The new Giorgian era

Meloni points to a "third way" for Europe's far right

Picking through the wreckage of their 49-state shellacking at the hands of US president Ronald Reagan in 1984, a small band of centrist Democrats decided losing had stopped being fun.

They founded the Democratic Leadership Council, spent the next seven years repositioning their party to appeal to voters outside the tribe, and won Bill Clinton two terms in the White House. Eighteen months into Clinton’s first term, Tony Blair took over the British Labour Party, adopted the Arkansas magician’s “third way”, and delivered three successive election victories after 18 wilderness years. At its slickest, the third way was an unbeatable combination of social liberalism and “left-wing” economics (Clinton’s earned income tax credit and Blair’s colossal increase in healthcare spending, for instance) and “right-wing” budgetary management, policing, and patriotism.

As you’d expect when you mix neoliberalism and flag-waving with statist and internationalist activist bases, the results aren’t always consistent. And, as the Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders near-death experiences showed, they’re hard to sustain. Yet, as an election-winning machine, the third way was something to behold – as Clinton and Blair repeatedly took and held conservative heartlands.

“Geert Milders”

I remind you of these Centrist Dad glory days to put last week’s extraordinary developments in the Netherlands into their proper context – a context that should terrify political professionals but be oddly comforting to liberal civilians. And the extraordinary development to which I refer is not the “victory” (he was 39 seats short of a majority) of Geert Wilders and his far-right PVV. It was his reaction to the news that Dilan Yeşilgöz, the leader of the centre-right VVD, that her party would sit out a PVV-led cabinet.

“It's her choice,” said Wilders. “But I don't think it's what the Dutch want. Of course, the Netherlands is waiting for a centre-right cabinet”. Wilders’ showy moderation during the election campaign got enough attention to win him the nickname “Geert Milders” and he even promised to drop the (many) unconstitutional measures from his programme. But, casually classing himself as the leader of a “centre-right” coalition was something new. For 20 years, Wilders has been a committed oppositionist and troll. He’s paid a price for his relentlessly anti-Islam (often straying into anti-Muslim) positions – going nowhere without a six-member security team, receiving no uncleared visitors, and living in a safe house. Turning 60, he wants executive office. If he’s going to live like a protected head of government, he may as well be one.

In a country with proportional representation, rule of law, membership of the EU, and a shared currency, he lacks the authoritarian elbow room of a Donald Trump or even a Viktor Orbán. In his hands is something precious and fragile – a quarter of the national vote. He’s thrown away surges before, like his 16% tally in 2010. Ipsos analysis found that, of the 1,317,836 extra voters to switch to the PVV between 2021 and now, 15% came from alternative far-right parties, but 25% came from the centre-right and 12% were previous non-voters. The protest votes he failed to win went to Pieter Omtzigt’s new NSC Christian Democratic alternative and to the BBB – Caroline van der Plas’ farmers’ lobby dressed up as a political party. With the VVD outside the negotiations but ready to “tolerate” a minority PVV-NSC-BBB “coalition of winners”, Wilders has emerged as the unexpected leader of a new centre-right majority. This new situation requires a makeover.

Bring ‘em in

As much as he loves Trump, Orbán, and Vladimir Putin, these models are a dead end for Wilders in a multi-party system inside a legal federation with a joint currency. With his meteoric rise and fall in 2018-19, Matteo Salvini - Italy’s Lega leader and former deputy premier - was a reminder of the dangers of an ill-disciplined mixture of social conservatism, personal permissiveness, and threats to middle-class wealth.

Instead, Wilders has diverted his lonely and envious eyes to Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, and her far-right “third way”. In 2022, after eight years as the junior partner on the right and abstainer from Italy’s pandemic-era national government, Meloni also won a quarter of the national vote. Despite leading Fratelli d’Italia, the inheritor of the MSI neofascist flame, and competing for Salvini’s 2018-19 vote, Meloni changed overnight. The anti-NATO, pro-Putin and pro-Orbán, anti-euro, and national-socialist fiscal-policy positions were dropped. Meloni saw her job as winning international goodwill over Ukraine and credibility with markets and EU institutions, thereby minimising the costs of funding the government and maximising fiscal transfers from Brussels. An added bonus is that Salvini’s political implosion and the death of Silvio Berlusconi provide a generational opportunity to unite the right around a fiscally and socially conservative (her real priority) agenda. Meloni has hardly been tested yet but, so far, it is going according to plan.

With the NSC and the BBB, Wilders can build a right-wing government programme that strips out the impossible and the unconstitutional. Leaving aside the culture-war issues that would plague it until 2027-28 (if it’s lucky), a PVV-NSC-BBB cabinet faces a challenging economic and budgetary outlook. Yeşilgöz is banking on it. Wilders could do worse than hand the finance ministry to Omtzigt – an economist and expert on pension systems – and see how long the flaky eternal outsider keeps his halo.

Much of the rest of Wilders’ trollish agenda – abolishing the asylum system, ending EU free movement, automatic withdrawal of citizenship from foreign-born Dutch convicted criminals, a police war on "street scum”, preventive detention for people suspected of supporting terrorism, treating 14-year-olds as adults in criminal courts, cutting foreign student numbers, raising motorway speed limits to 140 kilometres per hour, and a return to fossil-fuel extraction – can be turned into workable policy. Some already have been. If a new Dutch government took “eurosceptical” positions over increases to the EU budget, loosening fiscal rules, or overreach by the institutions, no one would be able to tell the difference. As for Wilders’ opposition to providing more military aid to Ukraine, he would probably be taking a seat in his Torentje office just in time to see aid and the war winding down anyway.

I’d prefer people like this didn’t assume the highest political office. Even constrained by their electoral ceilings, the rule of law, and institutional handcuffs, they can pursue social policies I dislike. They have a tendency to suck up to authoritarians and they have a ready pulpit to shape public opinion. But, unfortunately for everyone, I’m not the entire electorate. Like the Walloons, we could apply a watertight cordon sanitaire to keep them out of public life but that’s never worked outside Wallonia. Besides, who gets to decide what is and isn’t a political programme fit for media or parliament? Majoritarian systems like the US and UK are more vulnerable to unconstrained authoritarianism but, in pure or partial proportional systems, cursing extremists with governing beats turning them into martyrs.

So, here’s two cheers for the new Giorgian era.