Rise of the right should alarm poor nations

By , K24 Digital
On Fri, 26 Jul, 2019 00:00 | 3 mins read
Donald Trump signed the order on Wednesday
Former US President Donald Trump. Photo/Courtesy
Levi Obonyo 

It has been the world’s nightmare dealing with just one Donald Trump, the President of the Unit. But now Donald Trumps are increasing in the world. There is Boris Johnson, the newly appointed United Kingdom  prime minister and across Europe the right of the right politicians are on the ascendency.

 Over the last recent elections, the extreme right has been gaining numbers in Berlin and the story is repeated in France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Greece and other parts of Europe. Elsewhere in the world, Brazil and India are not too far behind. 

The rhetoric coming out of the conservative parties that are led by the extreme right is pretty clear. They are anti-immigration; they blame the other for the local problems, they certainly doubt the science behind climate change, they perceive the world from a prism of superiority that privileges their kind. They most certainly look at the black skin colour with disdain.

The comfortable victory by Boris and his ascendency to Premiership was greeted with glee by most of the right wing leaders in the world. Majority of them believe with every election, and as they keep gaining, they are inching closer to clinching power.

The right wing movement tends to blame everybody else for the difficulties that their countries are facing.

People who look different than them are blamed for the difficult economic times, for the rising crime rate, for lack of jobs, and for the falling standards of living among others.

The easy targets that have provided easy explanations for the local difficulties have become a magnet for attracting disillusioned populations in their countries. To their minds, the answers to national challenges are relatively simple – building a wall around themselves.

In Donald Trump’s “make America great again”, the leader of the Democratic Party, Nancy Pelosi, has read the rallying call to mean make America white again.

Donald Trump, as the signature poster picture of the right wing has not been disappointing in his rhetoric on the matter. He has always had negative epithets to characterize those different than his kind. He only saw “drug dealers, criminals, rapists” and one could add thieves among Mexicans. 

Africans, as far as Trump is concerned, may as well be living in shitholes. It came as little surprise when the American president recently told four Congresswomen to go back from where they came. He did not have kind words to describe where they supposedly came from.

Nationalism has a new spring in its step. While there are a few women leaders in its ranks, for example in France, men lead majority of these movements, their members tend to be violent and preach the return to a past of comfortable traditional values with men at the apex of the social structure. 

If this new world is the order of the day, and it is increasingly appearing so to be, then our countries need to prepare how to live in this new reality.

Many economies of the south have counted on financial remittances from the nations of the north, which will increasingly dwindle. 

Liberal regimes tend to champion liberal policies in the areas of aid, trade, and immigration among others designed to uplift the economies of the South, but such will certainly not be the case where the right wing rules the roost.

The south must champion economic policies that improve the living standards of the economies of the south, join hands in common markets, improve intra South trade, and add value to products from the South rather than export raw materials.  — The writer is the Dean, School of Communication, Daystar University.

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