
“I am sad that I was not able to make Europeans love Europe”
The retiring president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, has been unusually outspoken during his last weeks in office. He recently had a long interview with the Belgian newspaper L’Écho in which he discussed his actions and frustrations as head of the European Union. Juncker has since 2014 presided over the Greek crisis, the migrant...
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Attack From Far Left, Betrayed by Center/ Respectable Right
The current chaos in Austria shows that partnership between “center-right” and national conservative parties in Europe has limits. Chancellor Sebastian Kurz’s government, a coalition between Kurz’s Austrian People’s Party and the National Conservative Freedom Party, collapsed after nationalists rebelled against Europe’s “youngest leader”. [Austrian chancellor Kurz outsted after nationalists turn on him, by Boris Groendahl,...
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Europe Polarizes Between Nationalists and Globalists as Old Parties Fritter Away
The day is here! After five years, a new European Parliament has been elected! What is the European Parliament? That doesn’t matter too much. On the human level, it is a retirement home for has-been politicians and a trial area for the new generation of (increasingly rootless frequent-flyer) whippersnappers. In terms of policy, it influences...
Read MoreHillary Clinton called them "the deplorables." Barack Obama called them losers who "cling" to their Bibles, bigotries and guns. To President Jean-Claude Juncker of the European Commission, they are "these populist, nationalists, stupid nationalists... in love with their own countries." Well, "stupid" they may be, and, yes, they do love their countries, but last week...
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Nigel Farage, Britain’s Donald Trump character, is by far the most significant man in British politics. In just a few weeks he has gathered huge political momentum. In tomorrow’s European Parliament elections he appears likely to score more votes than Labour and the Conservatives combined. Farage stood up against the entire political establishment, including the...
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During the past few decades an intellectual movement has arisen out of the ruins of what once passed for Western civilization. As the great narrative of secular humanism, materialism, and progress collapsed—its obituary was published by Lyotard as The Postmodern Condition—an odd constellation of nationalist and traditionalist thinking began shaking the foundations of Western intellectual...
Read MoreA week from today, Europeans may be able to gauge how high the tide of populism and nationalism has risen within their countries and on their continent. For all the returns will be in from three days of elections in the 28 nations represented in the European Parliament. Expectation: Nationalists and populists will turn in...
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Dries Van Langenhove and the New Face of Flemish Nationalism
Dries Van Langenhove is a Flemish nationalist who has rocketed to the national scene in just a few years by founding the nationalist group Shield & Friends, which rapidly achieved nation-wide fame for its spectacular direct actions and savvy use of social media. Van Langenhove is now heading Flemish Interest’s (Vlaams Belang, VB) electoral list...
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Two years ago, the Forum for Democracy was a new fringe party in the Netherlands. Today, it is poised to become the largest party in the Dutch Senate after a decisive victory in recent elections. [Dutch government loses Senate majority amid populist surge, by Toby Sterling and Bart Meijer, Reuters, March 20, 2019] And the...
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An Interview with Jean-Yves Le Gallou
The following is an interview with Jean-Yves Le Gallou, a former French high civil servant, author, and identitarian activist. He was involved with the Nouvelle Droite intellectual movement as early as the 1970s before going on to join the Front National (FN). As a politician, he served as the secretary-general for the FN’s parliamentary group...
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Really and truly, I did not expect the most promising developments in West-European politics to come from Italy. Who could predict that the strange government appointed in June 2018 – an uneasy alliance of nationalists under Matteo Salvini’s Lega and the populist-but-vague Five-Star Movement – would last as long or achieve as much as it...
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Berlusconi, or the Limits of Democratic Chadism
The printed word is really not enough to get a sense of a person. For that, you really need to meet them, talk to them, do things with them for a while. If you can’t actually meet a person, perhaps the next best thing is to see some films about them, a complete audiovisual experience....
Read MoreWhy Trump’s Paris Fiasco Really Matters
You’ve probably had your fill of the media coverage, punditry, tweets, and wisecracks surrounding President Trump’s controversial trip to Paris, officially undertaken to honor the Allied soldiers, especially the Americans, who perished in France during World War I. By now, we’re used to the president’s words and deeds prompting eye-rolling and jokes. But on this...
Read MoreIn a rebuke bordering on national insult Sunday, Emmanuel Macron retorted to Donald Trump's calling himself a nationalist. "Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism; nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism." As for Trump's policy of "America first," Macron trashed such atavistic thinking in this new age: "By saying we put ourselves first and the...
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I recently predicted the emergence of Polar Alliance as Ice People recognize their common interest in stopping the Sun People Tsunami. Further evidence of that common interest: Italy Italy's Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte just visited the U.S.A. and had a meeting with President Trump in the Oval Office. The two leaders got along famously, both...
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The Great and the Good are furious about Donald Trump’s conduct at the G7 Summit, as journalists can’t believe an American president had the temerity to stand up for his nation’s interests at an international conference [One ‘rant,’ rough talks sour G7 mood in confrontations with Trump, Reuters, June 9, 2018]. They are especially incensed...
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For a generation, acceptance of the neoliberal doctrine “there is no alternative” has paralyzed politics in the West. If there is no alternative, what is politics to be about? The Authoritarian Center The traditional governing parties, center “left” and center “right” all follow the same neoliberal policies and constitute the self-designated “center”. Mainstream media enforce...
Read MoreA fortnight ago, Viktor Orban and his Fidesz Party won enough seats in the Hungarian parliament to rewrite his country's constitution. To progressives across the West, this was disturbing news. For the bete noire of Orban's campaign was uber-globalist George Soros. And Orban's commitments were to halt any further surrenders of Hungarian sovereignty and independence...
Read MoreAs Italy's traditional parties scramble to rise from the debris, two extremes – populist Five Star and far-right Lega...
A triumph of “populism.” A hung parliament. “Ungovernable” Italy. Berlusconi’s demise. The latest chapter in a European saga. The “end of socialist parties.” Italy’s latest elections were a roller coaster featuring plenty of thrills. Yet the top political nugget is unmistakable: Only one coalition may aspire to an absolute majority, an – unlikely – alliance...
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In the early hours of 28th September 1994, a pleasure ship, MS Estonia, sank in the Baltic Sea. Of the 989 people on board, a staggering 852 died. Bizarrely, some 650 were found below decks—unable to believe what was happening, they had made no attempt to save their lives Why? One possibility: humans used to...
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On immigration, not all millennial hearts beat to the left
“Watergate” Carl Bernstein pleasantly surprised me last May by agreeing that widespread use of the “anti-immigrant” mantra often reflected careless journalism. Since our brief exchange at Vienna’s Concordia Press Club coffee bar, news organizations have been applying the term promiscuously to characterize Austria’s newly elected coalition government, sworn in on December 18th. Bernstein, whose talk...
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Welcome to the Birthplace of Trumpism
He was a rich businessman, an outspoken outsider with a love of conspiracy theories. And he was a populist running for president. In 1990, when Donald Trump was still beyond the furthest outskirts of American politics, Stanislaw Tyminski was trying to become the new president of post-communist Poland. He shared something else with the future...
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“I hid in my bathroom from anti-Semitic marchers in Poland – in 2017” screamed Sam Rubin in The Forward, (November 13, 2017) triggered by the sight of tens of thousands of Polish patriots honoring their country’s independence in a march last Saturday November 13. Needless to say, despite the clickbait headline and ritualistic invocation of...
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As reported here by James Fulford on Monday, Austria’s general election last weekend was won by the center-right People’s Party with 32 percent of the vote. The center-left Social Democrats got 27 percent. Just a whisker behind them was the nationalist Freedom Party at 26 percent. The leader of the winning People’s Party is Sebastian...
Read MoreSteve Bannon’s interview with CBS’ Charlie Rose delighted VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow because Bannon confirmed Brimelow’s argument that Trump, contrary to general perception, did try to compromise with the GOP Establishment—Bannon even called it the “the Original Sin of the Administration”. [Breitbart’s Bannon declares war on the GOP, CBS News, September 10 2017] And it...
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