Trump’s rout could be part of a democratic spring that began in Hungary. But will it extend to the French elections next May?
Hungary, Brazil, Serbia, and now the US. So far this year, when their hand has been held to the stove, voters have chosen what the Texas senator-elect James Talarico, the new face of the US’s Christian left, campaigned on as a “politics of love”: a society where we aren’t at each other’s throats, or a police state at ours.
Is it any surprise that when there is clarity about the choice on offer, voters have started to shrink away from a vision fuelled by billionaire wealth and runaway inequality? Away from oligarchic rule and unapologetic corruption, connivance with aggression, expansion, colonialism and war; environmental degradation and the surrender of the human spirit to a reality mediated by the algorithm.
Are we living, perhaps, through an extended “democratic spring” that began in Budapest in April with the overthrow of Viktor Orbán, and will continue all the way through to the arrival of the Élysée Palace’s next occupant in May?
That’s what it felt like to wake up on Wednesday morning, blanketed in an unexpected optimism sparked by a country that has fed my inner cynic for too long. In Michigan, voters chose a man who responded to a hate-filled question about sharia law with disarming, acerbic humour about shawarma law instead.
In neighbouring Ohio, where I grew up, voters refused to suffer the fundamental indecency of one candidate (the billionaire entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy) trying to weaponise the childhood abuse suffered by his opponent Amy Acton via Acton’s estranged mother. Acton defeated Ramaswamy to become Ohio’s first female governor and its first Democrat in two decades.
Farther south, New Mexico has the first ever female Native American governor; in Georgia, a Black woman will hold that office for the first time; in Texas, the first Latina.
There are dozens of stories like these that have temporarily transformed scrolling from an experience of doom to one of hope. Beneath them is something more structural; there is, as a French historian messaged me early Wednesday morning, a “Rooseveltian” quality to what has happened in the US.
For a decade, we have been dealing, across international borders, with the feeling that governments are no longer “in control” – not of starkly advancing inequality and growing corporate power, or the pace and direction of technological change and climate breakdown. The far-right response has been to try to assert control over the things within immediate grasp: immigration and identity.
Those of us who believe in democracy, environmental and social justice have a far more difficult task, both to sell to voters and to accomplish. That is to actually take back control (not superficially, as Brexit once proposed) of the forces that pose an existential threat to the type of society we want to inhabit. In Europe, this is all the more difficult because of an internal split – between those who think this is possible on a national scale, and those who, like me, think it obliges us to pool sovereignty.
In the 1930s, Franklin D Roosevelt recognised that liberal democracy, faced with an existential threat, had to evolve to survive. He knew that it would be impossible to defend an open society or the rule of law unless the state could guarantee economic progress in people’s lives, so he responded with the flurry of government actions that together comprised the New Deal.
In the US, the Democrats, who now control Congress, have a chance to rebuild democratic foundations after decades of self-inflicted destruction. In part because the youngest generation of voters, who have only ever known Trumpism, massively rejected everything Trump has birthed, and that rejection echoed down the ballot – all the way to state legislatures and school boards. That didn’t only happen because they were angry and the Democrats offered anger in return; it happened because they were angry and a slate of exceptional candidates said: “So are we, and it doesn’t have to be this way.”
In Europe, the rule of law and the institutions that maintain it have not bent as much in the US, but an equivalently forceful snapback of hope and relief is still incomplete.
For the past month, France’s high schoolers have crystallised the social and economic dilemma Roosevelt encountered, and there are candidates out there mirroring their justified anger. I worry, though, that this offer remains a politics of anger tinged with nationalism, and uninterested in defending European democracy; that it risks throwing away what Europe painstakingly constructed in response to its institutional shortcomings, rather than proposing a resolutely European type of renewal.
Or that France – where an overwhelming majority abhors Trump, but where huge numbers seem to want their own version of him – will stubbornly stumble into just what the US has been through, before coming out on the other side, in full rejection of the far-right National Rally.
Both sides of the Atlantic woke up with more hope on Wednesday, even if neither side has a clearcut and easy path forward. Europe’s path, though, now seems the more difficult one to navigate.
Alexander Hurst writes for Guardian Europe from Paris. His memoir Generation Desperation is out now
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