KARACHI: “We have a global shift to the right. It is not just a European or a German thing but a global trend happening in Trump’s USA, in Brazil, in Turkey, the Philippines and a lot of other countries. For the first time in Europe, too, after World War II we have far right governments backed by the majority of people with fascist tendencies. We have that in Hungary, and Poland and this really is new if we look at history,” said Dr Thomas Seibert, German philosopher and human rights activist during his lecture on the ‘Rise of populism, spectre of far right politics in Europe and the role model of left politics’ at Szabist on Friday.

“In the formerly socialist Hungary and Poland we have politics that are systemically against the democratic tradition, actual democratic rights and the democratic constitution. We have a systematic mass mobilisation under the banner of anti-democracy, which is the same for anti-feminist tendency, massive anti-ecology with Trump stepping back out of the climate change negotiations, but we have that in Europe too. And we have anti-migration. But it is racism which comes through to become the main problem here,” he said.

“We have the Brexit problem in the UK. That problem is also initiated due to migration. It is not clear there as well if there will be a left wing or a right wing government. So there will be a strange political and economical problem,” he said.

Coming to his native Germany, he said that research there was showing that like the European population the people there too were shifting towards racism, anti-migration, anti-Islam. “They see Europe decaying as more and more Muslims come and take over their culture and there is more of that kind of thinking following the crisis in Syria,” he said.

“We had an old neo-liberalism which ruled all over Europe for the last 40 years. It had its promise that everyone will have a good deal in privatisation and globalism. But now we have a strictly authoritarian neo-liberalism and a progressive neo-liberalism.

“And we do not have a right-wing victory or a left-wing victory so there is a split of populations. What is right-wing politics?” he asked. “In its core is the politics of fear which works on people who are fearful of change in the norm and seeing their old identity in a state of decline,” he explained. “The politics of fear is also there in the Modi government in India,” he pointed out.

“This fear of decline in the old identity is also a split of the world coming out of colonisation. As migrants come to Europe it is sinking in that the old way of life there cannot be sustained. And this is why migration is at the core of right-wing politics, and that it why it comes down to one point: ‘stop migration’,” he concluded.

Published in Dawn, October 14th, 2018