In the U.K., today’s post-Brexit Conservatives bear no resemblance to the party that based itself in a patrician conservation of tradition after the war. Yes, during the 1980s, then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher shook that tree vigorously, but even she broadly adhered to the postwar consensus. That has long gone. Tories now see their very existence as under threat and are trying to emulate Reform UK — the party to their right. Likely, they’ll eventually either form a coalition with Nigel Farage’s party or be subsumed by it.
Meanwhile, across European countries with proportional voting systems, it has become commonplace for center-right parties to jump into bed with the far right (other centrist and leftist groupings have sometimes joined them too). Following this pattern, just this month, Belgium joined, inter alia, the Netherlands, Italy, Finland, Hungary, Croatia and Slovakia. Austria is around the corner, and the Czech Republic not far behind.
Of course, administrations have always come and gone, but what’s now indisputable is that the extreme and fringe has gone mainstream. The cordon sanitaire is disintegrating.
Even in places where centrists, or purported centrists, dominate, they’ve adopted much of the language and many of the practices of populists. In France, for example, the remarks by Prime Minister François Bayrou on how people are feeling “submerged” by immigration were hailed by the far-right National Rally, taken as evidence it had “won the ideological battle.”
This is about far more than just coalitions and deals. It is the death of one political tradition and replacement by another. Some might argue this is inevitable — after all, eight decades might be considered a respectably long innings. Some might even see it as desirable that the social mores that defined a previous era are being discarded.
The irony with Merz is that he hails from the Sauerland, a region of central Germany that epitomizes the bürgerlich stolidity of old — the three Ks of Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church). He also regularly attends mass, so the churches’ criticism will have stung.
