MARIANNE MERTEN: Hard turn to the right, dehumanisation ahead

The world has shifted irrevocably on its axis. Businessperson-turned-politician Donald Trump is back in the White House heading a plutocracy of tech oligarchs and other super wealthy. That and the hard right turn in the US he styles the “golden age for America” will shape geopolitics in the coming years even in “shithole countries”, to quote Trump in 2018. Countries like SA.

Anyone thinking the campaign rhetoric would disappear once Trump was in office was proved wrong when the US president addressed the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos last week. Informal, gossipy even, sprinkled with words like “tremendous” and “very, very bad”, Trump’s comments on coal and oil nevertheless affected markets.

He warned that European countries that did not invest in the US would pay higher tariffs, since Europe treated America “very, very unfairly with the bad taxes”. It’s the new American way.

European politicians, used to fact-based and negotiated politics, are battling to cope with Trump and his transactional style. The EU — SA’s biggest trade partner — flounders amid low economic growth and restiveness over social spending cuts, with an influx of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants feeding support for right-wing parties.

The killing of two people, including a toddler, in Bavaria by a man from Afghanistan, who the authorities should have deported a year ago, has become a turning point in the campaigning for Germany’s February 23 elections. Many believe this will boost the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and conservatives in general.

Trump plays in that field. The AfD was invited to his inauguration — deputy leader Tino Chrupalla attended — as were UK right-wing Reform Party leader Nigel Farage, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang boss Tom Van Grieken, and ultraconservative Polish former prime minister, now EU politician, Mateusz Morawiecki.

France’s right-wing Reconquête leader, Éric Zemmour, was invited rather than fellow right-winger and National Rally leader Marine Le Pen, presumably because she’s not sufficiently complimentary of the US president. While the leaders of France, Germany, the UK and the EU did not crack an inauguration invite, Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who, like Farage, recently visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago, did.

A crucial test for Europe will be whether individual countries strike out of the EU to make individual deals with the US. Or whether Europe, despite all the threats, holds a unified line. SA knows only too well the heavy price of allowing institutions to be subverted.

Another key test arises over immigration. Hard-right and conservative European political parties that already question these regulations have been boosted by Trump’s anti-immigrant stance, applauding his quickly issued executive orders that cancelled the legal official appointments of thousands of people wanting to enter the US at the Mexico border.

In SA, populist anti-immigrant sentiment also finds a receptive audience. The deaths of 87 illegal miners at a disused mine in Stilfontein seems to have left many cold. These miners are officially considered criminals engaged in a war on the economy, while mine bosses who failed to keep disused mineshafts sealed are left unchallenged. The SA Police Service’s Operation Vala Umgodi tactics of blocking egress would not have been out of place in the apartheid policing playbook.

From Stilfontein zama zamas to refugees in Europe’s camps from Calais to Lesbos and the thousands of legal immigrants who are stranded at US borders, right-wing populist politics is driving dehumanisation. It makes for discomfort domestically, but also in international geopolitics.

SA now chairs the Group of 20 (G20), talking inclusiveness amid global and domestic anti-immigration sentiment while juggling a vital renegotiation of the US’s African Growth & Opportunity Act. In SA, diversity and equity are constitutional imperatives, not what Trump calls “absolute nonsense”.

When asked in Davos about relations with the US, President Cyril Ramaphosa told Reuters: “I am not worried.” Perhaps that’s a thing shared by businessperson-turned-presidents with a penchant for golf and deal-making. For the US plutocracy and Trump, it’s self-interest and transactional relationships. From Europe to the Americas, Asia and even SA, the world seems to be shifting hard right.

• Merten is a veteran political journalist specialising in parliament and governance.