Across Europe and the UK, women and minorities are increasingly populating the top ranks of hard- and far-right parties. Italy’s next prime minister will be Giorgia Meloni, leader of the populist Brotherhood of Italy, a party with fascist roots. British Prime Minister Liz Truss fancies herself an even tougher version of Margaret Thatcher, though so far with limited success. Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National is now the largest opposition group in France’s National Assembly.
Truss’s cabinet also contains a remarkable number of people with South Asian or African backgrounds, including Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng, whose parents came to Britain from Ghana. The Labour Party shadow cabinet, by contrast, includes only one person of color — David Lammy, who oversees Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs.
As in the US, left-wing parties in Europe and the UK pride themselves on championing underrepresented groups. So why are so many notable politicians from those groups gravitating rightward?
In part, they appear to have been drawn by the right’s populist messaging. They believe that they stand for the common people and are hostile, in rhetoric at least, to urban, educated elites. Meloni grew up in a working-class area in Rome. Her father abandoned their family and was later sentenced to prison. Truss prides herself on her state school education, unlike many British Conservative politicians (but not Thatcher) who attended expensive private schools. While Le Pen comes from a well-off political family, she has spent much time in the bleak industrial north of France, where she claims to feel most at home.
Women and minorities who enter right-wing politics also tend to harp on the idea that they worked hard to overcome social hurdles and expect others to do the same. Such claims are sometimes a little less than honest. Truss is the daughter of a professor of mathematics. The only social hurdle Le Pen had to overcome was the stain of her father’s fascist tendencies. And Kwarteng was educated at Eton, Cambridge and Harvard. Still, this is not an unfamiliar standpoint. Often, immigrants and other minorities who are successful like to ascribe their rise to personal merit and hard work. They can have limited tolerance for people who have not done as well.
Older immigrants are not always kind to newcomers either. Once people move out of relative poverty in heavily immigrant areas to richer suburbs and their children join the upper-middle classes, their politics often shift rightward. It was not for nothing that many South Asians voted for Brexit, attracted by the Tories’ opposition to a more generous immigration policy.
The exceptions to this rule, in the US at least, have been Jewish Americans, who have mostly remained staunch Democrats. This is probably due to an instinctive distrust of any hint of nativism, a creed that, to put it mildly, has never been kind to Jews. But even Jews have been unsympathetic to newcomers in the past, notably to poorer, less well-educated Jews from eastern Europe, who they feared would make trouble for more established citizens.
All this poses a challenge for left-wing parties counting on the support of women and people of color. An important part of the problem is ideological. Progressives tend to treat minorities as social and economic victims who need to be helped by the state. The thought is that less privileged people need preferential treatment to succeed.
As progressive parties rely more and more on highly educated urban elites, and less on labor unions and industrial workers, this kind of thinking has become more prevalent. Union leaders fought for workers’ rights and better conditions. Left-wing ideology today is more concerned with combating prejudice against racial and sexual minorities.
Fighting prejudice is a good thing. And giving people who have been the victims of racism better opportunities in education and other areas of life is commendable. But there is a political risk that minorities will react badly to what is seen as condescension. People don’t necessarily like being treated as victims. Preferential treatment can be resented when it results from feelings of guilt among the most privileged.
This, as well as social conservatism about sexual and religious matters, is one reason why more and more Latinos and even Blacks in the US voted for Donald Trump, why the Tory cabinet is filled with women and people of color, and why women lead the far right in Italy and France. The left can no longer take the “rainbow coalition” of race and gender for granted. If they fail to learn this lesson, the far right is bound to get stronger, and then we will all be worse off.
More From Bloomberg Opinion:
• Behold the Hollowing Out of the Tory Party: Adrian Wooldridge
• Meloni’s Ship of State Heads for Choppy Waters: Rachel Sanderson
• Republicans Have a Lot to Fear in November: Ramesh Ponnuru
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Ian Buruma is professor of human rights at Bard College. His latest book is “The Churchill Complex.”
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion
