Tessa Szyszkowitz - UK correspondent for Austrian news magazine profil
Probably not, but Europe now seems to face an additional threat.
Boris Johnson, the Conservative mayor of London, is campaigning for the UK to leave the EU but to stay in the single market—as if Britain could have its cake and eat it. Even if his motivation for voting for Brexit in the June 23 EU referendum is simply to succeed David Cameron as prime minister, he is endangering his country’s future in the EU, a trading zone of over 500 million people.
BoJo evolving into BoGo is not the only case of populist transformation. The rising star of Austrian conservative politics, twenty-nine-year-old Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz, is leading the right-wing populist call to close Austria’s borders. He too might be driven by personal ambition. But in doing so, he is pulling his party with him toward the xenophobic right.
Some have speculated that these conservative maneuvers are attempts to stop the real populists on the extreme right. But no one has ever succeeded in being more populist than the populists. Austria learned this the hard way: Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party of Austria was included in a right-wing government from 2000 to 2005. Today, the party leads in the opinion polls.
Traditional conservative parties should focus like Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel on their values—Christian compassion, for example. Otherwise observers might not even care if populist parties run Europe, because the conservatives will have become the new populists.