Former Putin admirers turn against him

The worst people in the West were pro-Putin. They excused his imperialist ideology and crimes against humanity and never paid a price for bootlicking a dictatorship. On the contrary, they took Britain out of the European Union and took over the Labour party. They won the presidencies of the United States and the Czech Republic and seized control of politics and the media in Hungary.

The savagery of Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukrainian democracy has sent them into headlong retreat. Nothing better illustrates their panic than Marine Le Pen having to deny that she had ordered the destruction of 1.2m election leaflets that featured pictures of her giving Putin a firm handshake, as if to thank him for all the money he had loaned her.

Another French far right leader, Éric Zemmour, announced his affinity with the fascist tradition by defending Vichy’s collaboration with the Nazis and the persecutors of Alfred Dreyfus. With the first round of the French presidential election opening on 10 April, he returned the support the Kremlin has given him by saying that the French should not treat Putin’s victims as refugees because they would “submerge” France under a wave of immigration.

Cheeringly, Zemmour’s image of Ukrainians pushing French heads under water, as if they were aggressors rather than victims, did nothing to stop the decline in his support. In Hungary, the victory of the Putin wannabe Viktor Orbán in the elections on 3 April no longer seems the certainty it once was.

In the UK, the Labour leadership ordered MPs from the rump of the Corbyn left to disassociate themselves from a letter blaming Putin’s war on Nato or lose the whip. Even Donald Trump and Nigel Farage are backing away from Putin now and when rats that size abandon ship we know we are in uncharted waters.

Writers have struggled to find a label for the movements that have transformed the west. “Populist” is too vague. “Nationalist” works well until you remember that they hate large numbers of their fellow citizens and are more than willing to ally with their nations’ enemies. “Racist”? Certainly in some cases but how does that oft-repeated insult cover the religious sectarianism of a Modi or Erdoğan? “Fascist?” In the rhetorical echoes and common heritage, of course, but not in goose-stepping fact.

But they have all been “Putinist”, and not only because they have flattered the Kremlin. The appeal of the Russian empire to parts of the far left remains both a cause of outrage and a pitiable demonstration of moral and intellectual decay. From Karl Marx to Oscar Wilde, every 19th-century liberal and socialist knew imperial Russia was the greatest fortress of European reaction. (Wilde was so moved by the struggle against it he wrote Vera; or, The Nihilists, a forgotten and truly terrible play to honour an attempt to assassinate the tsarist governor of St Petersburg.)

The appeal of Putin’s revival of Tsarism to the modern far right may be grotesque but at least it makes sense. Putin is anti-democratic and so are they, as Orbán’s quasi-dictatorship and Trump’s attempts to overturn elections show. Putin despises human rights and so do they. Putin trades on a dark nostalgia and so do they. Above all, Putin is a strongman and it is as the tough guys who make their countries great again through a sheer act of will that they have sold themselves to tens of millions of voters.

Did I call them the “far right”? Forgive me, for “far right” doesn’t quite cover it. As I said, the Labour mainstream used the invasion to move against the tyrannophile left. We have seen nothing comparable on the supposedly mainstream right.

No pieces in the Mail or Telegraph agonising over how they ever came to be fooled by Farage and Arron Banks. No speeches from Boris Johnson warning against the seductions of tyrannical thinking and power worship. The silence shows that the border between the centre right and the far right has fallen into disrepair.

For Johnson also likes to pose as a strongman, who can get Brexit done. He too wallows in nostalgia for the past rather than hope for the future and defines himself against a large portion of his fellow countrymen: the remoaners, the naysayers, the libtards and the woke.

In the most desperate of circumstances, Ukraine cries to be allowed into the European Union, that same European Union a generation of unforgivably trivial Tories have dedicated their lives to destroying. Putin shows his fear of Russians learning the truth about his war by blocking their access to the BBC, the same BBC that Johnson underfunds and promises to ruin whenever he needs to toss red meat to the Tory right.