Algemeen·NRC·25 sep

Red alert! Europe’s populist left is on the march, slowly

For a movement predicated on historical inevitability, communism is taking an awfully long time to triumph in Europe. It has been nearly two centuries since Marx and Engels proclaimed the bourgeois goose cooked. Somehow the capitalists have contrived to retain control over the commanding heights of the economy, and even reclaim them in bits of central Europe that had fallen under the Soviet yoke. This dearth of revolutionary momentum is not for lack of zeal among the true believers on the populist left. Two dozen parties wed to class-struggle ideology across Europe have kept themselves busy mounting barricades, calling for strikes and organising seminars on the true nature of colonialist patriarchy. Despite their efforts the dictatorship of the proletariat remains as distant as ever. If a spectre haunts Europe these days, it is of the populists at the other end of the spectrum, those on the illiberal right, who seem to be making more tangible progress towards overturning the established order.