Letter: EU economic nationalists are neither left nor right

Alan Beattie (“The far-right threat that heightens Europe’s immigrant dilemma”, Trade Secrets, FT.com, June 13) worries that the rise of what he terms the far right and hard right “will worsen the political challenge of labour shortages”. That may be so, but if you do a blind reading of the manifestos of some of these parties, it will show that many of them are economically pro-state intervention. The characterisation as far or hard right is easy, but lazy. Left-right conflates so many different dimensions into one that the use of left-right is at best meaningless, but often misinformative.

These parties might be conservative nationalist, or some variation of this. If Donald Trump had not already done so, the emergence of Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (the Reason and Justice Alliance) in Germany makes explicit that economic nationalism is neither left nor right.

The recent European parliament elections in Ireland show the willingness of anti-elite parties’ voters, normally coded on opposite ends of the political spectrum, to transfer their votes suggests left-right is not how all voters are thinking.

Eoin O’Malley
Associate Professor, School of Law and Government, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland