The Guardian: How globalisation has transformed the fight for LGBTQ+ rights

 It was no coincidence that the notion of LGBTQ+ rights was spreading worldwide at the same time that old boundaries were collapsing in the era of globalisation. The collapse of these boundaries led to the rapid spread of ideas about sexual equality or gender transition – and also a dramatic reaction by conservative forces, by patriarchs and priests who feared the loss of control that this process threatened. These were the dynamics along the pink line, particularly in places where people came to be counted as gay or lesbian or MSM (men who have sex with men) or transgender for the first time. In most societies, they had always been there, albeit in ways that were sometimes circumscribed or submerged, but now they claimed new status as they took on new political identities. And they became enmeshed in a bigger geopolitical dynamic. [...]

Particularly in Europe, these new-look nationalist movements sometimes bolstered their agendas by claiming they were protecting not just jobs and citizens but values, too. By the time Le Pen was running for office in 2017, these values included the rights of LGBTQ+ people. The man who wrote this script had been the crusading Dutch anti-immigration politician Pim Fortuyn, who was assassinated in 2002. Fortuyn, who was gay, attracted mass support when he claimed that Muslim intolerance of homosexuality posed an existential threat to European civilisation. His far-right successor, Geert Wilders, drove the agenda hard. When a troubled Muslim man killed 49 people at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in June 2016, Trump – then on the campaign trail – slammed “radical Islamic terrorism”. Wilders, fighting his own election campaign back home, capitalised on this: “The freedom that gay people should have – to kiss each other, to marry, to have children – is exactly what Islam is fighting against.” [...]

In western Europe, the issue of LGBTQ+ rights was being staked as a pink line against the influx of new migrants. At the same time, in eastern Europe, it was being staked as a pink line against decadent western liberalism. In both instances, queer people themselves came to be instrumentalised politically as never before. They acquired political meaning far beyond their own claims to equality and dignity. They became embodiments of progress and worldliness to some, but signs of moral and social decay to others.

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The Economist: Why Europe's nationalist parties all sound alike

Nationalist parties in the European Union are gaining momentum. At a time when the EU is increasingly fractured, they are united on many issues. What are they? [...]

And that’s weird because one belief that unites these nationalist populist European leaders is that the European Union should be less united. Since the euro crisis of 2009 and the migrant crisis of 2015 these right-wing populist movements have grown in strength and in number. [...]

Every European country has its own version. Tomio Okamura is a Czech-nationalist politician born in Japan who wants a zero-tolerance policy on immigration. It’s not clear what this means but it plays into European fears of what they call an invasion. In other words… immigration.

They all accuse Brussels of behaving like a dictatorship. Which is ironic given that they’re all running in democratic elections for the EU parliament. They often speak of a supposed plot by mainstream leaders like Angela Merkel to replace Europeans with lower-paid migrants.

The Local: How EU elections could lead yet another Italian government to collapse Inbox x

But the fact that Marine Le Pen’s National Rally from France, Geert Wilders’ Party of Freedom from the Netherlands, the Belgian Vlaams Belang, the Danish People’s party and others have all agreed to join suggests that Salvini is now recognised as a successful leader well beyond Italy’s borders. [...]

In April, the League was expected to win 37 percent of the Italian vote, but support for the party has been shrinking in recent weeks. It has now dropped to around 30 percent, according to some polls. Nevertheless, after securing just 6.2 percent in the last European election, that would still be an extremely strong performance by the League. [...]

The forced departure from government of the League’s undersecretary for transport, Armando Siri, as he faces an investigation into alleged corruption, has taken a toll, too. M5S used to let Salvini dominate the agenda, but is now asserting itself as the dominant coalition partner, and very much lobbied the prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, to get rid of Siri. [...]

Then there is the question of whether fresh elections could even be held as quickly as Salvini would like. After all, the executive could simply end up being replaced by another, supported by a different governing majority, as, if this government collapses, parliamentary arithmetic means that no single party, or leader, would be in control of what happens next.

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openDemocracy: A pan-European radical right – contradiction in terms?

Although Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has confirmed it is sending a representative, Marine Le Pen of France’s National Front has said she will not be attending. Le Pen herself hosted a similar meeting in Nice in 2018, at which Geert Wilders from the Dutch Party for Freedom and several other influential radical right speakers were present, an event which indicated how hard it has been to create a pan-European radical right bloc. [...]

As David Barnes recently wrote here, narratives of European civilization have been both common and hard to sustain; Oswald Mosley’s post-World War II argument in favour of ‘Europe – A Nation’, which shares many similarities with today’s anti-immigrant discourses promoted by the likes of Salvini, found few takers, despite the fact that a notion of Europe having a homogeneous racial and cultural background was widely held across the continent’s radical right movements. [...]

Even if Europe’s radical right leaders share certain fundamental ideas, however, such as a belief in the need to defend the ‘white race’, a hatred of Islam, a desire to stop immigration, and a basic ultra-nationalist position, it is hard to see how the clash of nationalisms that conferences such as Salvini’s will expose can survive the experience. [...]

There may have been a sharing of ideas – a transnational fascism – but there was really no ‘fascist international’. Attempts to appeal to a basic ‘Europeanism’, centred on racial belonging and conspiratorial antisemitism, have historically proved insufficient to mobilise and maintain coherence across the continent, with nationalism proving far more powerful as an identity-building cohesive force. Perhaps the National Socialists came closest with their transnational membership of the SS (although this was not huge) and a racial ideology which found supporters in all European countries. Yet ultimately, as Bauerkämper and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe write, ‘the vision of a fascist Europe proved to be a chimera. Fascists clearly espoused different versions of European unity.’

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openDemocracy: Pro-Europe and anti-EU? Reviewing the far right’s view of Europe

Firstly, far right parties have not always been anti-EU. While many of them converged on anti-EU positions, they did not start from there. Both the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neo-fascist party founded by supporters of Mussolini’s regime in 1946 and which transformed into the conservative Alleanza Nazionale in the mid-90s, and the French Front National (FN, now Rassemblement National), were broadly in favour of European integration in the 1980s, although they were sceptical about the form it took.

Guided by their opposition to the Soviet Union and their distrust of American power, the parties saw European unity as a means to defend their homelands and remain relevant in a bipolar world. At the same time, they opposed the primarily economic nature of the European project. Thus, they advocated in favour of a European common defence and a stronger European foreign policy. While for both parties this appeared to be a way to pursue the national interest by European means, it still translated into a form of support for the EEC. [...]

Second, even if far right parties do oppose the European Union, this does not imply that they all oppose it in the same way. If we consider the example of exit from the European Union, this remains a rather marginal position across the European far right. While PVV leader Geert Wilders has famously advocated in favour of ‘Nexit’ (albeit tuning it down in the 2017 elections), the League’s Matteo Salvini has most recently argued for the need to ‘reform Europe from within’ and take back control of the ‘beautiful European dream’. [...]

On one side, it is used as a form of ‘civilisationism’ to recreate the image of a unified European civilisation typically opposed to Islam, and on the other side, to oppose the European Union in the name of ‘Europe’. This is well exemplified in the claim made by Marine Le Pen that ‘For us, Europe is not an idea. Europe is a culture, it’s a civilization with its values […] I believe in the need for a European organisation in the great uproar of the world and of globalisation, but in no case can this construction provoke the disappearance of the nations that form it. Our European project will be that of the Nations and peoples, their diversity and their respect.’

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The Guardian: Tommy Robinson and the far right’s new playbook

Yaxley-Lennon frequently complains he is being smeared as a racist and a Nazi; he insists that he doesn’t care about skin colour and that his objection is to Islamist political ideology rather than people. What this misses is that far-right politics almost always involves singling out particular groups on the grounds of their alleged culture and behaviour, as with the way far-right groups have in the past used the “black muggers” panic of the 1970s, or Jewish ritual slaughter. And the way Yaxley-Lennon characterises Muslims is to present them as an alien presence in British society working to harm the majority. In Enemy of the State, previously majority-white areas of Luton are described as having suffered “ethnic cleansing” via Muslim immigration. “We are sleepwalking our way towards a Muslim takeover of the country,” he writes elsewhere, and describes the niqab as “an up-yours that shows exactly how the hardline, majority Muslim community regards the rest of us”. He is also sceptical of Muslims in public life. “You cannot buy loyalty,” he writes. “You buy a measure of allegiance for a while.” [...]

Yaxley-Lennon, meanwhile, is frequently treated as “authentic” by parts of the British media that do not know how to deal with class. A public conversation that often treats being working-class as a kind of ethnic identity only shared by reactionary white people in forgotten suburbs – when, in fact, working-class Britain is the most diverse and numerous section of society – undermines efforts to credibly challenge him. And a journalism profession that contains few people of working-class backgrounds makes it all the more difficult. Take Yaxley-Lennon’s appearance in front of Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight in 2011: Paxman’s patrician contempt only bolstered Yaxley-Lennon’s projected image of the little guy versus the liberal elite. By contrast, one of the rare occasions he was convincingly challenged on television was in a debate in 2013 on BBC3 with the rapper, author and activist Akala, who was able to paint a very different picture of working-class Britain. It’s telling that Yaxley-Lennon only gives this 2013 encounter half a sentence in his autobiography, while dwelling at length on his other media appearances.

Why are these changes happening now? One reason is that political ideologies that were once dominant are struggling to make their worldview seem like the obvious one. Put crudely, this is the fallout from several decades when neoliberal globalisation was seen, to varying degrees, as the only game in town. The financial crash and its aftermath rendered that view untenable, but so far no alternative vision has won out. [...]

Yaxley-Lennon is a potential asset to the new, international far-right activism. He has a brand name and a powerful myth that is menacing enough to keep him in the news, and has mobilised support in a number of countries. Conservatives in the US can use his story to boost the “Europe has fallen” narrative promoted in order to justify Trump’s own anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant policies, while Bannon has already acknowledged his potential to catalyse campaigns across Europe. In the UK, he could become part of a broad rightwing coalition that seeks to mobilise popular anger as Brexit unfolds. The Ukip leader, Batten, has publicly supported Yaxley-Lennon. On 24 October, after Yaxley-Lennon’s most recent court hearing, Batten accompanied him to the House of Lords for a lunch with the Ukip peer Lord Pearson – and is now proposing he be allowed to join the party, in defiance of a long-standing ban on former BNP members. A recent long-term study by Hope Not Hate suggests the places most susceptible to far-right narratives are white-majority communities away from big cities, which have been hit particularly hard by austerity policies and longer-term industrial decline. Another danger is that smaller, violent neo-Nazi groups still exist – as does antisemitic conspiracy theory – and this increased activity in general gives them more space in which to operate.

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The Guardian: How populist uprisings could bring down liberal democracy

Some of these rules are formal. A president or prime minister allows the judiciary to investigate wrongdoing by members of his government instead of firing the prosecutor. He puts up with critical coverage in the press instead of shutting down newspapers or persecuting journalists. When he loses an election, he leaves office peacefully instead of clinging to power.

But many of these rules are informal, making it less clearcut when they are violated. The government does not rewrite electoral rules months before an election to maximise its chance of winning. Political insurgents do not glorify authoritarian rulers of the past, threaten to lock up their opponents or set out to violate the rights of ethnic and religious minorities. The losers of an election refrain from limiting the scope of an office to which an adversary has been elected in their last days in the job. The opposition confirms a competent judge whose ideology it dislikes rather than leaving a seat on the highest court in the land vacant, and strikes an imperfect compromise about the budget rather than letting the government shut down. [...]

In the US, and many other countries around the world, that is no longer how democratic politics works. As Ignatieff put the point, we are increasingly “seeing what happens when a politics of enemies supplants a politics of adversaries”. And the new crop of populists who have stormed the political stage over the past decades shoulder a lot of the blame for this. [...]

Citizens are less committed to democracy than they once were; while more than two-thirds of older Americans say that it is essential to them to live in a democracy, for example, less than a third of younger Americans do. They are also more open to authoritarian alternatives; two decades ago, for example, 25% of Britons said that they liked the idea of “a strongman ruler who does not have to bother with parliament and elections”; today, 50% of them do. And these attitudes are increasingly reflected in our politics: from Great Britain to the US, and from Germany to Hungary, respect for democratic rules and norms has precipitously declined. No longer the only game in town, democracy is now deconsolidating.  [...]

As I argue in my new book, The People vs. Democracy, we will only be able to contain the rise of populism if we ensure that the political system overcomes the very real shortcomings that have fuelled it. Ordinary people have long felt that politicians don’t listen to them when they make their decisions. They are sceptical for a reason: the rich and powerful really have had a worrying degree of influence over public policy for a very long time. The revolving door between lobbyists and legislators, the outsized role of private money in campaign finance, and the tight links between politics and industry really have undermined the degree to which the popular will steers public policy.

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Haaretz: Are Muslims the 'New Jews' for Today's Far Right? Trump's Tweets Boosted That Claim

Prejudice towards Islam and Muslims is endemic in the Europe of 2017. The "Muslim Question" is central to the politics of the far right, which has achieved success unprecedented since WWII at the polls this year, from France to the Czech Republic via Austria and Germany. 

More significantly, the fear of Muslims as potential terrorists has become an integral part of mainstream European politics and the European security state, as has been identified by Amnesty International, among others. [...]

The similarities between contemporary Islamophobia and 1930s anti-Semitism, in particular, are certainly striking: Panic about a Muslim 'horde' coming from the East; an obsession with Muslim conspiracies against the West; and the generalized depiction of Muslim men as corruptors/abusers of vulnerable Christian women (from sex gangs in the North of England to the sexual assaults in German cities on New Year’s Eve 2016). [...]

And we must not forget that the association between Jews and Communism was a central part of European thinking about Jewry before and after the Second World War (John Le Carré’s first novel, Call for the Dead, published in 1961, is testimony to its longevity). The idea of the Judeo-Bolshevik menace, however, has no corresponding concept in contemporary European debates about Islam. [...]

In 2017, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in Europe are on the rise, in different ways. The idea of a global Jewish conspiracy is itself globalizing and has found a new incarnation with, for example, the vicious campaigns against financier and philanthropist George Soros.

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Social Europe: How Populists Win When They Lose

Less obvious, but more pernicious, is the insinuation that citizens who do not share the populist’s conception of “the people,” and hence do not support the populist politically, are less than legitimate members of the polity. Think of Farage claiming that Brexit was a “victory for real people.” The 48% who voted to remain in the European Union, he implied, might not be part of the “real” British people at all. [...]

Populism is thus a form of anti-pluralism. To say that “the people” are rising up against “the establishment” is not a neutral description of political developments; it’s actually populist language. It accepts the populists’ claim that they authentically represent “the people.” [...]

The image of an irresistible populist “wave” was always misleading. Farage did not bring about Brexit all by himself. He needed the help of established Conservatives such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove (both now serve in Prime Minister Theresa May’s post-election cabinet). Likewise Trump was not elected as the candidate of a grassroots protest movement of the white working class; he represented a very established party and received the blessing of Republican heavyweights such as Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich.

In fact, if anything, Trump’s election was a confirmation of how partisan US politics has become: 90% of self-identified Republicans voted for Trump; they clearly could not fathom voting for a Democrat, even if many Republicans in surveys registered deep doubts about the party’s nominee. To this day, no right-wing populist has come to power in Western Europe or North America without the collaboration of established conservative elites. [...]

The idea that the Dutch and the French elections heralded the arrival of a “post-populist moment” fails to appreciate the distinction between populism as a claim to a moral monopoly on representation and the policies – think of restrictions on immigration – typically promoted by populists as part of their exclusionary identity politics. For example, Wilders, who really is a populist, did less well than expected in March. But his main competitor, center-right Prime Minister Mark Rutte, adopted Wilders-like rhetoric – telling immigrants that they should leave the country if they do not want to behave “normally.”

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Slate: How the Alt-Right Is Using Sex and Camp to Attract Gay Men to Fascism

Both have become influential figures in the alt-right; horribly, they are not the only gay men to respond to an olive branch lately offered by white nationalism. The opening of this movement to cisgender gay men is a radical change, "one of the biggest changes I've seen on the right in 40 years," says Chip Berlet, co-author of Right-Wing Populism in America. In the United States, unlike in Europe, out gay men have never been welcome in white supremacist groups. The Klan and neo-Nazi groups, the main previous incarnations of white hate in this country, were and still are violently anti-queer. And while a subset of openly gay men has always been conservative (or, as in all populations, casually racist), they never sought to join the racist right.

That was before groups like NPI, Counter-Currents Publishing, and American Renaissance started putting out the welcome mat. Since around 2010, some (though by no means all) groups in the leadership of the white nationalist movement have been inviting out cis gay men to speak at their conferences, write for their magazines, and be interviewed in their journals. Donovan and O'Meara, far to the right of disgraced provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, are the white nationalist movement's actual queer stars. But there are others in the ranks, like Douglas Pearce of the popular neofolk band Death in June. And there are many more gay men (and some trans women) who have been profoundly influenced by two white nationalist ideas: the "threat" posed by Islam and the "danger" posed by immigrants. [...]

Of course, neither O’Meara nor Donovan actually support gay rights. This is partly because they don't believe in "civil rights." Although O'Meara wants to be part of an imagined elite band of men who love each other and rule society—his version of an Aryan fantasy called the Männerbund—he doesn't want to support, as he put it in the interview with Alternative Right, "some sniveling queen demanding 'my rights!' … 'The plight of the homosexual' … is a Leftist myth." Donovan says explicitly that straight people should be given more power and privileges than gay folks, because their "reproductive sexuality" is superior to ours. Both men openly detest lesbians and trans and genderqueer people: Donovan calls the trans movement "men who want to cut their dicks off and women who want to cut their tits off." And of course, no white nationalist organization anywhere supports LGBTQ rights on a social or legislative level. Their new "support" is limited to allowing cis gay men who are white racists to join them.

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RSA: Populism and the Fate of the West | Bill Emmott

When faced with global instability and economic uncertainty, it is tempting for states to react by closing borders, hoarding wealth and solidifying power, and for citizens to look upon one another with suspicion, incomprehension and mistrust.

But as mainstream technocrats are purged, and populists fall on their own swords, could something better emerge from the rubble? Could we be in the process of watching the birth of a repoliticised and refreshed democracy?

Speakers: Bill Emmott, Former Economist Editor-in-chief; Joris Luyendijk, Investigative Journalist; Edward Luce, US columnist, Financial Times, Chair: Rowan Conway

CityLab: The Geography of Populist Discontent

The economic strategies of populists are territorial: walls, immigration restrictions, and rules based on national origin. But populism’s rise in Europe as well as the United States is less a product of economic inequality per se or even of economic anxiety; it is a cultural backlash against urbanism and the values of openness, globalism, tolerance, and diversity that are the hallmark of great cities. [...]

The decline of the middle class and the broken escalator of social mobility are no fiction. Before the 2016 U.S. election, Le Monde published maps about the geography of disparities in the U.S. Did you know that the size of the middle class shrank by more than 7 percent between 2000 and 2013 in New England, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, the Carolinas, Mississippi, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona? Some of these were red states, others blue. But the trend shaped the political narrative. [...]

There are times when rational, well-educated societies lose a sense of perspective, and become overly sensitive, reacting emotionally. We are at peace; the post-2008 recovery, although shallow, is underway. But the general atmosphere, conditioned by fear of terrorism, is pernicious. Studies show that people are poor judges of the risks they do face, exaggerating some which are highly unlikely, underestimating others for which the odds of probability are great. Meanwhile, the security state keeps expanding through a combination of rules, mandates, and direct expenditure. We have to look at what is on the front page of the news, and it is not the economy. Is it any wonder that people feel their way of life is under threat? [...]

Why is this necessary? National policies are spatially blind. National macroeconomic policy treats culture, geography, language, and religion as irrelevant at best, or as handicaps at worst, barriers to the smooth workings of economic rationality. After all, these are endowments which economic trends are unlikely to affect, for better or worse.

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Politico: Le Pen’s Dutch bummer

The Dutch were in a tetchily Euroskeptic mood in the days after Britain’s Brexit vote, with nearly half saying they wanted out of the EU. But the anti-Brussels mood has since cooled. A poll by TNS Nipo for Deutsche bank in February showed a whopping 79 percent of Dutch voters did not agree the Netherlands would be better off outside the EU. [...]

Le Pen should take note. The Dutch vote marks the second time in a year that a Euroskeptic candidate came up short on polling day. Last December, far-right candidate Norbert Hofer lost Austria’s presidential run-off. His supporters blamed arch-Brexiteer Nigel Farage for suggesting that Austria would hold a referendum on leaving the EU if Hofer won.

Given that polls in France show a rising majority in favor of EU membership, and an even higher share in favor of staying in the euro, Le Pen is trying to tone down her own Frexit proposal. Yet she, too, is branded with the Euroskeptic seal, and her efforts to change tack with a plan that would somehow combine a revived franc with a single European currency have left voters confused. [...]

While voters rate the National Front president very highly on metrics such as “sincerity,” “desire to change” or ability to “understand them,” nearly two thirds of voters said that she was “worrying,” according to an Elabe poll conducted in February. The scandal-tainted Fillon also rated highly on the worry-meter, while Macron registered lower at 41 percent, according to the poll.

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The Atlantic: 'This Is Exactly What He Wants': How Geert Wilders Won by Losing

In fact, according to Paul Wilders, losing the bid to become prime minister may be the optimal electoral outcome for Geert, who has campaigned on a platform of leaving the European Union, tolerating “fewer Moroccans,” imposing a “head rag tax” on hijab-wearing women, and paying settled Muslims to leave the Netherlands—promises on which it would be difficult to deliver. [...]

Paul spoke to me about what his brother was like as a child, how he developed into “the Dutch Trump” (as he is sometimes known today), and what’s next for him now that the elections are over. This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length. [...]

Geert’s momentum may have slowed down, but those voters are still out there, just more dispersed than they were. I’m pretty sure he will try to draw those voters back and that might mean a rethink in how he expresses himself. Up till now he has behaved in a very, very extreme way. Whether or not to tone down the rhetoric is going to be a difficult decision for him. On one hand, he still won the four seats [in addition to the seats his party already had] by being extreme. On the other, the three or four seats he lost to the newer, smaller parties, he’s losing because those smaller parties have the same message but deliver it in a more toned-down way. He’ll have to formulate a strategy that will work to both keep the extremists and attract more moderate voters. [...]

Yes, he grew up when he went to Israel. He was 18, I drove him to the airport in Amsterdam. He’d wanted to go to Australia but settled on going to a kibbutz on the border with Jordan, by the Allenby Bridge, instead. He stayed there for two years. He had a hard time over there and that made a difference. In Israel he spent all his money in about a week. He lived like a king and [then] was forced to work. It was dangerous. And you could tell, after that. He came back a far more serious person, far more likable. He started looking for jobs and studying. I think the seed was planted there—the emotional and intellectual seed.

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CityLab: Geert Wilders Didn't Take Over The Netherlands After All

Like Dutch politics in general, the situation is complicated and not especially sexy. The Netherlands has a pluralist system where 13 parties (yes, 13) are now represented in parliament; multi-party coalition governments have been the rule for over a century. Despite the chorus of worried thinkpieces, the number of buyers for Wilders’s PVV remains static in an extremely busy political marketplace. Indeed, the very nature of Dutch politics makes something of a mockery of the idea of “winning the popular vote”, which doesn’t in any way mean the same thing as it would in the U.S.

The overplaying of the Wilders threat cuts both ways. It was false to present his party and its extreme-right policies as poised to take over the Netherlands. It’s also simplistic to label Wilders’s restrained success as a “beautiful blow against Trumpism,” as did a recent email from Avaaz pushing this letter of congratulation to Dutch voters. The tenor of Dutch politics has still shifted rightwards and Wilders’s PVV has shaped the debate more than it electoral showing might suggest. In a bid to woo PVV voters, for example, Rutte’s VVD published a full page press advertisement this January warning migrants to “be normal or be gone”, a move picked up by the PVV as an attempt to out-Wilders Wilders himself. [...]

The Dutch elections have still broken something. That’s the belief in an unstoppable right-wing populist march through the West’s institutions, one that would start with Brexit, gain power from Trump’s election and inevitably deliver more extreme-right governments in Europe. Trump’s power may be unaffected and the slow, grim unfolding of Brexit, and its implications are no less inevitable. But maybe after Wednesday’s results, we will stop viewing European states as mere dominoes waiting to fall.

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BuzzFeed: The Man Who Turned Gay Rights Into “A Weapon” In A War Against Muslims

For months they had endured an increasingly strident debate about immigration ahead of elections on March 15, and they were tired of being caught in the crossfire. The race has been dominated by Geert Wilders, the bleached-blonde leader of the Party for Freedom who polls show could win the largest bloc of votes in parliament. His candidacy is being watched as the next test of the nationalist wave that drove Britain out of the EU and put Donald Trump in the White House.

But the race is also uniquely focused on gay rights, because Wilders has framed his crusade against Islam in part as a defense of national values in the country proud to have adopted the world’s first marriage equality law and has remained a leader on LGBT rights in the years since. And several more moderate politicians have echoed the message that Muslim immigrants threaten gay people.[...]

Wilders’ professed support of gay rights once put him out of step with other nationalist politicians in the West, who generally have also been social conservatives. But today Wilders seems like he was just ahead of his time, with politicians from Donald Trump to France’s Marine Le Pen following his lead and saying they are defending LGBT rights by opposing Muslim immigration. [...]

Immigrants are constantly being subjected to a “pink test,” said Dino Suhonic, founder of the queer Muslim organization Maruf and organizer of the evening’s gathering. Politicians are “using gay rights, as almost a [trait of] national identity,” Suhonic said, but only when debating the place of “asylum-seekers and the immigrants.” It’s an attitude Suhonic calls “homonationalism.” [...]

Ineke cited a 2009 study commissioned by the Department of Justice that found that 86% of people accused of violence against LGBT people in the Netherlands were of Dutch background and 14% of immigrant background, roughly equal to their representation in the population as a whole. Another analysis by researchers at the University of Amsterdam of anti-LGBT violence just within their city did find that people of Moroccan descent were overrepresented among suspected perpetrators, but also found that people from Turkish backgrounds were underrepresented and less likely to commit these crimes than people of Dutch descent. Religion was not the issue, the researchers concluded, but rather a “street culture” specific to Moroccan young men that “enforces hyper-masculine behavior.”

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Associated Press: With economy up, crime down, why are the Dutch discontent?

"It's not the economy, stupid," Professor Gerrit Voerman of the University of Groningen said, tweaking the campaign message Bill Clinton used in his successful 1992 march to the White House. Instead, Voerman said, "It's about identity." [...] 

 In the Netherlands, pollsters predict that Prime Minister Mark Rutte's People's Party for Freedom and Democracy will lose about 15 of the 40 seats it holds in the 150-seat House of Representatives. Wilders' party, which currently has 12 lawmakers in the chamber, is on track to become one of the biggest, if not the biggest, parliamentary faction, despite a recent decline in polls.

However, Wilders' hard-line anti-Islam, anti-immigration platform and rhetoric has driven away potential coalition partners among mainstream parties, meaning that he is unlikely to be able to form a government even if he wins the popular vote in this country whose elections all but guarantee coalitions.

Wilders' one-page election manifesto leads off with two "us-against-them" themes. The Party for Freedom pledges to "de-Islamize" the Netherlands by shutting all mosques, banning the Quran and halting all immigration from majority Muslim nations. It also commits to remove the Netherlands from the European Union, which it helped found 60 years ago.

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Politico: The man who invented Trumpism

Wilders admires Trump and encourages the comparison, delighted to cast his campaign as part of a global populist wave if it adds momentum ahead of the March 15 vote, in which polls indicate his Freedom Party (PVV) is neck-and-neck with Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD).

“It’s the revenge of the rust belt,” said Tim de Beer, an opinion and policy research expert at the Dutch polling firm Kantar Public. “The Netherlands was among the first to have this revolt.”

But Trump and Wilders differ in important ways. Trump’s lack of focus is completely at odds with Wilders’ singular, dogged determination to pursue his proclaimed mission: stop Islam in the Netherlands.  And where Trump is a newcomer to politics, Wilders is one of the longest-serving lawmakers in the Dutch lower house, with a formidable command of parliamentary procedures. [...]

Wilders is mostly silent about the other side of his family tree. His mother was born in what is now Indonesia. She arrived in the Netherlands as a baby after her parents fled the collapsing Dutch colony that would later become the country with the world’s largest Muslim population. [...]

Wilders severely restricts media access to the party. Attempts to contact it, or any of its lawmakers, are typically met with a wall of silence. This is combined with carefully rationed pronouncements designed to outrage and grab headlines. Wilders specializes in coming up with insulting compound words, such as straatterroristen (“street terrorists,” or foreign-looking men hanging around); haatpaleizen (“hate palaces,” or mosques); or his infamous kopvoddentaks proposal (a “head rag tax” on headscarves). [...]

Over the course of Wilders’ life under armed protection, his views have become increasingly radical, casting Islam and the West as ancient enemies locked in a civilizational war for survival. In 2005, his manifesto allowed that not all Muslims were dangerous, noted the importance of freedom of religion, and advocated that only radical mosques should be closed. Nowadays, he claims there are no moderate Muslims, just liars, or people who haven’t read the Quran.

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Al Jazeera: Mehdi Hasan on the rise of "fake" populists

Reality Check: The rise of ‘fake’ populism.

Mehdi Hasan on right-wing elitists who masquerade as ordinary folk.

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Business Insider: This chart shows how protest votes are shaping the political landscape in Europe

The refugee crisis that has struck Europe is the worst the continent has seen since the Second World War, and with it has come the resurgence of political parties that have not enjoyed this kind of support since 1945.

Support for far-right —and to a lesser extent far-left— parties has spiked in recent months as hundreds of thousands of refugees have come to Europe and a huge chunk of the population has once more felt their concerns were ignored or belittled by the ruling political class. [...]

The "contagion risk" from the UK to the rest of the continent is still possible too. Le Pen announced last week that if elected she would hold a referendum on France's membership of the EU. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders' far-right anti-EU Dutch Freedom Party keeps gaining in popularity as well.

The aftermath of the UK referendum in Britain has also had the opposite effect in other European countries. Seeing the chaos brought about in Britain, support for the EU has surged in a number of countries throughout the continent. [...]

Risks appear more linked to referendums on a ratification of a new EU treaty or other EU-related issues, rather than questioning the EU membership outright, as support for EU membership appears fairly rooted. Only 21% of the people surveyed by Ipsos MORI in nine EU countries wanted to leave the EU... Even where protest parties are gaining momentum, it appears unlikely that they will garner sufficient votes to muster a majority.

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