by Lorenzo Vita

The sovereignists do not necessarily represent a gut or protest vote. And even if the "populist" wind has started to blow in the 2009, with the advent of the economic crisis, it is impossible today to reiterate that that vote was the result of the crisis. Foreign Policy explained it well, in an editorial that retraces the last stages of the end of the leaders of social democracy and the advent of the new men who have taken power or are undermining the old guard.
For a long time, we were told that the sovereignist movements were the result of a protest. The mainstream intelligentsia has labeled the phenomenon as a sort of demagogic exaltation of the popular class, in search of certainties after the impoverishment caused by the great crisis that shocked the West. But relegating it to the danger of losing purchasing power or jobs risks being superficial, or at least misleading.

It is not only the economic crisis that fuels the new large political parties. Because the economic crisis, which still exists, evidently, in many countries, it is no longer the one that shocked European states and America in 2008. And many states where "protest" movements are growing are actually unrelated to the crisis. Unemployment does not indicate widespread discontent, the people are not hungry. And in some cases, the countries where sovereignty is growing, which is labeled as a sort of “right-wing populism”, they are actually among the most advanced and richest in Europe.
In this sense, the cases of three countries are sobering: Germany, Holland and Poland. In Warsaw, the sovereignists exploded when the country was considered the true locomotive of Eastern Europe. It was the 2015 when Beata Szydło of Law and Justice became prime minister. Then it was Mateusz Morawiecki's turn, always from the Polish right. Jarosław Kaczyński's party has always pursued a nationalist rhetoric, strongly linked to the Catholic values ​​of Poland and anchored to a conservative vision of civil society. He took the reins of the country away from Donald Tusk's party, which promoted Europeanism from its Civic Platform to ferry Warsaw to Western Europe. And instead Poland, despite economic growth and despite interest in joining the European Union, it turned out to be sovereignist and anti-EU.
The same can be said of Holland. A rich country that has not suffered from the economic crisis like other countries in the European Union. The Netherlands has not had the emigration of young people, wages have not collapsed, unemployment, in August 2018, was from 3,9%, with a maximum peak of 6 percent in 2016. The economy is growing here too, yet Geert Wilders' far-right does not dominate but is a constant. Ditto for Sweden, where Jimmie Akesson's Sweden Democrats invaded the parliament in Stockholm.
The case of Germany, Instead, it is even more striking. Angela Merkel is slowly collapsing. And if the CDU wants to move to the right, the wind of sovereignism is taking hold throughout the country. There is no local parliament in which the Alternative fur Deutschland has not taken seats. The far-right party has gained consensus and continues to increase its weight throughout Germany. And this despite the fact that Germany remains the locomotive of Europe and the country that in fact represents the economic and industrial heart of the European Union. Bavaria, in this sense, it was a perfect example: a rich Land, productive yet with an electorate that has moved to the right.
Because therefore the crisis does not serve to explain sovereignism? Because sovereignists are based on other needs. Which are the same ones that in the United States led to the election of Donald Trump in 2016 or to the confirmation of the Republicans in deep America, rural and industrial. It's not just the economy. There is an identity crisis, a desire to get back a society from which the people of the deepest part of the country feel excluded.
It is not a fight for economic survival, but an almost anthropological struggle, cultural, which shifts attention not to the wallet, but on other values. There is immigration, there is political and economic sovereignty, there is the challenge towards ultra-liberal progressivism. Steve Bannon, talking about voting in the United States, he didn't talk about the economy, but of struggle between "nationalists" and "cosmopolitans". European sovereignists do not gain consensus by talking about work and taxes, but of closing borders and lost identity, of homeland culture and values ​​to be restored.
This is why sovereignism is destined to remain strong throughout the West, while social democracy loses momentum. Because the parties of the liberal world do not respond to the needs of the population who feel increasingly excluded not only on an economic level, but on a cultural level. There is a sense of extraneousness to a world of which we no longer feel part.
And those values ​​that formed the basis of Western societies, they are constantly affected by a progressive world that is putting ever larger parts of the population under siege, causing a feeling of identity that has been dormant in recent decades to resurface. The sovereignists win because it has inflamed people's national identity. But they are doing it above all because the progressive world has questioned diversity. And these, under attack, they resurface. And they will always resurface until progressivism changes its objectives.
SOURCE: http://www.occhidellaguerra.it/sovranisti-occidente/