Our World in 2018

EUROPE’S FUTURE
A battle of
campaigners
By Shane Fitzgerald
We enter 2018 still reeling from the
Trump/Brexit campaigns of 2016.
The narrative of the past year
has been one of an old guard routed by
insurgents bent on chaos. The implications
for the European Union were grave.
From our slightly calmer vantage, the
emerging lessons of Brexit and Trump
are not that modern politics has been
tipped into anarchy, but rather that small
groups of committed believers, armed with
clear visions and simple messages, can
run rings around the political and media
establishment, which are more than ever
distracted, compromised and overloaded
with competing priorities.
In victory, and to nobody’s great surprise,
the Trumpians and Brexiteers have worn
the mantle of power no more gracefully
than those they despised and evicted from
.
Rather their authority has been rapidly
degraded by fresh coalitions of focused
opponents. In Trump’s case, this has
involved a rearguard effort by the US
security establishment to hold his team to
account for lying about their interactions
with Russia.
In the UK, it is hard to know which coalition
was more surprising – the huge crowds that
surged in the heat of a snap election to
put the ‘unelectable’ Jeremy Corbyn at the
doorstep of Downing Street, or the bickering
gang of European leaders who have so far
handed to Michel Barnier and his team.
In the middle of this gang has been Angela
of the modern era, and a virtuouso of the
Blair-Clinton strategy of triangulation as
a way to capture the soft centre ground
Shane
Fitzgerald
Shane Fitzgerald
is Director of
Campaigns at Red
Flag, where he
manages national,
European and
international
advocacy campaigns
for Red Flag’s major
clients.
Campaigning is
exhausting. It
takes discipline,
resources and
organisation.
But it works.
of political debate. This approach has life
in it yet (witness the remarkable rise of
Emmanuel Macron), but the unceremonious
crippling of Merkel’s political career by a
band of far-right insurgents has certainly
shown the risks of appealing to compromise
and the status quo above all else.
There are lessons here for us all. In
the tired arena of Brussels regulatory
policy, it is clearer than ever that small
groups of activists have worked out how
to harness the discontent of vast numbers
E.
Their ammunition? Focused outrage. Their
approach? Disciplined campaigns.
There is a tendency to underestimate
certain NGOs and activist groups because
they represent wide and shallow coalitions,
but the best of them demonstrate an ability
chosen wedge issues, which they do far
more tenaciously than traditional lobby
groups.
Brussels trade associations and the
agencies that support them spend their
time laboriously building consensus
around constantly cycling lists of priorities.
They must also devote huge efforts to
relationship-building and peace-keeping
42 2018 | OUR WORLD