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LONDON – When populist Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban joined a parade of foreign leaders to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden this week, he patently failed to note that Mr Biden had in fact beaten up his friend, the President Trump.
Like other right-wing populists, from Britain and Brazil to Poland and Germany, Mr. Orban was still grappling with the defeat of the flamboyant standard-bearer of populism in the White House. The Hungarian leader admitted that a victory for Mr. Trump was his “plan A.” There was no real plan B.
While Mr. Trump’s defeat is a stinging blow to his populist allies, its consequences for populism as a global political movement are more ambiguous. Mr. Trump, after all, won more votes than any US presidential candidate in history except Mr. Biden, a testament to the enduring appeal of his message.
The economic, social and political grievances that fueled populist and xenophobic movements in many countries are still alive, and may indeed be reinforced by the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic. Social media continues to spread populist ideas, often hidden away in conspiracy theories designed to cast doubt on the scientific facts behind the virus or the legitimacy of the electoral process that resulted in Mr. Trump’s defeat.
“This is arguably the most important election of our lives, but I would be very cautious in the face of a change in mood towards the belief that populism is over,” said Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European studies at Oxford University.
“In general,” he said, “all of these extreme mood swings are wrong, and more specifically, over 70 million Americans voted for Trump.”
Moreover, some of these leaders are likely to be able to exploit the legacy of the pandemic – from chronic unemployment and insecurity to skyrocketing public debt and racial tensions – even if they themselves have compounded the problems. problems in minimizing the threat of the virus and politicizing the public health response.
Some have tried to pivot quickly to the new political reality.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who Mr Trump once referred to as’ British Trump ‘spoke by phone with Mr Biden on Tuesday, telling him he looked forward to working with the United States on’ common priorities , from the fight against climate change to promoting democracy and rebuilding better after the coronavirus pandemic. The latter line referred to a slogan from Mr Biden’s campaign, also used by Mr Johnson’s government.
Despite all the talk about a populist wave that swept the world after Britain’s Brexit vote in June 2016 and the election of Mr Trump five months later, experts point out that populist and far-right movements in Germany and other European countries have always had their own roots. which were distinct and predate the Anglo-American variety.
Their fortunes have gone up and down, largely independent of Mr. Trump. In France, right-wing leader Marine Le Pen suffered a crushing defeat to Emmanuel Macron in 2017, at a time when the US president was soaring. Now, as Mr Macron grapples with the pandemic and deeply unpopular, polls suggest Ms Le Pen is on the verge of making a return to the elections scheduled for 2022.
In Italy, where Mr Trump’s former chief strategist Stephen K. Banon once dreamed of opening an academy to train populist leaders in a converted monastery, far-right parties built their political base in s opposing southern migration, a phenomenon that predated Mr. Trump and will survive his presidency.
“Trump gave legitimacy to these parties,” said Fabrizio Tonello, professor of political science at the University of Padua. But he said the president’s inflexible manner and win-win style had never had much influence in Italy’s messy politics, where the premium is on making deals and compromise.
In Germany, Mr. Trump’s complicated legacy was evident in the way the main right-wing party, Alternative for Germany, hesitated over how to handle Mr. Biden’s victory. While some lawmakers echoed Mr. Trump’s false claims about the vote count, party leaders quietly praised Mr. Biden after the vote was called.
Some interpreted the more conciliatory tone as an acknowledgment that Mr Trump’s defeat was also a defeat for the polarizing politics of the German party, which has seen its popularity hover around 10% in recent surveys.
“Everyone who has focused on a policy of polarization across the world has suffered a setback,” said Hans Vorländer, professor of political science at the Technical University of Dresden. “It’s a very clear signal.”
Others, however, are more skeptical. Populism in Europe is a local phenomenon, they said, so if populist leaders could point to Mr. Trump as a cognate spirit while he was in power, their fortunes were not directly tied to his.
“Trump was more or less irrelevant to populist and right-wing movements in Germany and Europe,” said Norbert Röttgen, a Christian Democrat politician seeking to succeed Chancellor Angela Merkel as party leader. “For this reason, his defeat will not affect them in a fundamental way.”
Conspiracy theorists and the movements they spawned – like QAnon, which took root in Germany – will also be oblivious to Mr. Trump’s defeat, some experts say, as his fraud allegations simply give them another opportunity to escalate the situation to their advantage.
“The wonderful thing about conspiracy theories is that they are non-falsifiable and impossible to refute with facts,” said Anna Grzymala-Busse, a professor of politics at Stanford University specializing in populism.
Where Mr. Trump will continue to cast a shadow, Mr. Röttgen said, is in the way the United States engages with the world. Immigration, great-power rivalry with China, suspicion of foreign entanglements, and doubts about the value of alliances – all of these themes will continue to fuel debates about the country’s foreign policy.
Populist leaders will likely continue to borrow from Mr. Trump’s playbook.
In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro, a retired military officer who dined with the president at his Palm Beach, Florida estate in Mar-a-Lago, modeled his response to the pandemic on that of Mr. Trump – disdaining locks and face masks, and endorsing an ineffective and dangerous antimalarial pill.
Mr Bolsonaro imitated Mr Trump by making unsubstantiated allegations of voting irregularities, which he said were to blame for having had to stand in a run-off election in 2018. Brazilian political scientists have said they considered Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede his electoral loss a dangerous precedent.
In Hungary, Mr. Orban did not hide his preference for the American elections.
“We support the victory of Donald Trump,” he wrote on November 3. As the ballots were being counted, his cabinet released a message saying, ‘We have backed Donald Trump, while Joe Biden has been backed by George Soros,’ the billionaire financier who is the perennial subject of right-wing conspiracy theories. .
When Mr Orban finally congratulated Mr Biden on Sunday, it was for his “successful presidential campaign”, not for his victory in the White House. He then wished Mr. Biden “continued success in fulfilling your responsibilities.”
Mr. Trump’s departure will make life more difficult for Mr. Orban and other populists in Eastern Europe, said Andras Biro-Nagy, of Policy Solutions, a Budapest think tank that has tracked Mr. Orban over the past decade. But he wondered if Mr. Biden would succeed in getting them to change their ways.
“For leaders like Viktor Orban, the easy days are over,” Biro-Nagy said. “The biggest challenge for them is that there will be more pressure and more attention on policies that have gone unchecked in the past four years.”
For example, he cited the expulsion of Mr Orban from the Central European University in Hungary. Founded in Budapest by Mr. Soros, the school was forced to move the majority of its operations to Vienna. Mr. Biro-Nagy said it was “unprecedented” for the State Department not to intervene in the situation.
“Orban could get away with policies that harm American interests,” he said. “The big question for me is how important will Hungary or Poland be to the new US administration? At least that open support will cease to exist. “
For some experts, the greater importance of Mr. Trump’s defeat is not how it will change the populists, but whether it emboldens those who oppose it. In countries like Hungary, where the democratic system has been corroded almost out of recognition, Mr. Trump’s victory could serve as a beacon.
“It shows them that it is really possible to get rid of the populists,” said Professor Grzymala-Busse.
Mark Landler reported from London and Melissa Eddy from Berlin. Ernesto Londono contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro and Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome.
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