Ed Luce: belief

Transcript context

…Given that the landslides of Macron and Finland, the true Finns are splintering. The Five Star party in Italy had weak local results. No one thinks Germany’s going crazy. Why does this move away from liberalism seem to be so Anglo‑American? What do you attribute that to? I would dispute your premise to some degree. I think the Macron victory is a very positive moment. If you were going to ask me, “Overrated, underrated?” Macron would be in the overrated category right now. The first time the National Front, the Front National candidate, Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean‑Marie Le Pen, got through to the second round within 2002. It was a crisis of France. It was a drama of the republic, “How could a fascist get through to being one of the last two?” Jacques Chirac led what was essentially a funeral march, no campaigning between round one of the election and round two. Everybody put the famous clothes pegs on their nose, Socialists, Communists. They voted for the Gaullist. They voted for Chirac. He got 82 percent of the vote. As I say, it was an existential moment in French democracy. Marine Le Pen gets through to the second round, as expected, wins a third of the vote, 11 million votes, as opposed to 5 million, and it’s a kind of normal event, so I would dispute the fact that nothing’s changed. I think in September, hopefully Merkel or Martin Schulz will be elected in the German elections, but the AFD is going to breach the five percent limit below which you can not achieve representation under the German system. This will be the first time in German history, since its basic law was promulgated in 1949, that the far right has achieved representation. Then, of course, there’s Austria, where a postmodern Neo‑Nazi, Norbert Hofer, lost with 47 percent of the vote. We celebrated that as a breaking of the populist wave. How low should our bar be to celebrate the health of liberal democracy? That, to me, is too low, so I dispute that premise of your question. But there was a second half to your question, which…? Why Anglo‑American?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.