Politics of Fear

Rejecting emotional politics altogether won’t fight fearmongering but providing a vision of a desirable future can.

In Poland the incumbent right-wing Law and Justice party, backed by the Catholic Church, demonised LGBT organisations in its recent successful electoral campaign. Adam Ostolski spoke to feminist activist and scholar Agnieszka Graff about why gender politics have become central to Polish politics, taking a step back to analyse how the Right’s scapegoating of gender is a response to the same set of social issues that the Left attributes to neoliberalism.

Sociologist Karolina Wigura calls for a move from the pervasive politics of fear which has seen the rise of the far-right to a politics with a positive vision based on hope.

In the face of rising national populism, rather than seeking to combat these forces on their own terms, Green and progressive politicians can instead turn to a far more effective rhetorical tool.

Editorial: In a Europe with a changing political landscape, the future of the Union– and incidentally that of the Greens in 2019 – will be largely played out over the question of security.