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| Tech billionaire Elon Musk speaks live via video transmission during a speech by Alice Weidel, chancellor candidate of the far-right Alternative for Germany political party on Jan. 25 in Halle, Germany. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images) |
| Olivier De Schutter has a message not many governments want to hear. On Wednesday, the United Nations’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights will deliver a report to the U.N. General Assembly on how cuts and curbs to welfare programs and social spending across the world have stoked popular discontent and, as a result, far-right politics. Across Europe and, indeed, in the United States, overwhelming impatience and despair with the status quo has laid the groundwork for the rise of various antiestablishment and often far-right political movements. Those include President Donald Trump’s own project and a host of ascendant factions globally, including the National Rally in France and the Alternative for Germany party. Welfare programs that once galvanized entire societies have, in some instances, turned into sources of division and stigma. Anti-immigrant parties grumble over foreigners claiming benefits; others capitalize on resentment of minorities receiving state assistance. Campaigners in Britain, for example, have raged against government efforts to temporarily house asylum seekers, while Republicans in the United States claim misleadingly that the political impasse shutting down the federal government has to do with Democrats’ supposed desire to provide free health care to undocumented immigrants. “Far-right populists appeal to a growing share of voters by combining anti-elite sentiment with an ‘us’ against ‘them’ mentality, positioning themselves as defending the in-group against the out-group,” De Schutter, a Belgian legal scholar, noted in the report. “This messaging is particularly attractive to voters who fear losing their status and feel threatened by cultural and economic change.” At a time of widening inequity and increasing economic uncertainty in many countries, De Schutter contends that there’s even more reason to widen and bolster social spending. “One of the most corrosive things we’ve seen in recent years is this idea that social protection was costly to society and therefore could only be narrowly targeted, given to those who ‘deserve’ it,” he told me. But even Europe’s much-vaunted welfare states are in trouble. Last November, Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank, warned that the robust social spending programs and entitlement packages on the continent were at risk if its major countries couldn’t turn around their sluggish economies. Then the return of President Donald Trump to the White House jolted Europe’s leaders all the more, compelling many of the need to invest in their nations’ hard power — perhaps at the expense of the welfare-state models that anchored European stability and prosperity for many decades after World War II. The sense of structural crisis that once stalked countries on Europe’s periphery is now well within the continent’s engine room. Germany’s center-right Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared in August that his country’s social welfare programs were unsustainable and needed overhaul. “We simply can no longer afford the system we have today,” Merz said in a speech, adding: “This will mean painful decisions. This will mean cuts.”
In France, opposition to the centrist government’s desire to enact pension reforms led to the ousting of successive prime ministers and underlie a rolling political drama that could tank President Emmanuel Macron’s legacy. The country’s public debt is growing, incomes are stagnating, its credit rating is slipping and, as my colleagues reported, younger generations are reckoning with the prospect of worse-off lives than those of their parents. “Like other countries in the West, France suffered blows to domestic manufacturing from globalization, turning parts of the country into disenfranchised rust belts,” my colleagues wrote this month. “Unable to replace those jobs to the same extent that the United States did with new engines of growth in services and tech, and facing a rapidly aging population with huge pension demands, France spent 31.5 percent of its GDP on social protection in 2023, the highest in Europe.” Something may have to give. “There is a growing realization that the system has to become less generous, and a lot of people are not very happy about that,” Willem Adema, a senior economist in the social policy division at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, told The Washington Post. | ||||||||||||
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| French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu delivers his first general policy speech in front of the parliament and the new government on Oct. 14. (Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters) |
| De Schutter, who is an independent expert appointed by the United Nations to advise on a specific issue, argues the opposite. “Welfare is not a luxury for a society, not something we can dispense with in times of crisis,” he told me.
The universality of welfare programs was a key to their success, De Schutter said. Not only did welfare programs in the 20th century reduce inequalities, they helped build “social capital” in communities, uniting people with a sense of common purpose and shared future. It’s the “ethos on which the welfare state was based,” said De Schutter, but now “is really missing” and needs to be revived. “The cultural reasons for why the far right is rising, the distaste for others and overt xenophobia, is because people don’t feel protected from falling behind,” he said. “People trust less, invest less in civic life, and see others as competitors, including for access to benefits.” There’s a robust debate over whether there are purely economic answers — as many on the left would contend — to the driving animus of far-right politics. Beyond the fiscal challenges of expanding public spending, 21st century dilemmas such as climate challenge and the advance of new technologies, especially AI, might soon reshape the political landscape and the demands of increasingly precarious communities around the world. All the more reason De Schutter thinks “we should change the way we speak about poverty and welfare support,” and “stop blaming people in poverty for their conditions.” He points to studies about the long-term benefits of a robust welfare state, where investment in poor families pays dividends in prosperity down the road. “Social protection is not just a cost, it’s an investment,” he said. | ||||||