An anti-austerity protest in Madrid, November: "The conversion of resentment at 'elites' into a political platform connects diverse movements"© AFP/Getty Images
The politics of resentment and rejection will be a powerful, destabilising force in 2014. The comedian Russell Brand burst into mainstream debate in October with a pseudo-revolutionary diatribe in the New Statesman and an appearance on the BBC’s Newsnight, when many commentators reckoned he got the better of the formidable Jeremy Paxman. Refusing to vote, Brand said, was the only coherent response to the state of parliamentary democracy, which he called “a bureaucratic means... for furthering the augmentation and advantages of economic elites.” Plummeting voter turnout is certainly an affliction of mature democracies; another is the growth of “rejectionist” parties, as the elections to the European Parliament in May will show.
The conversion of resentment at “elites” into a political platform connects movements as diverse as the Tea Party in the United States, the UK Independence Party in Britain and European populist parties of right and left, such as the Front de Gauche and Front National in France, Geert Wilders’s Party of Freedom in the Netherlands, the left-wing anti-austerity party Syriza in Greece and Beppe Grillo’s 5-Star Movement in Italy.
Polls suggest that across the continent parties that reject the EU will often come first in the European elections. Peter Kellner, President of YouGov, told Prospect: “Across Europe, nationalist parties are gaining ground. There will be more of them than ever before in the European Parliament to be elected in May.”
It is likely that after the elections there will be a substantial “Eurosceptic bloc” in the parliament. “They won’t have enough power to control the parliament’s decisions,” Kellner says, “but they will be able to make more of a noise than ever before and possibly frighten some mainstream right-of-centre parties into adopting more nationalist policies. To fend them off, the new parliament may need to operate an informal “grand coalition,” embracing the socialists, liberals and centre-right EPP.” But if they did that, the mainstream parties would risk confirming everything that Farage, Wilders and the rest have been saying about a technocratic elite that pursues its grand projects without regard for what “the people” think.
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