The first is that tacking to the right can help traditional conservative parties lure back voters from the fringes. That’s what Mark Rutte, the Dutch Prime Minister, did when he told immigrants that if they didn’t like Dutch liberal values, they could leave, and when he prevented Turkish ministers from attending rallies in The Netherlands. That’s also how Theresa May has been staving off the threat from Ukip (not that she needs to do much to defeat a party so apparently determined on self-harm).
Embracing patriotism and identity could reinvent the liberal centre
The Daily Telegraph, 21 March 2017
At the jubilant election-night celebration for the centrist D66 party in The Hague my Dutch wasn’t good enough to understand the party leader’s rousing speech to his activists. But it wasn’t hard to make out words like “Brexit!”, “Trump!” and “populism!” And when I interviewed Alexander Pechtold afterwards for a Radio 4 documentary, Can The Centre Hold?, he was adamant that the man he had to thank for his party’s election success and likely part in the new governing coalition was the President of the United States.
“There was one game changer,” he told me, “and that was Donald Trump. I thank him because everybody thought, “Do we really want this in Europe, in the Netherlands, in our country which is so tolerant? No, we don’t want those kind of populist policies, we want reason.” And people in The Netherlands voted for reason.”
Even in the face of voters’ worries about immigration, anger at the Establishment, and job insecurity, the rabble-rousing Geert Wilders wasn’t able to win enough seats to make anything like the breakthrough he – and many others – had expected. So if the centrists’ fightback starts there, what are the lessons that centre-right and centre-left parties here can learn from the Dutch?
Smaller, liberal parties like D66 have done well by making a confident case against populism. The difference is that they, like the Liberal Democrats, can afford to do so because they don’t expect to win more than about 15-20 per cent of the national vote. It’s harder for big mainstream parties, as the Conservatives under David Cameron discovered.
Former Chancellor George Osborne doesn’t seem to have learnt that lesson. He told me that, “Politicians of the centre-right and centre-left have neglected to try and explain in straightforward terms why free markets are a good thing, why protectionism costs jobs, why managed immigration is a good thing, why open societies are stronger than closed societies. I don’t think we should just accept the narrative that immigrants are taking the jobs, that free trade deals are destroying the factories. It is not true.”
So is it just a matter of explaining to voters in ever shriller tones why they are wrong? I don’t think so. For what centrist parties haven’t been good at acknowledging is that politics is as much about identity as about economics. You can argue all you like that GDP is boosted by immigration, but if people see their neighbourhood and their country changing in ways that make them feel uncomfortable, it’s no use telling them that they’re deluded.
Trump won by promising to Make America Great Again. At Marine le Pen’s rallies in France, supporters chant, “This is our country!” Patriotism is popular, but you don’t have to be populist to be patriotic. Justin Trudeau, the charismatic Canadian Liberal Prime Minister, is forever talking of Canadian values; they just happen to be open, tolerant ones. Centrist parties need to reclaim the message of patriotism from the Right.
There is, of course, one centre-left UK party that has managed to be extraordinarily electorally successful: the SNP. And guess what? It has done so by crafting its message around a sense of nationhood. It’s not just “the economy, stupid.”
What the SNP has also succeeded in conveying, though, despite having been in power in Scotland for ten years, is a sense of being anti-establishment. As Alex Salmond, its former leader, told me, “We challenged the establishment in Scotland, which was the Labour Party, and the establishment in Westminster, which was often the Tory Party, and that defined the SNP’s role.”
Most centre-right and centre-left parties have been the establishment, though, for so many decades that voters are increasingly bored and angry with them. It’s partly a matter of style. People can’t bear the buttoned-up, stick-to-the-message-at-all-costs method of talking that was invented by New Labour, tested to its limits by Labour leadership candidates Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham, and finally drove people to distraction with Hillary Clinton. To mangle Yeats, it seems to voters that the centre lacks all conviction while the populists are full of passionate intensity.
As Osborne put it to me, “When President Trump tweets, probably at two or three in the morning, you may look at the tweet and think that’s a pretty odd thing for the President of the United States to say, but you don’t doubt that he’s done it, whereas when Hillary Clinton tweets, everyone goes, “Well, that probably went through seven committees and is signed off by someone’s that not even her.”
So mainstream politicians need to capture the authenticity and candour beloved by populists of the right and left. But they also need somehow to reinvent themselves, ideally outside the traditional party system. That’s what Emmanuel Macron is doing so successfully in France. His policies are avowedly centrist, but he has created his own party, En Marche!, and may reach a run-off against Le Pen in which no candidate from a mainstream party is represented.
Could it happen here? I spoke to Tony Blair about it. He was reluctant to endorse a new political party of the centre, but he clearly expects something of the sort to happen. “I think there are a lot of people who feel politically homeless right now, so in a country as vibrant and creative as ours, at some point that political energy finds a home. Now obviously I hope the Labour party sorts itself out and becomes that home, but you can’t tell.”
He told me that, “The political structures of the party systems of the west were really born from the industrial revolution, from debates between socialism and capitalism, state and market, and for many decades, those structures haven’t really answered where the public is today. One of the reasons there’s such turmoil in all the main political parties in the west today is you’ve reached the point where the coalitions which gave rise to some of those parties many years ago are no longer in existence in the same way. Are there different and new coalitions which make sense not just for this moment but for many years to come?”
Of course, the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system makes it difficult for new parties to emerge, much harder than in France or The Netherlands. But it’s no accident that Blair’s landslide victories were won with a party called “New” Labour. One way or another, the centre needs to find some novelty if it’s to see voters flocking back to it again.
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