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This article is part of a series in which we have asked our contributors to imagine that populist movements continue to gain influence in the coming years – what do western democracies look like in 2025?
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The year is 2025. The death toll in Syria has exceeded one million. We have come a long way since March 2011, when 15 boys were detained and tortured by Syrian authorities for writing graffiti in support of the Arab Spring. The hopes of the western policy establishment that Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad would return the country to ‘stability’ – flatteringly known as the ‘realist’ position – have proven illusory. Aside from the horrific death toll, nearly 10 million Syrian refugees have fled the country as rebellions against the dictatorship have continued to flare.
It is a grim irony that the impetus for inaction in Syria on the part of the international community was based on the forlorn hope of containing the conflict. Yet a willingness to let Assad remain in power – at an exorbitant human cost – has created a refugee crisis the scale of which European nations have been forced to confront. To paraphrase Leon Trotsky, European electorates may not be interested in war, but war is interested in them. The globalisation of refugees is a reality whether or not the isolationists of Left and Right care to acknowledge it.
If the European project teeters on the brink of collapse it is due in part to this willingness to acquiesce in Assad’s slaughter. As millions of desperate people have sought refuge outside of Syria’s borders, many hundreds of thousands have ended up in Europe. Sections of the European media have been running a steady stream of articles over the past decade blaming the new arrivals for all of society’s maladies. Indeed, populism’s appeal on European soil stems in large part from its single-mindedness in running against the spectre of the newcomer.
The eurozone has also been dragged down by the increasing unwillingness of some of its member states to adhere to the bloc’s fiscal rules. While the worst fears of many pundits have not been borne out – predictions of the impending collapse of the European bloc have been receiving ample airtime since 2008 – in recent years nearly everything that could go wrong has gone wrong.
Ground zero of the latest crisis is not in one country but spans three: Italy, Germany and France. In Italy, the right-wing Lega (led for more than a decade by Matteo Salvini) has ridden to power on the back of frustration with the compromises of its larger coalition partner, the Five-Star Movement (M5S). First elected in 2018 after a meteoric rise, the M5S movement has progressed from ramshackle upstart to another spoke in the wheel of the status quo. Much of this rests on little more than the fact that the M5S – like all governing parties – has been forced to compromise with political and fiscal reality.
For all of its pretence at partnership, the Lega sought to undermine its senior partner at every turn, pushing for a much stronger line on immigration (echoed vociferously by much of the press) while blaming Italy’s economic problems on the vacillations of M5S. Record numbers of refugees arriving on Italian shores – mainly from Syria – have driven an even more virulent wave of anti-immigration sentiment, which the Lega has done little to quell, instead fanning resentment at newcomers and adopting the Putinist line that all opposition to Syrian dictator Assad is Jihadist in nature.
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