00:00Now speak to Georgia Samaras, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at King's College, London.
00:05Thank you so much for joining us. As we've just heard from Peter, the AFD is not over the line
00:10yet to take control of Saxony-Anhalt. So why is the rest of Europe so rattled?
00:18I think that Europe has seen the effects of normalizing the far right over the years.
00:25It's not just Germany, it's France, it's Italy, it's Spain. The difference here is that we have an extremely strong
00:33entity
00:33that is inherently linked to neo-Nazism in Germany. It's very organized. It has created a narrative around migration,
00:42nationalism and racialized ideas of belonging. It is in Germany. And the question is what is going to happen to
00:50Germany
00:51if a neo-Nazi party reaches the top spot in a national election? How is the European Union going to
01:00survive
01:00under those circumstances?
01:02Absolutely. And next year, if we look to next year, there are elections due in France, Italy and Spain.
01:08In all those three countries, there are far right parties gaining ground. Do you expect to see a big political
01:14jump
01:14to the right in the next year?
01:18It is a shift. We expect to see more far right parties rising. There is a material crisis at the
01:27moment,
01:28which is fundamental. People are struggling with housing, with wages, insecure employment,
01:34declining public services all over the continent. And what these parties can actually achieve
01:40is remarkably, I would describe it as monothematic, a single thing. They take all of those issues
01:48and they portray a country under decline, under a decline that has to somehow be tackled by curbing
01:59migration and emphasizing national identity. The problem is that the center and mostly conservatives
02:07and liberal forces have tried to normalize that. They've tried to sound tough on migration.
02:13They've tried to adopt a nationalist identity. And this is not how it works, because they normalize
02:18the far right and they make it appear mainstream.
02:22Are there lessons to be drawn from what's been happening in Hungary? After 16 years,
02:28the country's voters booted out the far right leader and Viktor Orbán is gone. What does that tell us?
02:38I wouldn't necessarily compare Hungary to Germany or other Central European countries. Hungary has
02:45a very different history and also the nature of Fidesz is quite different compared to IFD,
02:53compared to the national rally. One could argue that to some extent, Hungarians rejected authoritarianism,
03:01but it doesn't change the fact that Fidesz was in power for 16 years and the importance of its,
03:12I would argue, future will probably be seen in the years to come, whether it could survive,
03:21whether its legacy could survive in Hungarian politics, because the current government could somehow retain
03:27some of the political tools that it's leaving behind. So it's an experiment. We don't know yet
03:32how things are going to play out, but there are lessons to be learned when authoritarianism
03:37collapses because people reject it. Germany, France and Italy, most Central European countries
03:43are very different compared to Hungary. I repeat that.
03:46All right. Thank you so much for speaking to us, Georgia Samaras,
03:48Assistant Professor of Public Policy at King's College, London.
