Part 5: Can Liberal Democracy Survive in Europe?

The Daily

The New York Times

News, Daily News

4.3 • 107.6K Ratings

🗓️ 14 June 2019

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Across Europe, populists are saying that it’s not democracy they aim to discard, but liberalism. To end our series, we returned to Germany, the country at the heart of a liberal Europe, to see if the rejection of liberalism had also taken hold there. Guests: Katrin Bennhold, the Berlin bureau chief for The New York Times, and Clare Toeniskoetter and Lynsea Garrison, producers for “The Daily,” went to an election party in Berlin for the far-right party Alternative for Germany. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: Germany’s political establishment looks increasingly fragile after the European Parliament elections.As anti-Semitic crime rises in Germany, new forms of old hatreds are stoking fear for the nation’s estimated 200,000 Jews.Katrin Bennhold offers her main takeaway after 10 days on the road: “Europe cannot be taken for granted. But neither can its demise.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	So at this point, we're on the train platform in Warsaw.
0:16.6	We've been traveling together for a few weeks now.
0:18.7	Yeah.
0:19.7	And we've been going from country to country to sort of check what people are thinking ahead
0:26.4	of these European elections, which are now upon us.
0:30.3	So we pack up Berlin and head to the train station in Poland and get on the train back
0:37.6	to Berlin.
0:38.6	Is this it?
0:39.6	Yeah.
0:41.2	You know, we started this trip thinking that these liberal values that are so fundamental
0:53.4	to the founding of the European Union, coming out of World War II, that they're now being
1:00.0	rejected by all these movements across Europe.
1:04.5	It's no longer relevant to people's lives or even as threats to their national identities
1:09.8	as impositions.
1:14.5	Speaking with Danuta, the Polish-Lon-Jasus politician, I think I understood a little bit better what
1:20.1	this was about and what kind of Europe the populists wanted.
1:26.2	They don't want to throw away democracy.
1:29.2	They want to throw away liberalism.
1:32.2	They want a democracy that responds to them, that answers to them, that represents the
1:36.8	will of the majority.
1:39.0	And this is the battle they're kind of bringing to the EU parliament.
1:44.6	So these elections, the second biggest democratic process in the world, this is about how many
	...

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