The New Yorker: A Scandal in Austria and the Far Right’s Fortunes in Europe

In France, for example, President Emmanuel Macron called the potential victory of his main opponent, Marine Le Pen, and her National Rally (formerly National Front), an “existential threat” to the E.U. Le Pen, in return, predicted that her victory and those of her kindred parties—in Italy, Poland, the U.K., and Hungary, among other places—would be a “historic feat.” Such either-or narratives, as might have been anticipated, proved cheap. Le Pen came in first on Sunday, and she picked up half a million more votes than she received in the 2014 European election. But she earned a slightly smaller proportion of the over-all vote, and her party will actually lose two seats in the Parliament. In his young party’s second-ever election, Macron, facing exceptionally low approval ratings at home and besieged by a popular uprising that has changed the course of his Presidency, came in behind Le Pen by less than a point. His La République En Marche! party will now enter the European Parliament for the first time, with a mandate to further his “European Renaissance” agenda. Because the Party will be centrally positioned, and therefore able to make alliances with the left and the right, it may end up having more power than anyone anticipated.

The Brexit Party won in the United Kingdom, but it did so in an election that wasn’t supposed to happen, and for a governmental body that the country was no longer supposed to be a part of. Right-wing parties also won in Poland and Hungary, but these were hardly insurgent campaigns—nationalists are a part of the political establishment in both countries. But the continued erosion of the stronghold of traditional parties was evident on the left as well. In France, the Green Party doubled its number of seats, thanks, in part, to young voters. In Germany, the Green Party, which entered the national Parliament for the first time in the nineteen-eighties, came in second and doubled its results from five years ago; one in three first-time voters in Germany chose the Greens. Over all, the nationalist block in the European Parliament fell short of winning a third of the seats, as many leaders (and Steve Bannon) claimed it might. Instead, it will hold about fifty-eight seats out of seven hundred and fifty-one. Across Europe, liberals and greens gained more seats than the right-wing populists and nationalists did; pro-European parties won two-thirds of them. [...]

For the past two years in Austria, Kurz, youthful and brash, was held up by conservatives as someone to emulate. “Up until last week, many people on the center right in Europe saw Kurz as a kind of hero,” Jan-Werner Müller, a professor of politics at Princeton, told me. This idea extended beyond Europe: Trump’s Ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, made clear, after arriving in Berlin last spring, that he was more interested in meeting the “rock star” leader of the small country next door than the vastly more powerful Chancellor of the country in which he was being paid to behave diplomatically. Kurz brought the F.P.O., a party founded in 1956, and whose first chairmen were former S.S. officers, into his government promising to tame them. “If you ask people today, what does the center right stand for, I think most people could not really give you an answer,” Müller told me. “And this vacuum of ideas has made it easier for the center right, in a very opportunistic way, to mainstream the far right as a kind of desperate measure.”

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Aeon: Who really owns the past?

What is most striking about this campaign is its seeming indifference to the lives of the people who call the city home. UNESCO’s promotional video pans through the old city; block after block after block lies completely devastated … only for the camera to abandon them for the one monument that will actually be rebuilt. What kind of reconstruction is this, and who benefits from it? Certainly not the residents. Many Iraqis suspect that the Shiite-led national government is exacting revenge on the Sunni-majority population of the city. Instead, it appears that the main beneficiaries are the governments gaining prestige by launching and funding this campaign.

Cases such as Mosul’s highlight a key fact about cultural heritage: it is not primarily about the past – as counterintuitive as that might be. It is about the present. Heritage harnesses the power of the past to justify present social relations, especially relations of power. Governments trample over the lives and needs of individuals and communities, the wealthy convert their dubiously acquired wealth into cultural capital, all in the name of that heritage. And in our conviction that we must protect the remains of the past, the rest of us are often swept up in the enthusiasm. We don’t even question the relatively new idea of cultural heritage – that the remains of history are to be unquestionably treasured as our inheritance from the past and must be preserved in their original state. Or that what typically counts as cultural heritage are major historic buildings and monuments, perfectly suited to be exploited as symbols of the powerful. [...]

The situation truly changed only in the aftermath of the Second World War. The British and other imperial powers began to shed their colonies in earnest, and international agreements such as the 1954 Hague Convention, and the 1970 and 1972 UNESCO conventions codified respect for these new nations and their heritage. These agreements are rooted in the concepts of national sovereignty. They have enshrined the principle that cultural heritage belongs to the nation in whose territory it is found, and call for recognition and enforcement of national laws of cultural property. These conventions represent the final step in the transformation of attitudes toward antiquities laws of developing countries from dismissal to respect. But they have also enshrined and encouraged the use of cultural property for nationalist purposes. [...]

Universalist language serves a double purpose. It justifies the urges of the developed world to acquire, often in effect to loot, heritage from developing nations. And it does so while presenting those same developing nations as less enlightened. But this characterisation of developing nations runs counter to the actual history. In 1989, John Henry Merryman, professor emeritus of law and art at Stanford University, questioned ‘[t]he deference still routinely given to state claims to their “national cultural patrimony” in international affairs’. At the time, European and American powers had just begun taking the antiquities laws of developing nations seriously. Western scholars love to critique and mock the image of Hussein as Nebuchadnezzar, but it is not qualitatively different from Napoleon’s depiction as a Greek god or hero, defeating the Mamluk rulers of Egypt and bringing civilisation back to the country. In Europe and America, nationalist use of heritage is depicted as an aberration. It’s what others do. The West rarely holds itself up to the same mirror.

UnHerd: The far-Right’s appeal to resentful Germans

This was once the beating heart of East German industry, and it is here that the far-Right has enjoyed particular success in recent times. Support for the AfD in East Germany is on average more than double that in the West. In this week’s elections to the European Parliament, the AfD was the biggest force in Saxony, winning a quarter (25.3%) of the vote. The party also finished first in Brandenburg.

As with populist successes elsewhere, the reasons for the AfD’s rise are multifaceted. There is the decline of industry and resultant male resentment. There is the gap between the attitudes of younger city-dwellers and older voters toward multiculturalism and immigration. And there is a tired political establishment – in this case Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union of Germany – that has been in power for nearly a decade and a half. [...]

The difference in attitudes to immigration between East and West is significant. According to a recent survey, 66% of respondents in the former East German states are not satisfied that their immigration concerns are being addressed, compared to 46% in the former West German states. There are fewer foreign-born citizens in the East than in the West, yet anger about immigration runs deeper. According to data collected by victim counselling centres, five people in the east fall victim to far-right violence every day. In Saxony, 317 attacks were recorded in 2018, up from 229 in 2017. [...]

There are other factors at play in the party’s growth. The economy, for example. But often these are connected with immigration as low-skilled workers compete with immigrants for jobs. Though the AfD did well in areas with strong economic growth, support across Germany was typically stronger in areas with low household income. Those living in the former GDR are statistically several percentage points more likely to be living in poverty than those living in the west of Germany.

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Financial Times: How Brexit has broken the UK's two-party political system

FT political editor George Parker says the European elections have exposed how both Britain's ruling Conservative and opposition Labour parties are 'cracking up' under the pressure of Brexit.

Financial Times: Donald Trump and the US-UK special relationship

FT's chief foreign affairs commentator Gideon Rachman and US national editor Edward Luce give their views on the president's first state visit to Britain. The special relationship is under pressure from Brexit, the China trade war and unilateralism.

Deutsche Welle: Poland: Where Keynes meets Jesus

Brian Porter-Szucs, author of the book "When Nationalism Began to Hate," believes that Kaczynski hasn't suddenly turned "a communist," and adds: "But many wanted a state that would preserve the communist party's commitment to social cohesion, cultural homogeneity and nationalism, just imbue it with a Catholic rather than a leftist conceptual vocabulary."

Kaczynski himself rarely speaks with anything but a Catholic conceptual vocabulary. That is why some in PiS see the current administration as part of a long-term plan to remold Polish state and society, with a socially conservative, church-infused rhetoric combined with a Keynesian-lite attempt to rebalance a capitalism that some believe has gone far enough in the post-communist country.[...]

The spending plans could also bring Poland close to the EU's budget deficit limit of 3% of GDP in 2020, from under 0.5% in 2018. Some economists even fear Poland could breach the limit. They also think that there will be hardly any money left in the budget for urgently needed increases to public sector pay. [...]

"The schemes were criticized as being too expensive, but Poland's public deficit has fallen, not risen. Rather, these policies have stimulated economic growth while dramatically reducing child poverty and increasing school enrolment." he argues, and adds: "A new European political order seems to be emerging — one that is likely to leave traditional parties of both the left and the right behind."

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Politico: Mueller remarks put Barr back into harsh spotlight

Moments after Robert Mueller gave brief concluding remarks about his Russia probe on Wednesday, the former Republican New Jersey governor and sometime Trump adviser Chris Christie declared that the special counsel’s statement “definitely contradicts what the attorney general said when he summarized Mueller’s report.” [...]

Wittingly or not, Mueller spotlighted differences with Barr on several points. While Barr stated in his April news conference that there was “no evidence of collusion,” Mueller said Wednesday he found “insufficient evidence to charge a broader conspiracy.” And while Mueller gave a nod to Congress when he said that “the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing,” Barr said he hoped Mueller hadn’t intended to leave the decision to Congress “since we don’t convene grand juries and conduct criminal investigations for that purpose.” [...]

Perhaps the most significant divergence between Barr and Mueller, who are longtime friends, dating back to their service at the Department of Justice during the George H.W. Bush administration, came on the explosive question of a potential indictment of Trump for obstructing justice. In Mueller’s telling, a Justice Department policy that a sitting president cannot be indicted guided his investigation and informed his decision not to reach a conclusion about whether Trump obstructed justice. Charging the president with a crime was “not an option,” Mueller said, and accusing him of committing one when he could not try the case in court, Mueller added, violated what he considered “principles of fairness.” [...]

Both Barr and Mueller on Wednesday evening sought to tamp down the fury over their perceived split. In a rare joint statement from Department of Justice spokeswoman Kerri Kupec and Special Counsel spokesman Peter Carr, the two said, “The Attorney General has previously stated that the Special Counsel repeatedly affirmed that he was not saying that, but for the OLC opinion, he would have found the President obstructed justice. The Special Counsel’s report and his statement today made clear that the office concluded it would not reach a determination — one way or the other — about whether the President committed a crime. There is no conflict between these statements.”

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Vox: Ghana is adopting a data-driven approach to fighting poverty

Recognizing this, Ghana wants its new census data to be more accurate, comprehensive, and granular than in the past. In addition to switching to digital tablets, it’s using satellite imagery to make sure households in rural areas don’t go undiscovered and uncounted, and disaggregating the data it collects at the district level.

The government is now seriously committed to a “leave no one behind” ethic, which means counting every single person in the population. That includes people who are sometimes called “the invisible” — those who live in slums, who are homeless, or who are institutionalized. [...]

Sometimes called West Africa’s “golden child,” Ghana was the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to cut its poverty rate in half, thereby achieving the first of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, a list of eight targets that world leaders pledged to meet by 2015. [...]

That sounds impressive, but when researchers disaggregated the data they found that in some regions, over 70 percent of people were still below the poverty line, Seidu said. In two districts in a particularly poor region, it was as many as nine out of 10 people. [...]

One of the major critiques of the Millennium Development Goals was that some countries saw improved conditions for people who were just below the poverty line, but the extremely poor weren’t better off. So when the UN formulated a new list of targets in 2015, dubbed the Sustainable Development Goals, it emphasized the motto “leave no one behind” as a guiding principle. Those words have become a popular development slogan.

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The Guardian view on German responses to antisemitism: frankness and honesty

The Jews of Germany are alarmed. It is not just the success of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in recent elections that contributes to their feeling of unease. A short-lived campaign to ban circumcision in 2012 was the first alarm bell; large demonstrations against the Gaza war in 2014, in which hostility to Israel often seemed indistinguishable from antisemitism, was another. And they are aware of the rising currents of antisemitism around Europe, even if it takes different forms in different countries. [...]

The chancellor and the newspaper, in their different ways, exhibited a moral seriousness that is one of the distinguishing characteristics of German public life. The determination of official Germany to look the past squarely in the eye and, where possible, to atone for it, has provided a moral example to the rest of Europe. That does not undo the signs that sympathy for the Nazi past remains in some parts of the country. But no senior German politician would say, after far-right protests that had led to a person’s death, that there were “very fine people on both sides”, as Donald Trump did after the Charlottesville white supremacist rally of 2017.

The first big challenge to modern Germany’s liberal order came from the far left, with the urban guerillas of the 1970s. One noted legal thinker then observed that the democratic, liberal state depends on conditions that it cannot itself guarantee. In other words, the written rules are not in themselves enough to hold society together. They must be supplemented by unwritten moral understandings. Finding and strengthening those was the task facing Germany in the 1970s, successfully accomplished then; it must be resumed now. It is also the task that faces a horribly divided Britain today.

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