revolution, the Greek anti-austerity movement, and the Spanish 15-M movement – eventually leading to the emergence of parties such as the Pirate Party, Syriza and Podemos. There were also actors clearly on the other side of the ideological spectrum: PEGIDA and the AfD in Germany, Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, People’s Party in Denmark, the National Front in France, and the Freedom Party in Austria, among others. Of course, one should also add UKIP and its successful Brexit campaign to the list, as well as the election of Donald Trump in the US – and with it, the reinvigoration of the North American ‘alt-right’.
The argument that the 2008 economic crisis and its (mis)management is to blame for the rise in these movements does go a long way in accounting for the turmoil. But the extent of this, and exactly how, remains unclear.
Leading scholars have ventured various analyses. For Jürgen Habermas, we are essentially witnessing ‘a variety of structural causes and many coincidences’. Others, in turn, provide more ambitious interpretations. Colin Crouch sees in these actors, especially in the rise of right wing populism, the symptom of a new cleavage that is opening between – in the absence of a better name – cosmopolitans and xenophobic nationalists. Finally, Etienne Balibar believes that these changes confront us with the choice between a xenophobic nationalism and “a quest for the “missing people” (Deleuze’s expression), a new synthesis of resistances and democratic hopes”, as expressed in protest events in Iceland, Greece and Spain.
