Bloomberg: Populist Voters Don’t Mind Putin’s Help

As in February, there’s still no evidence that the deal actually took place, that the League received any Russian money or that Salvini even knew about the negotiations. An Italian lawyer, Gianluca Meranda, has since come forward claiming that he’d been present at the meeting and that the transaction hadn’t been completed. And Salvini has said that he’s “never taken a ruble, a euro, a dollar or a liter of vodka in financing from Russia.” [...]

As I’ve written before, European populists are perfectly aware of the toxicity of accepting Russian money in any form. In some countries, Italy among them, political slush funds are not unheard of – but Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election has drawn so much attention, including from intelligence services, that accepting the Kremlin’s financial aid increases the probability of getting caught. That explains Salvini’s obvious caution – and that of Brexit campaign funder Arron Banks, who apparently turned down offers of lucrative Russian deals. [...]

The League’s polling numbers are on the rise despite the Russia scandal. It’s conceivable that populist voters simply don’t care about the Kremlin scare, either because they’re generally sympathetic toward Russian President Vladimir Putin (who cleverly echoes hard right rhetoric as he seeks allies in Europe) or because they write off media reports of Russia scandals as fake news. The more Russia scandals hatch and pass without consequences, the more the latter perception will be reinforced: one can’t cry wolf too many times. Voters also know these parties have a harder time gaining funding and may simply be willing to ignore such freelancing if it helps their larger anti-establishment cause.

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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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Haaretz: Netanyahu’s Speedy Absolution for Austria’s neo-Nazis

Establishing ties with Germany remained a sensitive issue for decades. The deal with Adenauer included not only financial reparations (and secret arms deals) but also a speech to the Bundestag in which the chancellor acknowledged Germany’s sins against the Jews. Ben-Gurion also made sure that the Israeli government was not alone in making peace with Germany; his moves were coordinated with World Jewish Congress President Nahum Goldmann, who was a partner to the negotiations with Bonn. The ground rules for atonement were established. For a state or a political entity to absolve itself of its anti-Jewish past, it would have to publicly repudiate its sins and prove itself to be pro-Israel. Jerusalem’s stamp of approval would not be sufficient; it would need the blessing of the Diaspora as well. 

These standards would remain. When, in 1986, 53 percent of Austrian voters chose as their president the former Wehrmacht officer Kurt Waldheim, who had been tainted by his Nazi-era associations with the SS and war crimes committed in the Balkans, Israel downgraded its diplomatic relations with Vienna. The same happened in 2000, when the Freedom Party became part of the ruling coalition.[...]

TIn his meeting with the Visegrad Group (Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia) in July, Netanyahu felt comfortable enough among friends to describe the EU’s policy towards Israel as “a joke” and “actually crazy.” He was relying on the leaders of these four countries to help Europe “decide if it wants to live and thrive or if it wants to shrivel and disappear” and the way to do that was “a different policy toward Israel.” To get these nations to stand by Israel in the European forums, Netanyahu has been prepared to overlook the inclusion of racist politicians and Holocaust revisionism of the Polish government and the anti-Semitic tone of the Hungarian government’s campaign against Jewish financier George Soros. Israel’s silence under Netanyahu has been in contradiction to that of major local and international Jewish organizations – just as he has ignored the distress of American Jewish over U.S. President Donald Trump’s embrace of anti-Semitic white supremacists. Now he is looking to the new Kurz-Strache government in Vienna to add Austria to his pro-Israel coalition in the EU.

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