What Tim Bale thinks ‘we have to’ do
Sometimes it’s the passing comment, the detail that could be overlooked, that stops you in your tracks.
In all the discussion of the European Parliament election results, one exchange jumped out for me.
To be fair, Tim Bale, Professor of Politics at Queen Mary’s (University of London) began his 10 June exchange with Evan Davis on BBC Radio Four by recognising the risk of overstating the gains of the far-right across the full range of countries which went to the polls.
But then, reflecting on the undeniable gains of Rassemblement National in France, Davis mused about how Le Pen’s party had long been categorised as ‘far-right’, together with other similar political formations. ‘One feels’, he felt, that ‘when you’re getting up to thirty or more per cent of voters voting for these parties, there’s something becoming much more normal about these parties, and just becoming another very big party in politics in a nation’.
Bale then treated ‘PM’ listeners to this snippet of ‘political science’: ‘I think that is a really, really important point actually. I think we have to normalise these parties now. A couple of decades ago, we could have talked about them as new kids on the block or new entrants … they’ve been around for a long time now and they’ve lost what was for many people their toxic reputation and that is particularly the case in France – in other countries, they still have this toxicity there, which imposes something of a ceiling on their support … but, as you say, once they get to nearly thirty per cent (and that’s the same in Austria as it is in France), then they are really part of the system and we have to regard them as such, and not produce these frightening headlines about “earthquakes”, because they’re there and they’re part of the landscape’.
In a poem written two years after he fled into exile from his homeland, following Hitler’s accession to power, the German writer Bertolt Brecht observed how, when people are out walking on a fine day, and then they feel an unexpected drop of rain, they notice it, comment on it and do something about it – hurry for shelter, cover their head with a hood or umbrella … but if the rain then sets in and becomes familiar and people are regularly dressing for the wet days, and always wearing their raincoat and carrying their umbrella, they might accept the weather as normal, and hardly comment on the drizzle at all …
‘Evil-doing comes like falling rain’.
Mike Makin-Waite
‘Wenn die Untat kommt, wie der Regen fällt’ by BB, 1935.