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Hyper-liberals like Angela Merkel, not the populist right, are the real extremists of our age. That’s not me saying it. It’s The Times columnist Matthew Syed, who in an important article this weekend revealed just how quickly the debate is moving towards the arguments many of us have been making for years, and our readers.
Syed, who explicitly describes himself as a liberal, makes an argument that would have been considered unthinkable in polite society only a few years ago.
Perhaps, he ponders, we have been looking for “extremists” in the wrong place. Because the real extremists, he argues, are not the ordinary men and women who want secure borders, controlled immigration, sensible energy policy, and governments that prioritise their own citizens.
No. The real extremists are ‘hyper-liberals’, who over the last twenty-five years or so not only dismantled these things but radicalised to such an extent they are now completely and utterly adrift from the vast majority of their fellow citizens.
Syed points the finger directly at Angela Merkel, who ruled Germany between 2005 and 2021. Her disastrous decision to allow more than one million asylum-seekers and illegal migrants into the country, in 2015, imposed enormous demographic and cultural pressures, while destabilising politics across much of Europe.
Here’s what he writes:
“The extremists are not the “populist” right … It is the likes of Merkel and that broader generation of western leaders who presided over the two great sins of hyperliberalism: open borders and the betrayal of Nato.
Liberalism as an ideology is muscular and realistic. It recognises that defending freedom requires powerful militaries, solid alliances and strong borders, otherwise fifth columnists will enter our nations and wreck that which we value.
As Karl Popper, the great theorist of open societies, put it: ‘If we extend unlimited tolerance to those who are intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.’ In this sense, hyperliberals have been the enemies of freedom by allowing militaries to atrophy and borders to dissolve.”
He is, of course, absolutely correct.
You can draw a straight line from Angela Merkel’s decision — like similar decisions made by Tony Blair, Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron in France, Stefan Löfven in Sweden, and now Pedro Sánchez in Spain — to a surge of public support for populism.
The only reason parties like the Alternative for Germany, Reform UK, National Rally in France, and others like them are reshaping their respective political systems is precisely because hyper-liberals massively over-reached.
They imposed a series of extreme policies that reflected the values of an increasingly radical elite class but deeply alienated and angered millions of people who were left to live with the dire consequences of policies they often never voted for.
But it’s not just about immigration.