Trump Teaches Europe a Lesson in the Possible - WSJ

Trump Teaches Europe a Lesson in the Possible - WSJ

By JOSEPH C. STERNBERG
Nov. 24, 2016 3:40 p.m. ET
8 COMMENTS
Think of Donald Trump not as an answer but as a question: What weapon works best to kill the stale political arrangements that have delivered years of slow growth in one Western country after another? Americans are asking whether a mace will do the trick, while Britons have opted for an ax with their antiestablishment vote to leave the European Union. Then there are conservative French voters, who believe a stiletto might be equally effective come their own Presidential election this spring.

Sunday’s first round of the center-right Republican primary produced a surprise lead for François Fillon, possibly the closest thing to a Thatcherite France has produced. He advocates supply-side reforms, such as trimming the government budget by €100 billion ($106 billion) over five years and the payroll by 500,000, and cutting taxes on businesses and households. He deploys considerable eloquence in explaining this program to voters, and hints strongly at the conviction to back it up. “I want to give the country its liberty back,” he said before the primary. He castigates previous leaders for being too shy about staring down antireform unions.

Equally significant, the second-place finisher who will face Mr. Fillon in Sunday’s runoff is another supply-side reformer who, in the French context, appears moderate only compared to Mr. Fillon. Alain Juppé promises to cut 300,000 government jobs and to cut taxes on high earners. They both pledge to end the 35-hour work week and raise the retirement age. Who are these people, and what have they done with the real France?

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Joking aside, this primary has shown that despite their many and well-documented economic and social frustrations, French voters are not yet convinced they need a sledgehammer. A blunt instrument has always been available in the form of the National Front, whose leader, Marine Le Pen, is widely expected to be one of the two finalists in the spring’s general election. But she hasn’t won a presidential vote, and polls suggest 2017 also won’t be her year.

Ms. Le Pen is treated in the media as the Donald Trump or Brexit of the French election—the looming popular-protest surprise, the figurehead of a peasant revolt against a disconnected elite. That’s a misreading of Mr. Trump’s victory in America, however, and could also prove a misreading of French politics.

Mr. Trump’s win was ambiguous and ambivalent, a choice American voters narrowly made absent any viable anti-status-quo alternative. French Republicans are trying harder than their American right-wing peers did to offer voters a plausible change candidate from within their ranks. The bet is that Ms. Le Pen’s appeal derives more from the promise of a shake-up than from her specific nationalist program.

Which is why French Republicans rejected Nicolas Sarkozy, who donned Le Pen-style nationalism as a political burkini to conceal his own lack of economic credibility. Both Mr. Fillon and Mr. Juppé offer a conservative social platform—the former more so, especially on matters such as gay marriage and Islam—but the selling point is jobs and growth. Center-right voters concluded that their greatest danger when facing a nationalist such as Ms. Le Pen lies not in being insufficiently nationalist but in failing to concoct a convincing economic revival plan.

Notice the word “convincing.” That’s where Brexit and Mr. Trump come in—not by inspiring a particular sort of nationalist candidate, but rather by suggesting to voters that mature democracies are capable of surprising themselves by doing previously unthinkable things.

We now live in a world where voters can upend 40 years of settled British foreign policy on Europe, and where an American candidate can float to victory atop the soup of media political correctness instead of drowning in it like most politicians have. Why, then, should French voters assume Mr. Fillon or Mr. Juppé wouldn’t be able at long last to overcome the entrenched opposition of France’s myriad special interests to implement their own reforms?


Whether either candidate would succeed with even a part of the radical overhauls they propose remains an open question, as does whether the Trump mace will prove to be the right tool to fix what ails the U.S. While we wait, though, be open to the possibility that Mr. Trump and Brexit can teach Europe something about itself.

For many years, politicians and pundits assumed Europe would be unreformable without some crisis busting open its sclerotic politics. Greece—among others—broke that theory by proving a European economy can resist reform no matter how deep its crisis.

The bigger ingredient Europe has been missing is a sense of the possible. The thing to watch over Europe’s coming turbulent electoral year is not whether Mr. Trump and Brexit stimulate the Continent’s unsavory nationalists. It’s whether the fact of these electoral upsets lends greater credibility to reformers when they tell voters that change really can happen.