The ‘Trump Effect’

The Trump Effect, the wise now agree, is a kind of sickness in the democratic system. The early symptoms—nativist grumblings, nocturnal tweeting, and disinhibited behavior around women and immigrants—may lead to a crisis, especially in cases where the major parties have left their voters to fend for themselves in a globalized economy. This crisis may continue for as long as four years. Public life may be impaired and civility permanently weakened. Grandiosity and an increase in risk-taking behavior may lead to a rise in the racial temperature and the loss of old friendships. It is not yet clear if the Trump Effect can be remedied by treatment with tariffs, subsidies, and border defenses involving moats and alligators—or if these are actually signs of its terminal phase. It may in fact be incurable, like senility and other symptoms of decay.

Worse, the Trump Effect can jump like a virus from one sick constitution to another. Named for its first appearance in the United States in early November 2016, within weeks the Trump Effect claimed its first European victim. The Italian prime minister was overthrown in a referendum on constitutional reform. In their presidential election, 46 percent of Austrians showed symptoms, voting for Norbert Hofer and the anti-immigrant Freedom party. A full-scale epidemic is expected in 2017, with significant outbreaks of populism in France, Italy, Germany, Holland, and Britain. Further complications may induce the amputation of the southern tier of the European Union.

This is the newly received wisdom of the Trump Effect. Except there is no Trump Effect.

Pundits have correctly diagnosed one thing: the symptoms of America’s domestic problems and the possible effects of a Trump presidency on America’s global position. But their assumption that Trump’s victory makes electoral revolts in Europe more likely is erroneous. Europe’s insurrections may arise for similar reasons, and may even take similar form, but correlation, as the analysts hate to admit, is not causality. Europeans and Americans may face similar challenges in a globalized economy, but they are heirs to different histories.

The Trump Effect is in reality a misleading narrative that reverses the current of recent events. Internationally, the Trump Effect is a domino theory of democratic reaction, in which Trump, to use the key term, “emboldens” Europeans to vote for the alt-right flat-earthers for whom they would not otherwise have voted. Yet the sorry truth is that Europeans are already uninhibited when it comes to voting for bigots and xenophobes. Further, the extremity of Europe’s “New Right” parties is not uniform, and some of Europe’s antiestablishment parties are not of the right at all. As for the alleged domino effect, if any dominoes are falling, they are falling towards the United States, not from it.

If we were to name a political condition after a deliberately controversial populist with a blond bouffant and a fondness for anti-immigrant statements, a more accurate name would be the Wilders Effect. Its symptoms appeared in Holland several years before the crash of 2008 and the subsequent rush of blood to the extremities that produced the Tea Party, the Occupy Movement, and the Trump candidacy.

In 2004, when Donald Trump was beginning his career in the entertainment business with the first season of The Apprentice, the bleached and bequiffed Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders was expelled from Holland’s center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy. As party spokesman, Wilders had repeatedly embarrassed his colleagues with hostile statements about Islam and immigration. The last straw was his refusal to agree that the European Union should start negotiating Turkey’s long-promised entry into the club.

Following his expulsion, Wilders launched the Party for Freedom. He combined a Thatcherite economic agenda with strongly nationalistic positions on Islam, immigration, and identity. Almost immediately, he required police protection because of regular death threats from Islamists. As Trump was to do a decade later, Wilders cultivated popular support by mocking professional politicians, the media, and political correctness. A born entertainer, he exploited the media’s amoral appetite for drama by discussing delicate subjects in crude language. His rivals made the mistake of responding in equally melodramatic fashion and his enemies the mistake of trying to censor him.

While the British Parliament would later debate whether to bar Trump from visiting the United Kingdom because of his inflammatory statements about Islam and Muslim immigrants, in February 2009 Jacqui Smith, the Labour party’s home secretary, banned Wilders as an “undesirable person.” The ban was rescinded on appeal in October of that year. Wilders declared a “victory” over censorship, went to London, and held a press conference at which he called Islam a “fascist ideology.”

He starred in a similar drama at home. In 2009, Dutch prosecutors charged Wilders with five counts of hate speech against Islam, Muslims, and Moroccans and other immigrants. The trial, which was widely criticized as a repression of Wilders’s right to free speech, ended in 2011 with Wilders acquitted on all charges. Not only did the trial, publicly praised by politicians on the left, fail to cast Wilders beyond the pale of acceptability—it secured him a supporting role in the Dutch government.

Popular support for the Party of Freedom rose during the trial, with a majority of Dutch voters sympathizing with Wilders. In the 2010 election, the Party for Freedom took 15 percent of the vote. With 24 of the House of Representatives’ 150 seats, it became the third-largest party in Holland. Wilders’s erstwhile associates in the People’s party took the largest share of votes, 21 percent, but their 31 seats were sufficient only to form a minority government. Leader Mark Rutte failed to form his preferred coalition with Labour, the second-largest party. Turning right, Rutte partnered with the Christian Democrats, whose support had collapsed by half in the election, and secured a working majority by making an “agreement” with Wilders. The Party for Freedom would remain outside the government, but would vote with it. This “agreement” lasted for two years, until Wilders refused to endorse an austerity budget that, he said, would put the EU’s law on budget deficits ahead of the national interest.

This was not the first such European “agreement” between the established parties and a Euroskeptic, nativist newcomer. In 2001, the Danish People’s party (DPP) had allied with a center-right coalition without entering the cabinet. In return, the DPP played a role in turning Denmark’s immigration policy into one of Europe’s strictest. The arrangement lasted until 2011 and resumed after Denmark’s 2015 election, this time with the DPP among a right-left alliance supporting the minority cabinet of Lars Løkke Rasmussen and the Venstre (Left) party. The DPP is now the country’s second-largest party, with 21 percent of the vote and 37 of the 179 seats in the Danish parliament.

Next door, the nationalist Sweden Democrats became the third-largest party in the 2014 election, more than doubling their share of the 349 seats in the Riksdag to 49. As in Denmark, a left-wing party leads a right-left coalition, this time formed to prevent the Sweden Democrats from entering the government or taking part in a Dutch- or Danish-style “agreement.” A similar outcome was averted in the second round of the 2002 French presidential election, when strategic voting by the left kept Jean-Marie Le Pen from becoming France’s first National Front president.

In March 2017, the Dutch will return to the polls. Once again, Wilders’s campaign has been buoyed by an indictment. In 2014, Wilders asked supporters at a party rally at The Hague if they wanted more or fewer Moroccans in Holland. “Fewer! Fewer! Fewer!” the crowd chanted. “Well, we’ll take care of it then,” Wilders replied.

His prosecution for hate speech ended in early December with a token conviction—and a significant rise in support for his party. During the course of the trial, polls showed that backing for the People’s party jumped from the equivalent of 27 seats to 36. If Wilders wins that many seats in March, he will be the leader of the next Dutch government. His manifesto includes his longstanding commitments to a moratorium on mosque building, halting immigration from Muslim countries, and—despite his advocacy of free speech—banning the Koran.

Any rise in Wilders’s share of the vote is sure to be attributed to the Trump Effect. So will a rise in support for Marine Le Pen in April’s first round of voting for the French presidency, a fall of support for Angela Merkel in Germany’s parliamentary elections next September or October, and any other unpalatable or unforeseen votes in a year that will test the endurance of the European Union. But European politicians do not need Trump’s encouragement when it comes to making extreme statements, and European voters do not need the uninhibiting example of Trump’s voters.

Europe’s voters have long invited radical populists into the mainstream. In some states, the older parties have worked with them in informal coalitions. In others, the populists have won office more than once. The Hungarians have twice elected Viktor Orbán, an authoritarian democrat who is determined to prevent the growth of Hungary’s minuscule Muslim population. If Italians wonder what life would be like if they elected a populist septuagenarian with obscure tax arrangements and an unwillingness to separate his businesses from his political office, they need only recall their four terms under Silvio Berlusconi.

Today, Europe’s populist parties resemble its airlines: Every country has at least one. They have built up their market share slowly. That market is an internal, European one. While Americans were enjoying Bill Clinton’s post-Cold War dividend, Europe’s nationalists were digging in for the long war against the European Union. The Danish People’s party was founded in 1995, and the UK Independence party in 1993. Other, more extreme nationalists have roots reaching further back and were seeded by candid sympathy for fascism. Austria’s Freedom party was founded in 1956, France’s National Front in 1972, and Greece’s Golden Dawn in 1985.

It bears stating the obvious: All these parties formed before 2008. Almost all of them prospered by exploiting Europe’s multiparty systems and proportional representation, which have no parallel in the United States. All have prospered further since 2008 by exploiting hostility to immigration, Islam, and the federal superstructure of a European Union that seems incapable of fostering economic recovery. Here, the resemblance to American politics is unmistakable, but so are the differences.

Geography alone makes the collapse of states in the Middle East a foreign policy problem for Americans, but a domestic issue for Europeans. History defines membership in the European nations on narrower criteria than membership in the American nation. Economically, America’s sluggish post-2008 recovery is a miracle of dynamism compared with the stagnation of the eurozone, where only the German economy has done well. And although Americans have their own tradition of animosity to the federal government, there is no American parallel to the widespread rejection of the European Union. The voters of Arizona and Texas may denounce Washington’s immigration policies, but they are not yet committed to secession.

Europe’s problems are of a different order, and they develop by different dynamics. Donald Trump’s campaign rejected free trade treaties and promised to erect tariffs. The winners in this year’s Brexit campaign, Trump’s friend Nigel Farage among them, want to escape the tariffs and regulation of the European Union and increase Britain’s free trade, notably with the United States. The Danish People’s party’s economic policies are indistinguishable from the center-left policies of Europe’s Christian Democrats. The National Front is as committed to the glory of the French welfare state as the Socialists it despises as unpatriotic. Beppe Grillo, the leader of Italy’s Five Star Movement, may be another insurgent entertainer, and a career in comedy may be an ideal training for life in Italian politics. But the roots of Grillo’s movement are on the anarchist, anticapitalist left, not the nationalist or free-trading right.

American politics remains a generally merciless struggle between two parties. The purportedly transformational campaigns of Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump all occurred within this two-party framework, and the victories of Obama and Trump have affirmed it. The outcomes of the 2000 and 2008 votes inspired claims that the electoral landscape had been changed utterly, in favor of one party and then the other. In both cases, the hope of a new consensus turned out to be illusory. A similar solidity can be seen in Britain, which has had one coalition government since 1945, and where centrist third parties struggle to sustain a significant role. The shock of Brexit is being absorbed by a two-party framework so effective that UKIP, which was vital to the Brexit vote, is out in the cold.

By contrast, in France the National Front has successfully broken the monopoly of the traditional parties of the right and left. In Europe’s states, especially in those susceptible to regional tensions and proportional representation, the definition of civil discourse had changed long before Trump’s campaign. So, too, the party framework of democratic politics is changing. The traditional parties are on the defensive.

In 2013, the extremists of Alternative for Germany narrowly failed to reach the threshold for entry into the Bundestag. In 2016, they are likely to exceed it. Angela Merkel, who welcomed hundreds of thousands of migrants in 2015, and who responded to Donald Trump’s victory with the chilliest and most conditional of congratulations, now proposes to ban the burka in Germany. Merkel is not “emboldened” by Trump’s victory. She and other leaders of Europe’s established parties are trying to forestall the new parties of the extremes from establishing themselves on the emerging center ground of European politics, a consensus about keeping the welfare state in and the Muslims out.

The people who told us that Hillary Clinton was bound to win may, like medieval doctors with their miasmas, trace unhealthy symptoms in European politics as the malign influence of a Trump Effect. It may be comforting to attribute the world’s ills to one person. In a sense, it affirms that an American president could still be that influential. But Donald Trump is not a harbinger of Europe’s near future so much as a message for Americans that got delayed in transmission.

Americans, shielded by geography, patriotism, a two-party system, and the world’s currency of last resort, were able to delay their reckoning with the electoral consequences of open borders and open markets. Meanwhile, the Europeans have been creating a new politics and a new consensus on national identity. While Trump was talking about walls, the Europeans were already building fences.

Dominic Green, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, teaches politics at Boston College.