Going bump in the right: Europe’s worrisome politics

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Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Ore Ogunbiyi. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Rupert Murdoch has announced his retirement and is stepping down as the chairman of Fox and News Corp after over 70 years in the media industry. But what will this actually mean in practice? And who is his successor? And why do some American schools start so early? Although kids have lots to pack into their day, new research suggests that this is especially unhealthy for sleep-deprived teenagers. I mean, fair enough, I could do with a lie-in too. Festabend.

I'm walking down the Marienstraße in downtown Dresden, and up ahead I can see a line of police cars with their lights flashing. I think that is where the Freie Sachsen are demonstrating, a radical right group here in Saxony.

Matt Steinglass is our deputy Europe editor.

Earlier this month, I visited a march by a group called Freie Sachsen, or Free Saxony. It's a relatively new far-right group that doesn't just oppose Islam and immigration. It thinks that in order to get control of its borders, Saxony should secede from the rest of Germany. Freie Sachsen got a big boost during the COVID pandemic, which lots of people on the political fringes decided was a giant global conspiracy. At the march, Martin Kohlan, the group's leader, insisted that since pandemic restrictions ended, things had only got worse. He calls Germany's democratically elected government a dictatorship. The march drew about 500 people, maybe more. One guy was carrying a Soviet flag. He said he was a communist. Others carried Russian flags and said Germany needs to stop sending weapons to Ukraine. The marchers were shadowed by counterdemonstrators. Some of them were black-clad activists from Antifa or other groups, but most just left-leaning Dresdners and students. They said Freie Sachsen has been out here marching like this every week.

It really shifted from anti-corona things to anti-refugee. Yeah, they're always having like something, something different that they're demonstrating against.

Okay.

On Friday they demonstrated against like, uh, against the new mosque, and today like was the main topic was the Sexit. Like those party, they demand that Saxony leaves Germany, and they want that of course Saxony leaves like the EU, the NATO, the European Union, and that it makes peace Russia.

Freie Sachsen are a small fringe party. Germany's security services are keeping an eye on them. They consider them an anti-democratic group with ties to neo-Nazis. Mr. Kohlmann is a city council member in Chemnitz, but the group is nowhere near winning a seat in Saxony's regional parliament, let alone nationwide. But they are incredibly good at mobilizing people to get out into the street and get themselves on the agenda. And they're part of a big rise in the political strength of Germany's hard right. And in country after country across Europe, hard-right populist parties that used to be on the fringe are getting close to power. In some cases, they already have it.

Matt, how strong are the hard right across Europe?

Hard-right parties already hold power in Hungary, Poland, and for the last year in Italy. They have a share of it in Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland. They're also rising in popularity in many countries across Europe. So in Germany, for example, the Alternative for Germany party is now at 22% support in the polls, which is up from 10% in the last election in 2021. In France, the Rassemblement National, the National Rally Party, has 24% support in the polls. There are countries in Europe that didn't used to have any hard-right nationalist parties, including Portugal, Romania, and Spain, but they do now for the last few years. It doesn't mean that the far-right support always goes up. Far-right parties have had reverses. For example, in Spain, they were expected to do extremely well in an election over the summer. Instead, they lost seats. It's important to remember that far-right parties are quite different from each other in different countries. Some of them are libertarian. Some of them support what's called welfare chauvinism, where they back government benefits, but only for people of the local dominant ethnicity. And they have different stances on foreign policy. Some of them are quite anti-Russia. Some of them back Russia against Ukraine. But nevertheless, this sharp rise in far-right sympathy is a big cause for concern.

And why are we seeing this rise in hard-right support across the continent?

Probably the biggest factor behind the current rise in far-right support is a rise in illegal immigration. So far this year, over 160,000 people have crossed illegally into Europe, which is as many as came all of last year. It's nowhere near the million that came in 2015, but still it's quite high. Economic upheaval is good for populists. There's a lot of inflation right now in Europe. In many countries, the job markets are quite good, but there's a great sense of uncertainty if you look at numbers on consumer confidence and things like that. There's been a kind of a slide in confidence in institutions and governments. During the pandemic, there was actually a bump in confidence in governments, but that seems to have receded and maybe snapped back. And of course, the culture wars are going strong. The lead candidate for the Alternative for Germany is a guy named Maximilian Krah, who has put out a series of extremely effective TikTok videos this summer. In one of them, he says real men are right-wing, don't watch porn. Another one, he talks about soy boys. They can be quite effective on social media.

So the right-wing politicians who have actually managed to get elected, how effective have they been?

The most effective far-right populist candidate to win election is definitely Viktor Orbán, who's been prime minister of Hungary since 2010. 2010 and has really changed the entire system there. When he got into power, he stacked the courts with his own people. He changed the constitution to favor his own party. Other countries have tried to imitate Mr. Orbán's model. When the Law and Justice Party won the elections in Poland, they tried to do a lot of the same things. They tried to pack the courts. They turned state media into a propaganda outlet. But they haven't been able to take it as far as he did. It's not so easy to take over a state entirely.

Next year is a big year for democracy, and we've discussed this on the podcast quite a bit. Matt, how do you expect the hard right to perform across Europe in 2024?

Hard right parties are probably going to do very well in the elections to the European Parliament in June 2024. The hard right usually does well in those elections because people see it as kind of a protest vote. They don't think of the European Parliament as being really an effective governing body, so they feel like it's a low-risk vote where they can show dissatisfaction with the who are running Europe. That's going to have consequences for Europe because Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister of Italy who heads the hard-right Fratelli d'Italia party, she is the head of a group of parties in the European Parliament called the European Conservatives and Reformists, and they're significantly to the right of the main center-right grouping in the European Parliament, which is called the European People's Party. She wants those two groups to join up. And that would shift the entire political profile of the European Parliament significantly to the right.

So Matt, how do you think that centrist voters and parties should respond to this threat from the hard right?

So for the last two decades, the general strategy on how to handle the far right has been what's called a cordon sanitaire, which is an agreement by all mainstream parties not to form coalitions with hard right parties. And that has been effective in the sense that it has kept them out of power in almost all European countries. But It rested on the assumption that at some point voters would drift away from such parties, and that hasn't happened. And there's an argument to be made that one of the reasons why support for such parties is increasing is precisely because they haven't been allowed to participate in government, because voters haven't had a chance to watch them fail or to assign them responsibilities for scandals and for all the things that always go wrong in politics. They've been insulated. Europe is not about to be overwhelmed by fascist governments. It's quite hard to do what Viktor Orbán did in Hungary. But the cordon sanitaire strategy doesn't seem to be working anymore. Governments may need to start to include them or work with them, but you have to be extremely careful when doing that. It's especially discomforting for people who are not white or who are not straight to think about having these parties getting a share of power, and they are expert in dodging responsibility. Mainstream parties that go into coalition with them need to be very careful.

Matt, thank you so much for your time.

Thanks, Zoray.

I think the announcement on September 21st that Rupert Murdoch is stepping down as chairman of Fox and News Corp should be treated with a bit of a pinch of salt.

Tom Wainwright is The Economist's media editor.

Rupert Murdoch isn't going anywhere just yet.

So then, what does retirement actually mean for Rupert Murdoch? Is he still going to hover around and exert some kind of influence?

I think, yeah, more than some kind of influence. I think he's going to be still very much a fixture at these companies. He's not retiring, he's taking on an interesting new title of Chairman Emeritus. And he said in the past that retiring would be a dismal prospect. He once called it— he once said that he thought if he retired, he would die pretty quickly. So this is someone who has He's spent 70-plus years building up this empire. And even if his formal title going forward is not gonna be quite as grand-sounding as it was, I think he's gonna be there behind the scenes, still influencing and probably making most of the really big calls.

[Speaker:KARA] So why is he making this change? Let's put it that way.

[Speaker:GUY] I think in recent years, people have started to wonder a bit about whether he's quite got the same grip on the company that he did. I mean, part of this is rumors about his health. There was a story earlier on this year in Vanity Fair reported that he'd had all kinds of health problems, broken his back and had seizures, all this kind of thing. He's not been appearing on earnings calls as much in recent years. He recently had to give evidence in a legal case, and people thought they detected in that, that he, you know, wasn't quite how he was a few decades ago. I mean, he's 92 years old. This isn't wholly surprising. And in the past year or so, the companies have made a few strategic missteps. I mean, we've seen these very public spats with some of Fox News's anchors. Tucker Carlson has left and set up on what used to be called Twitter. And the strategy that Fox pursued in its legal case against Dominion, which was this voting system technology which said that it had been libelled by Fox News, turned out to be a disastrous strategy. They've ended up having to settle the case for nearly $800 million. So it's been a period when Rupert Murdoch has been showing some signs of weakness in public and when his companies have been making some strategic errors. And I think this combination had got investors a bit concerned.

Tell us a bit more about Lachlan Murdoch. Why did Rupert Murdoch anoint him as his successor and not any of his other children?

Well, he's got 6 children, and he's set up this decades-long audition between them. I mean, his eldest child, Prudence, has mostly sat out and not been involved very closely in the companies, and his 2 youngest children are still only in their early 20s. But his 3 others have all, you know, at one time or another, been vying for influence within the Murdoch companies. And Lachlan, the one who in the end has prevailed, won person described him to me as a kind of mini-me of his father. He's the one who seems to get on by far the best with his dad. I haven't spoken to many people who consider him to be the most talented of the three main contenders. James Murdoch was the one who put together the auction which resulted in the sale of 21st Century Fox to Disney for $70 billion, which was absolutely at the top of the market. You know, that was a real masterstroke. But Lachlan has proved to be the one that Rupert Murdoch gets on most easily with and who seems to be most in tune with his dad's politics. And I think this possibly tells us something about the way in which Rupert Murdoch intends to maintain his influence behind the scenes. He's alighted on the successor who seems to be most likely to carry on in the way that Rupert Murdoch himself might have wanted, rather than necessarily one of the ones who showed the most business acumen.

And so, Tom, is that it for the other siblings?

No, it's not. There's a sting in the tail coming when Rupert Murdoch eventually dies. There's a family trust set up which ultimately controls the two Murdoch companies. And control of that trust at the moment is held by Rupert Murdoch. But when he passes away, that control is gonna be shared between the four eldest children. And so, suddenly, once more, the views of siblings like James and Elizabeth and Prudence will come to matter again. And nobody seems quite sure how they're going to use those votes, what they're going to do. I mean, there's been some speculation that James and Elizabeth, who have more liberal politics than their dad, might try to kind of change Fox News and make it more, more centrist. I'm not sure about that. I mean, a centrist Fox News, I don't know if that would really work. You know, that could just collapse. I wonder if another possibility is that they may want to sell up, they may want to jettison it. I don't know who would buy Fox News, but it's possible. You know, one person I spoke to mentioned the, you know, Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter as an example of somebody with a lot of money buying something as kind of political plaything. And Fox News would be worth much less than what Musk paid for Twitter.

Our sister show Checks and Balance reported on the mammoth defamation lawsuit that Fox News faced earlier this year. What are some of the challenges for the network going into 2024?

It's got to tread a difficult path. It was very closely associated with Donald Trump, obviously, and then it had an equally clear and public sort of disassociation with him after he lost the election and disgraced himself. It's had some problems since then because it it's courted the Trump base so closely that many of those viewers now are annoyed with the turn that it's taken. But on the plus side, I mean, it continues to rake in the profits. I mean, its margins lately have been sort of 20% plus, which for a media business is extremely strong. And going into the election year, I mean, it's going to be a difficult one for Fox to tread politically, but election years are always bonanzas for news channels because American elections in particular are such an advertising blitz that they're always the years when those channels tend to do best. I think going forward, the big transition that Lachlan now has to manage is the eventual withering of cable, which has been happening now for some time. But I think that's going to gather pace as sport and probably eventually news switch to digital methods of distribution, i.e., streaming. And so I think transforming Fox News from a force in cable news to a force in streaming news is going to be the big challenge for the years ahead.

Tom, what does all this mean for the future of News Corp?

The Murdoch project has always been partly a business project, but really more than anything, a power project. And over the years, his relationships with politicians, the power that he has wielded over them, has altered the course of history in many countries where he's operated. And I think that he's lost some of that clout. And in recent years, we've seen election results in countries like, well, America, Australia, Britain, where people that he has backed have not done so well. His influence may have waned, but I think that the favor of Fox News is something that is still enormously valuable in political terms. And I think that the empire that Lachlan inherits is still a pretty formidable thing.

Tom, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you.

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In America, most decisions about schools are made at the local level, which means that start times can vary quite a lot from place to place.

Doug Dawson is a data journalist for The Economist.

Data from the Education Department show that most schools start around 8:15, but in the South states like Alabama, Louisiana, they can start quite a bit earlier, around 7:45. Early morning class is fine for youngsters, but for teens, experts say it's actually quite unhealthy.

Okay, to be honest, 7:45 is a bit early even for me, but why'd you say that this specifically isn't a good thing for teenagers?

Yeah, so research conducted back in the '90s found that during puberty, teenagers' circadian rhythms—so they're like biological clocks—actually shift by a couple of hours. So that makes it difficult for them to fall asleep before around 11:00 PM or wake up early before 8:00 AM in the morning. Over the years, health researchers started to catch on to these findings. And then around a decade ago, the American Academy of Pediatrics published a report, was quite influential, recommending that middle and high school start no earlier than 8:30 so that teens get the 8 to 10 hours of sleep that they need. A few other organizations made similar recommendations. The CDC also put out a report saying that school should start later for teens. And for the past decade or so, the consensus has been that teens should be allowed to sleep in.

And do we know what difference it makes when they are allowed to?

So you might think that given the opportunity to start class an hour later, teenagers would simply just go to bed an hour later. But this doesn't seem to be the case. Data from the American Time Use Survey, which asks respondents to track their activities on a minute-by-minute basis over a 24-hour period, show that high school students who start class after 8:30 in the morning actually log 33 more minutes of sleep per day on average than those who start earlier. And research suggests that this extra sleep can have all sorts of benefits, including better school attendance, fewer disciplinary problems, and higher test scores.

And do you think this message that it's not a great idea for teenagers to wake up so early— do you think that message is getting through?

Yeah, I mean, for a long time Schools resisted starting later in the day, citing transport costs, conflicts with afterschool activities, and just generally resistance to changing their schedule. But that's starting to change finally. The latest data from the Education Department show that high school started a little bit later during the 2020-2021 school year, and new state laws are actually helping push these schedules back even further. In 2019, California passed a law requiring public middle schools to start no earlier than 8:00 and high schools to start no earlier than 8:30. And just earlier this year in May, Florida passed a similar law, and several other states are considering similar legislation. So relief may finally be on the way for sleepy American teens.

Doug, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks, Ari.

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