When the victory of donald trump about Kamala Harrisan electric current shook the international political board. Something emerged from the reaction of the various world leaders that was, in any case, evident. It is not about one more victory of the extreme right. And not only because it is the United States, one of the main powers in the world, but because there is a feeling that the least important thing is, in reality, the electoral victory itself. “I am concerned that the extreme right is disputing social hegemony,” he says. Marga Ferréco-president of think tank Transform Europe and member of United Left.
Are far-right postulates managing to penetrate the common sense of citizens? Through what mechanisms? Is it inevitable? Is it his merit or demerit of his political opponents? Can the world left turn the situation around?
Urbán: “The reactionary, illiberal and autocratic logic proposes us to return to a past of security”
Miguel Urbanformer MEP and author of Trumpisms: Neoliberal and Authoritarian. X-ray of the radical rightgives a key. “The reactionary, illiberal and autocratic logic,” he explains, “proposes us to return to a past of security where capitalism had not been canceled.” Two important elements in Urbán’s idea: security and capitalism. Without them, it is impossible to understand your thesis.
For Urbán, “the ecological and climate crisis has canceled the last utopia of modernity: capitalism.” He points out that, for the first time, society has seen that continuous and infinite growth is not possible. What happens is that “we are incapable of imagining a future without growth“because the scheme of “growth equals progress and progress equals the future” is broken. It is, precisely, this absence of future through growth that generates a series of fears and panics for which the extreme right has been able to find answers and solutions based on the “security“.
Urbán: “The ecological and climate crisis has canceled the last utopia of modernity: capitalism”
“He trumpism proposes returning to security from the past“. It is a characteristic of all the leaders that Urbán frames in the “reactionary authoritarianism” and gives several examples: Trump promising to “make America great again,” the classic “with Franc people lived better”, far-right leaders attacking feminism so that “the sexual privileges” or something as simple as “being able to enter with the car burning gasoline in central Madrid”. What the trumpismAccording to the former MEP, it is the illusion of returning to a previous, more comfortable world free of moral anxieties at the level of gender, the climate crisis or the depletion – and distribution – of resources. Along the same lines, the leader of Esquerra Republicana, Gabriel Rufiannoted on the social network X that “when one has no future, one votes in the past.”
For this reason, Marga Ferré sees the danger that the extreme right will achieve the “social hegemony“with those solutions that sneak directly into the common sense of the people. The co-president of Transform Europe emphasizes that this is a phenomenon that must be analyzed globallysince the themes that underpin the advance of the extreme right are the same in USA, Italy, Spain or any other country in which it governs or has a presence.
Ferré: “I am concerned that the extreme right is disputing social hegemony”
Talk about the immigration ―Ferré insists that “we are seeing how racism now seems like common sense”―, of the “antifeminism“, of the strategies of hoaxes and post-truthof the denial of the climate crisis and of the component “anti-governments“For Ferré, they are not anti-elite neither anti-establishmentbut rather they exercise opposition to the figure of the Government which, he explains, could lead to the proliferation of leaderships directly authoritarian.
The “lesser evil” and the “good Republicans”
As soon as the results of the American polls were known, several political leaders of the Spanish left – among them, Ione Belarrageneral secretary of Can― spoke of the damage that appealing to the “lesser evil“; to propose an electoral campaign solely to avoid the damage that would result from a reactionary candidate governing.
Elizabeth Duvalphilosopher, activist, writer and Secretary of Communication of Addraises another question, in conversation with Public. “Harris has sinned from a failed attempt to appeal to moderate republicans while doing nothing to build on the progressive base and defense of social and labor rights“, he explains. And he continues: “It is a defeat of the strategy of looking for the center right to combat the extreme right.
Urbán agrees. “What Kamala has done is focus on attracting the vote of good Democrats and good republicans“. Instead, “Trump has heeled, demonstrating that electoral and, more importantly, social majorities can be built from radicality outside the system“.
Antidote?
Marga Ferré finds precisely there one of the changes that should be applied in the fight against the extreme right: “We must not temporize with any of their proposals or go for their votes.” And that, everyone agrees, must be done with a global perspective. Duval believes that the left has to build the tools to “give itself a international institutionality“communicative and organizational” capable of facing the Trumps of the world. Ferré warns that it is not easy, since they [la extrema derecha] have the media and the platforms – you just have to look at the case of Elon Muskowner of X― and “know how to use echo chambers.” “The left,” he adds, “would do very well to invest in those fields.”
Duval: “The left has to equip itself with international, communicative and organizational institutionality”
Urbán agrees and places what for him is the crux of the issue. If the extreme right has known how to generate security, the left has to rebuild a social fabric and “a common sense antagonist with the system“And there he sees a perfect opportunity in the mobilizations for the right to housing because they build common sense against the reactionary wave and, furthermore, they are “assurances known to the people“. “Given the fears of the advance of neoliberalism and the security provided by the extreme right,” he says, “the housing movement provides a warm and collective security“.
For him, there is a fundamental difference between the security proposed by the extreme right and that offered by the housing protests. While Trump, Abascal, Meloni or Le Pen “offer security only so as not to live worse and that prevents you from looking up”, the fight for decent housing places citizens side by side and not against each other. Furthermore, it has the component of challenging capitalism, something that he considers essential given that, defending , “within capitalism you cannot live better.”
If everything continues as usual, Trump will take office during the second half of January and become president again, something that few believed was possible when he left office. White House in 2021. The academy places precisely in 2017, when Trump first grabbed the baton, the beginning of a period of return of the extreme right. In 2024, Trump returns to the Oval Office.
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