 Okay, well, thank you so much and we're delighted to be here again for what is the second in-person IIA Young Professionals Network event of the year. We had one virtual at the start of the year, but this is the second one, and it's great to see so many faces, so many familiar faces who were here last week as well, and also some new faces as well for this event here today. So somewhat different topic for this event here today, so obviously we were focusing on the economy last week. This week we're talking about the rise of the right within Europe and asking the question of whether Europe's voters are shifting to the extreme right. And for this we're absolutely delighted to be joined by Naomi O'Leary, who is the Europe correspondent of the Irish Times, who's flown in from Brussels to be here with us today and to speak to us about the results of recent elections within Europe and what they mean in the broader European context. So I'll just give a brief intro of Naomi and then I won't talk for too much longer and then I'll hand you over to Naomi who's going to get us underway. So Naomi O'Leary is the Europe correspondent for the Irish Times and the creator of the Irish Passport podcast with Tim McInerney, a regular TV and radio contributor who is reported from the ground from around the European continent. Naomi is a former correspondent of Political Europe, Reuters in Rome and Agence France-Presse in London. She was awarded Political Journalist of the Year 2021 by News Brands, Ireland's Newspaper Industry Award. So Naomi, we're absolutely delighted to have you here and Flores yours. Hi everybody, thank you so much to Dara, to the IIEA for having me here. It's brilliant to be here and to work in on saying thank you so much for all the great organization. So yes, as Dara laid out, the team today is recent electoral gains of parties on the far right or hard right in Europe, particularly Italy and Sweden, and whether there are any takeaways for democratic systems elsewhere. So just to recap and set the scene, in the Swedish election in September, the far right Sweden Democrats emerged as the second largest party. They might reject the characterization of far right and call themselves a mainstream conservative party, but I'll talk a little bit about this later. They then reached a confidence and supply arrangement with the new minority government, which gives them quite a significant sway over policy making, whereas in Italy, in their recent election, the Brothers of Italy Party, Pratelli d'Italia, emerged the party with the largest amount of support and it ran within a coalition. And that coalition, which includes two other right wing parties, emerged with the biggest block with enough support, enough votes to get an electoral premium, which means that they now have an absolute majority of seats in parliament. So these two elections come against a background, of course, of radical right parties, which have made inroads in various European countries over the last decade, and we could actually argue before that as well. In both cases, these are parties which were once considered on the fringe of the political map, and they saw a very rapid transformation in vote share. So they rapidly gained votes from one election to the next. Both of them have a background or a heritage associated with the far right and extreme views, and how much that heritage shapes the current reality of the party is a matter of political debate, including how you even describe them as kind of politically contentious. I wanted to point out that sometimes we apply, particularly in English language reporting, there's a flaw that comes into reporting on European elections, and that's that a majoritarian frame of reference is used to apply to continental elections, which are actually more like our system here in Ireland and where we have proportional representation and a much more fragmented result than majoritarian elections like in the UK or in the US, where they have a presidential election, and there's just two candidates or its first past post. So because of that framing and the way that winners are declared from elections, we can sometimes get a flawed impression of how much of the electorate these parties which are deemed the winners actually get. So you can see on this here, Sweden Democrats were second to the Social Democratic Party. They got just over 20% of the support, so 20.5. Really significant jump for them. Fratelli d'Italia and Italy, they got 26% support. I point this out just to kind of clarify that we're not talking about parties taking a majority of overall votes here. So just to kind of lay out a little bit about what happened in these elections, this chart actually helpfully put together by a researcher in the IAEA shows the electoral results. And in the final column, you can see who gained the most and who lost the most. And what we can see with this is there has been a gain for the Social Democratic Party, which is the sort of dominant governing party in Sweden. Sweden Democrats took the most and they took it at the expense, particularly of centre and right wing parties, the moderate party and the centre party. Then if we look at Italy, I have some more detailed slides to show the trends. I'm just going to wait to see if this responds. Oh, yeah. So can I come over towards the screen? I'll just sort of point at it. This shows the difference in the last election that's on the left hand side compared to the election now. The very top symbol, the blue one on the right hand side, that's brothers of Italy, Fratelli d'Italia, and it shows where they're taking their vote from. So you can see that the biggest lines are actually coming from their coalition partners. So they are taking most from the League, the Northern League and Forza Italia and those are the other right wing parties that they're actually currently in coalition with. They also took from the five star movement. That's the yellow one that was the big winner of the last election. You can see them taking a big chunk on the left hand side. A good amount of their voters also went over to this hard right party, which tells us something interesting about the five star movement. It's a kind of podge podge. It's a it's a it's voters are heterogeneous, let's say. But what defines it is the five star movement was the last big political innovator that took that swept the scene in Italian politics in 2012. So what we're seeing here is a very dynamic electoral scene where you're having upstarts, incommers, and voters are abandoning the more traditional parties and going towards them in terms of whether the electorate as the whole is shifting to the right. It's arguable that they're not because Georgia Maloney is mostly taking from other right wing parties. However, she has had an impact in mainstreaming what would once have been considered fringe views, which we'll talk about a little bit more later. I have some more slides which demonstrate what happened in Italy and where this support is coming from. These, this is data based on exit polls by Utrend and SWG. Yeah, so just to just to have a look, these are this is a national map which shows where the center left coalition got its votes. So a generally weak showing nationally and those areas of red, which you see more or less in the center of Italy, those are the old left strongholds of like Emilia Romagna and so on, they're holding on in terms of the central left support. But overall, you can see that the center that the right wing coalition pretty much swept the board, particularly in the north and you can see that they're making inroads really nationally. Then this is where the exit pollers try to figure out what exactly what co what correlates most straightforwardly with a vote for Fratelli di Dalia and so on. This first graph, this shows, this is a measurement of vote share correlated with the percentage of people who have degrees. So we can see quite a strong correlation with a higher vote for Brothers of Italy with the places which have the lowest percentage of people with degrees. So places with fewer university graduates tended to have higher support for Brothers of Italy, this hard right party and the more the percentage of university goers you have in the population, the lower that vote and you can see the direct opposite trend with that red line, which that is the center left party, the sort of the, let me say establishment or traditional center left party, the Democratic Party. This is a measurement of how vote compared with the percentage of people in a place that are foreign born. So this is the percentage of foreigners and how it correlates with the vote. You you might expect to see a strong correlation here, but you actually don't. It's not particularly dramatic, except that if you have a high percentage of foreigners, which is on the right hand side, you have fewer people voting for the five star movement for whatever reason. This is unemployment. Places with a lower unemployment tended to have higher voters for Brothers of Italy. So a higher vote for this hard right party. And as unemployment in places with higher unemployment, the vote for that party was lower, which is again, perhaps slightly counterintuitive. We've heard a lot of narratives about the left behind about economic concerns, driving votes for hard to write parties. This is quite a self-serving narrative by these parties that doesn't always stack up when you look at the data. Now, this is the most clear correlation. This is the number of people who live in a particular place. So let's say the size of the town or village that you live in correlates with the vote. So the highest vote share for the hard right is in places with less than 5,000 inhabitants. So we're talking about villages. That's where the vote for Fratelli di Dalia is strongest and it declines as you get into cities. And you can see something of the opposite trend with both five star and with the center left. The higher the population, the more their vote. Roughly, it doesn't perfectly correlate, but there is a clear correlation between a small place and higher votes for Fratelli di Dalia. OK, those are my slides just to illustrate. And I went through that because I thought it was really important to look at the data about what actually happens in these elections, because the story that's told about elections does not always match data like this. So what we can see is two things. The center right coalition, which is what it's called, within that, the farthest right party grew in strength, but mostly took support from its other coalition members. So that support on the right consolidated to the hardest element of that coalition. It's also the case that the left lost in the selection. So you can see that the left was very, very fragmented. The Democratic Party didn't have as good a showing as it would have hoped and it would have had historically. It was fragmented. There were a number of different parties and they were quite divided amongst themselves so that it's not just that the right one, but the left also lost. In terms of, so I've gone through these. So in terms of the voters that decided this election in the strongest swings, there's some additional polling data which shows that the strongest supporters of all are among people who were like self-employed workers. So they're employed people. They're not necessarily left behind voters in the way that that has been framed. It's not necessarily the lowest socioeconomic group in society, but they are people who might feel that they've lost out relative to their prior position. And I brought up the statistics on a number of immigrants because the story of the election that's told by the parties that gained often links their gains to immigration and the immigration debate. Now here in Ireland at the moment, we are currently coming to terms with the kind of logistical problems that can arise when you when you're trying to accommodate many refugees that come in a short space of time. What we've seen is that across Europe, other countries have been dealing with those logistical problems earlier. And in a situation like that, you end up with genuine conflicts of interest between different groups in society. So for example, when you have at the moment, I think Simon Coveney said that one in four hotel rooms in Ireland is currently being rented for Ukrainian refugees. Obviously in times that are dependent on tourists coming, you then have a conflict between the economic interests of the existing businessmen who are, you know, have their restaurants and so on based on tourists that come in. And there's a question about how do you balance those interests? These are the kinds of conundrums that have been kind of dealt with for longer in continental European countries that saw greater migration arrivals in previous years, basically since 2015. What happens is that those kind of logistical problems, which are more or less value neutral, those, the existence of those problems lays open an opportunity for more cynical actors. So people who have a de facto opposition to immigration, they would be opposed to it, whether it was causing logistical difficulties or not. They come into that scenario, see that people are having these conundrums and they exploit it. Now, then you can have a blurring of lines between what's a logistical problem and what's just coming from a de facto opposition to immigration per say. These kind of actors are aware that racism is a societal taboo. It remains a society taboo to discriminate against people based on origin. But what happens in situations like this is there's an opportunity for people who do hold racist views to conflate their views with problems which are being noticed more in society, which are just logistical issues to do with the housing of refugees. And they can make advantages out of that situation in wearing down the taboo against racism by playing on people's frustrations and normalising more hard-line rhetoric and particularly dehumanising rhetoric. And that's a really central feature of something we've seen not just in Italy, not just in Sweden, but actually across Europe is that one of the central effects of the rise of these right-wing parties isn't necessarily that they've gained more and more support, but they've actually injected their more extreme rhetoric into the mainstream. So you see it being adopted by centrist parties and indeed by left-wing parties as well as they react to the competition on the right by actually adopting the rhetoric and trying to compete them by seeming hard line on immigration. In Sweden, there was also an issue of crime and violence in disadvantaged neighbourhoods involving people of immigrant background. This is a highly, highly politicised topic. So the extent to which people believe this is a problem is very highly linked to their political views. So if they're more conservative, they're more likely to view it as a problem and if they're more liberal, they're less likely to view it as an issue when they tend to believe that it's all a bit overblown. So to just recap some of the history of these parties, I mentioned earlier that it's actually politically contentious how you even define them. So it's kind of sometimes a challenge for journalists what terms to use, do you use far right, extreme right, hard right. They define themselves as mainstream conservatives, but that is a self-serving narrative because it seeks to redefine what mainstream is to the right to suit them. So it's difficult. So just looking at the facts, the Sweden Democrats grew out of the Keep Sweden Swedish campaign. So it is, it is a gain, its root is in anti immigration politics. Early members have been revealed by the Swedish press to have been part of neo-Nazi groups. Nevertheless, as I said, this remains a taboo in society. So part of the electoral tactic of this party is to always disavow this and to insist that they've normalised to expel party members like that. At the same time, though, what we've seen actors like this do is they are still able to signal enough to hardline voters that they sympathise with them to both gain that hardline vote, but they're also able to sort of talk about moderation and appear moderated and also bring the centre ground to them enough that they broaden their support in the electorate and they get more centre centrist voters voting for them as well. The Brothers in Italy party is different. It's founded in 2012. The bulk of its early members came from the National Alliance. In the National Alliance is what is called in Italy a post-fascist party. Post-fascism refers to the tradition on the right which seeks to make the transition from the Mussolini era into modern electoral politics. This is a process of sort of moderation and normalisation that nevertheless involves bringing along the old die hearts and retaining important symbols that signal continuity with that fascist tradition. Meloni herself, Georgia Meloni, the leader of Fratelli di Dalia and the new Italian Prime Minister, she comes from a background of teenage activism in the far right. French documentary captured her in those years when she was 19 saying that Mussolini was a good politician and everything he did, he did for Italy. And that is the classic kind of thing that you might hear in an Italian neo-fascist say. In order to become the national figure that she is now though, she's had to completely transform in a chameleon like way. So she's learned clearly from Marine Le Pen, but she's done it better. She does. She presents herself in a very charismatic way. She comes off as very confident. She's also extremely good at speaking one to one to voters over things like Instagram that makes her views, presents her views in a way like they just seem common sense. You know, she often sort of describes herself as just an ordinary Christian mother, things like that. She's very good at that one to one talk that sort of is good at breaking down the taboo that would there would have once been against her. And she insists that she's the mainstream conservative, as I mentioned. So what we've seen is that the national figures of these party in order for them to sort of bestride the national theme, they need to moderate their image, which is an important thing to remember, because in countries in Europe, racism has in the past been an overt state policy. So it is really important to distinguish when racism does remain enough of the societal taboo, that in order to rise to the top, you need to at least through your rhetoric to devour it, whether or not you're bringing your party members with you is another important question. Or whether you're playing on the ambiguity enough to nevertheless, take advantage of an extreme party of the electorate. These are good questions. The other sort of looking at the backstory of these parties and of these elections, what we see is that this, whatever you want to call it, radical right, hard right newcomers to politics, this takes different forms in different places. And you can also have actually different generations of this. The country that saw this trend very early on was the Netherlands. They're now on, you know, several generations down from radical right parties, because you had, you've actually had various iterations of them over the years. These movements clearly learn from each other. There's an international element to this. They look and see what works elsewhere, and then they apply it to their own national context. And they, they never exist. They're never exactly the same from one country to another, because they're operating within a historical societal context, which is really specific and which they're sort of experts in reading and playing to. But then they borrow from abroad for what works, which is why we see things spreading almost like means, like, for example, George Soros conspiracy theories rhetoric about the deep state state. And it's worth pointing out that the United States is a major amplifier of this, a major amplifier of both rhetoric and tactics that work well for these radical right parties, possibly because of the international pervasiveness of English. It's a language that can spread easily in many places. So you see things like the truckers protests in Canada, farmers protests in the Netherlands, synergies and rhetoric shared between them. They're then, you know, these movements both take advantage of and are exploited by radical right broadcasters with international reach, like the likes of Tucker Carlson, certain podcasts and so on. So the effects, I mentioned, one of the key effects is the introduction of radical ideas, ideas that would have seemed beyond the pale into the mainstream. This is particularly noticeable in Sweden, where we saw very extreme rhetoric being adopted by the moderate party, also broader Scandinavia. This has been a feature for particularly in Denmark, where the center left responded to challenges from the right and from anti immigration parties by basically owning the integration and the immigration issue, coming up, coming up with ghetto laws, quite cruel laws. Another feature is the use of policy as a campaigning tool. So what I mean by this is that you introduce bills or measures not designed necessarily to cause an effect on the ground in real terms, which is our traditional understanding as policy, but actually the introduction of policy as a communication tool, simply the announcement of a policy to campaign. I view this as concerning because essentially, in my view, it's using the resources of the state for party campaigning, announcing policies that aren't even intended to really have an effect on the ground. They may work. They may not. But that's not the point. The point is to use them to signal to your voters that you're being hardline on something. Typical example of this is the Danish jewellery law. This said that Syrian refugees or any refugees arriving could have their valuables like jewellery seized from them by the state to use to pay for their accommodation. As far as I know, it's never actually being used, at least according to a local reporting. That's not the point. It's about signalling hostility and cruelty in this case. This is a trend that we actually see quite strongly from the UK. It's clear that things like the sending of refugees to Rwanda. This is about communication to voters, and this has actually been admitted by members of Conservative Party that, you know, it's very much about the coverage of this and the signal that it sends that they're trying to achieve rather than setting up a system per se. Arguably Brexit itself is a classic signal policy of this kind since it was so ill-defined. So another feature is the classic populist framing of the ordinary people versus the elite. And here, the storytelling about the results of these elections is very important. So the idea that it's left behind voters or some sort of appeal to the common man of the country. It also it defines quite narrowly what an ordinary person of a particular place is in quite an exclusionary way. One thing that I would point out as well is that Georgia Maloney in particular, perhaps quite unusually played an important role as an individual. This was her campaign was very much focused on her as a person, almost presidential in that way. So it's quite specific about who that person is more than her party. Some takeaways from these elections, both of them saw a drop in turnout. In general, there's a trend of falling participation in electoral politics in Europe, particularly amongst the young and our parliaments are not representative of the actual population. They tend to be skewed towards the older people. Now, in the current context of today, this is particularly grave, because we're seeing serious generational inequality in wealth. So if you have a parliament which is representing older people, they're representing a particular economic group and society who may be at odds with the other group. That's a recipe for embedding disillusionment. It's a future potential future structural problem with electoral politics. I think in Ireland, we could do with rethinking a little bit how our voting system works, particularly because the way that we make people vote is very, very location based. Young people are much more mobile than other members of society. So they tend to get disenfranchised more than others. They also immigrate. Ireland's law is very strict in terms of you basically disenfranchise when she step off the country, out of the country, which is in the case for other countries, other countries have overseas voting. It's not it's not a big deal. In some countries, you can just vote it wherever any polling booth you happen to come across whether it's in the train station. There is other ways of doing this and we I think it's probably if it's it's a mistake to be lethargic about the current system, particularly when you have the risk of disengagement among the young. Very notable that housing is an increasingly volatile political issue that has the power to topple governments. It was a revolt against the relaxation of rent controls in Sweden and newly built apartments that actually toppled the socialist Prime Minister Stefan Lofven in 2021 in the build up to this election. As I mentioned, both of these countries have seen political innovation, particularly in Italy, Italy, arguably, you know, on its third round, maybe of political innovation, the first being Silvio Bolesconi. So it's normal for political innovation to happen and arguably it should happen. You need to have generational renewal, renewable ideas within parties in order for them to keep relevant and adapt to the needs of their electorate and represent the people. That's what they're for, right? If parties are unable to renew their ideas and their people in a generational way themselves, then they are vulnerable to being outcompeted by political upstarts. And that I think is what we've seen. Political scientists note that an important determinant of the role of radical parties is whether existing traditional parties on the scene offer a genuine choice to voters or appear to offer a genuine choice to voters. If voters feel like they're all the same, I'm going to try something new becomes more appealing. So the kind of drift to the centre probably ultimately works against existing parties in the long term. The final thing that I'll note is that one of the most important things to consider in these circumstances is the strength of institutions. How strong is rule of law? How strong are checks and balances? Are these parties because they toy with things, ideas like the deep state overthrowing the existing establishment, things like that? Do they intend to pull the drawbridge up behind them? Essentially, do they intend to destroy the ability for future free elections to be held? Do they intend to try to gain control of state institutions in a way that would prejudice future democratic competition in the future? The reason why this is a very relevant question is because we've actually already seen this in Europe. It's happened in Hungary. Hungary, Hungarian elections are no longer held on a fair field. The Fedex Party and the state have become blurred. So any opposition is fighting against a completely unfair field. They won't get media time. Independent media has been completely cracked down on, has had civil society. So we can see a pattern where there are political actors who will get into power by democratic means, but then seek to backtrack on the fundamental aspects of democracy. What keeps democracy going? Those are things like rule of law, free fair elections, media freedom, things like that. And it's something we've seen internationally and, of course, including in the United States. So are they going to stack the deck? So that is the end of my presentation. And I'm happy to turn to the Q&A section. Should I come and sit down? Yeah, OK. No worries. I particularly like presentations that have data in them coming from my from my maths and economics background. But, you know, it's very interesting because one of my colleagues and I had this debate actually during the week about just just thinking about what you were saying about the different labels of, you know, right wing, far right, extreme right. We had this kind of debate about, you know, what's the difference between right wing, far right, extreme right? I think we sort of we came to the conclusion, I think certainly on that the far right versus the extreme right that the difference was perhaps that the extreme right would be more inclined to question the legitimacy of elections, you know, like we would say with the Republicans in the United States and things like that. But they all hold, you know, broadly socially conservative views and they're all, you know, anti-establishment in some ways. I don't know, would you agree with that assessment or it's somewhat different. You know, there are people who have careers in defining these terms, political scientists and so on, they're probably used by people to mean different things. I agree with you that it's it would be good to be able to define our terms. I think it's a thought moment. It's very difficult when a political party has is insisting that it has a different self perception than how it's perceived by others. So it's just it's a it's a thought question. If you have a party that is coming from post post fascist tradition, but now it is insisting that it's simply a conservative party. Like I say, there's an agenda to that and it's about shifting what they what typical conservative mainstream means in their favor. So it's just a difficult question. I think I usually settle on saying describing describing as closely as I can the facts in as few words as I can. So I say things like comes from Italy's post fascist tradition or something like that or a heritage in the post fascist tradition. And some people think what the hell is post fascist, but it is actually a thing. It's like a recognized tradition in Italy. And then also, you know, I would might describe Maloney as a former far right teenage activist, which is also just correct, you know. And yeah, you just try to to describe the fact as much as you can as they are. You can only you can only do your best. But there's there's infinite ways to write these things. So it's probably maybe I don't know if there's an absolutely correct answer. And probably people will have different perceptions and yeah, debate about it is probably good. Absolutely. I should say, by the way, if people have questions, please do raise your hand. And I'll come to you during the discussion. How do you think the the elections in Sweden and Italy will change the government's their their relationship with the EU? And I suppose particularly their support for the for Ukraine. In the in the war with Russia. Well, I think. I think that Sweden remains to be seen mostly because under this confidence and supply arrangement, it's it's kind of up to the Sweden Democrats when they want to apply pressure. It seems like their current emphasis is on immigration, whether they want to pressure the EU to change it or pressure the moderate party to change its EU policy. They could decide to do that. They haven't signaled that they'll do that yet. In terms of the Brothers of Italy led government in Italy. It's it's Georgia Maloney so far has in every public public appearance styled herself as like a model right wing pro-European. And she's always always said like the first thing she said is that we stand with Ukraine. We are pro-NATO. She's attempted to detoxify herself, distance herself from other elements of the right in Italy, which were quite enamoured by Putin and Russia and the version of sort of right wing Christian conservatism that there is over there. So she's she's being very overt about that. It will probably end up nevertheless being feature in her government because her two coalition partners, Sylvia Bolesoni and Matteo Salvini are both sort of to one degree or another former Putin of vials or even current potentially. So they have a different view on this than at least the one that she's professing. And it's also something to a certain extent that division is also present in Italian society. There's on the left and on the right. There are sections of society which are impatient, at least with the Ukraine war, want to see a piece, not sure about giving arms, things like that. So this question, so it will probably continue to be a feature. But Italy is very dependent on support from the EU, particularly in terms of the recovery funds, the COVID-19 recovery funds that are still due. So very much relies on being part of this being viewed as normal and non-demiant in the international sphere. And it wants to keep that alliance solid for now. Yeah, I mean, I wonder, I wonder is it a sign like, I mean, we had years ago, you know, parties, far right parties in several countries in, including Italy, you know, advocating that they should leave the Euro and, you know, certain people should leave the European Union. I think even, you know, it was actually pointed out in an event I was at recently, I think it was Professor John O'Brennan pointed out that, you know, even though we consider Hungary not to respect the rule of law and to be openly Eurosceptic, it's very unlikely that they would leave the European Union, given the dependence that they have. But I wonder more broadly, is it a sign maybe that, you know, since 2020, since the pandemic, that the EU has performed a bit better on some of these issues. As a result of that, it's less popular around Europe to argue for leaving the European Union or leaving the Euro if you're one of these parties. I would trace that change to Brexit. Brexit was like a test for Eurosceptics of their ideas. And the UK is seen internationally to be like a basket case at the moment and in the in the years subsequent. So across European countries, loads of different parties that used to say these things like we want to, we want to leave the Euro, we want to referendum, these kind of things. Suddenly these weren't abstract ideas. They were actually being tested in a place with bad results. And it's and they adapted to that situation and they adapted to the electorate, which was saying, well, actually, maybe not. So they had to sort of moderate the ways in which they expressed, like, your critical views. And in general, yeah, there's fewer skepticism comes out in very, very different ways. And in a way, yeah, the sort of the most salient topics politically have moved on a little bit. But there will be points of tension. I mean, already, although I've said that Maloney is being, you know, sort of behaving as this model international stateswoman, already you've seen like quite serious tensions between France and Italy over the migration issue. So there's, I mean, at the end of the day, she's she's a nationalist, she's a national conservative. And that's her voting base. And this, in essence, will necessarily mean that sometimes Italian interests will conflict with the interests of other countries and her approach may cause friction. And do you think maybe, say, migration as a result of the Ukrainian war? Obviously, the scale of the Ukrainian refugees that are forced to leave Ukraine as a result of the war, I think it's 61,000 now we have an Ireland very important to integrate within society. But it's, I think we do that a bit better here, maybe than other countries do. And so I suppose how much of a threat do you think that is to potential other rise of far right parties within Europe? Because obviously we had it in the wake of the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015 as well. The question of correlation and causation between the arrival of refugees and the rise of right-wing parties is in itself politically contentious. So if you say, you know, like immigrants cause the rise of the right wing, that's actually quite a politically loaded argument. And it's an argument that serves a political view as well. Like I suppose what I tried to get across in my presentation is that there's kind of like innocent logistical problems that come with a large amount of new arrivals from anywhere wherever they happen to be. And those can like cause conundrums for towns and villages, which are dealing with them. And then into that situation you can get, like I say, people who are de facto opposed to immigration anyway, exploiting those tensions and seeking an opportunity to introduce their ideas and wear down the taboo against de facto discrimination against people from elsewhere. So yeah, of course, of course, in situations like that, it's a risk. Yeah. Yeah, I suppose one of the things I wanted to raise with you, I was reading during the week and the teacher was giving a speech in Oxford and during the week, I don't know if you saw it, but what he was talking about, I suppose, how to how to ensure liberal democracy remains strong in the face of all of the challenges that we have and liberal democracies around Europe. And he had some interesting comments, particularly on the issue of social media, first of all, in terms of some of the disinformation that's being spread on social media. But also like you mentioned in your remarks, some of the political campaigning that goes on on social media and how it's regulated, etc. But one thing he mentioned, I suppose, was in particular related to media itself. And I thought you might have some some interesting views on this, particularly somebody who I think writes, you know, very objective, unbiased journalism and very good journalism. And he talked about, I suppose, the lack of a public square in the way that we would have had in the past, you know, and that we have all of these different, you know, sources of media, all of these different channels. I remember when I when I lived in the United States, you know, you had CNN, you had Fox News, one thing telling you one thing, and then the other telling you the other. And but I suppose he also mentioned the idea that media is becoming more negative and emotive was how he described it and more like the commentary in social media. So I wonder would you would you have any views on that, maybe? I think it's extremely important for democratic societies to have agreed upon facts. It's if there aren't agreed upon facts about objective reality. It makes democracy very difficult, because if you have the level of division and partisanship that you actually disagree about, you know, who actually won an election, for example, that is it like it's like toxic because it like democracies are a kind of trust. You need to trust institutions, you trust like civil service to extend that the counting of elections are fair and media have a really important role in that. Definitely, their perception of media has been very politicised. It's part of populist rhetoric to. Let me say that it's part of the rhetoric rather than populist of many of the new political sort of insurgent parties to discredit the media per se as being like a biased actor or an actor that's influenced by some sort of authority or power rather than being the sort of like independent like for the state role, which is working for its readers and viewers and just seeking to scrutinise the powerful on behalf of them. So that obviously makes the work of journalists quite difficult. It also serves political parties for people not to trust media because then any criticism of them or not even criticism, any reporting or exposure of things that are unflattering to them, they can dismiss as simply being biased or simply having another political agenda, which isn't generally the case. It's just a self-serving tactic that's ultimately very toxic to democracy. All journalists are human beings and, you know, you could have ones that are better, ones that are worse at their job. But in general, it's not particularly high paid. It's very hard work and it's more it's like a vocation. So it's not really something that people get into to like to act in that way. You know, that sort of characterization of media is so foreign to anyone who actually works in the newsroom. Like if there was some sort of like secret like attempt to influence what people were reporting or something like that, like that's a huge story. Journalists, like by their nature, expose that kind of thing. So it just wouldn't remain a secret. Do you know what I mean? So, yeah. It's in terms of the social media dynamics, there's comments about media becoming more negative. I don't know. I'd like to see objective data on these things. Certainly the transformation of the technology through which information is spread caused really big challenges to media. It destroyed revenue bases. That means you can fund less journalists to do good reporting and so on by challenging. Also, you know, there's been mistakes as well. There's been like click chasing. That could that could lead to more emotive and reporting and maybe misleading if you're trying to get people just to click. But I think we'll I think all the media organizations are learning over time. That's strategically the best way to keep readers and to have readers or viewers or whoever who want to support you who want to pay is to just do stuff that's good value. That's like good quality that they wouldn't get elsewhere and and not to not to trick them by like luring them in with a headline that that then leads to an unsatisfying story that doesn't satisfy the headline that's actually very destructive. So yeah. Yeah, I mean broadly, I think it's probably not an issue we have in Ireland is probably more of an issue elsewhere, maybe in the US and in other places as well as some of the some of the other. So I see four people. OK, so I saw Emily's hand first. So I think I'll go to Emily first. So Emily. Thank you Naomi for that. Really interesting discussion so far. I have many questions, but seeing as there are others, I'll limit it. I'm Emily Benchy. I'm the Justice and Home Affairs Secretary at the IIA. My first question, I suppose, is your outlook for the future and the the future of right wing parties or future elections in the EU and how you see those going. Do you see, for example, I know it's some time away up in Germany that day seems to be resurgent and support a little bit again, following the decrease in last year's election, but largely appears to be a bit more of an isolated party on that right wing that maybe won't benefit from the same support from that that Fratelli Didalia benefited from on the right. And then secondly, I wondered about what you, how you see the role of the European Commission. Do you think it has to wait for things to get to the stage that they got to in Poland and Hungary and then implement that conditionality mechanism or do you think that it could maybe be a bit more proactive in this year with things maybe like media freedom act? I'm not sure as a journalist how effective you see that as the end. Thank you. The really hard question. I'm not sure what's going to happen next. I think we're in a time of great uncertainty and also like countries are quite diverse one from another. I think that in recent years, particularly around after the sort of Trump election and the Brexit and so on, we had a sort of. A politicized narrative that there was an unstoppable wave of populism that was coming. This hasn't proved to be the case just if we've seen some radical or newcomer parties winning elections, we've also seen them recede in other places. We've seen one of the things I meant to point out actually in my data is that the younger voters actually swung towards the greens in Italy and the left. And that's another trend that you see is a swing to green parties. It tends to be small enough in these proportional systems that it's not necessarily the main sort of narrative of the election that gets taken away, but it's a persistent trend. So, yeah, it's diverse. And, yeah, the young voters are not necessarily behaving if we're looking to the future in the in the way that would fit with those narratives about the unstoppable rise of the radical right. And we know that social issues and justice are very important to them. And then in terms of the European Commission media, I'm not sure. I think that one of the most helpful reforms would be here in Ireland, a reform to defamation law. Currently, it can be used really easily to make journalists think twice about whether to report on a certain person or not, because some people are really litigious and they harass you with angry letters, which carry the implied threat of legal action, which can be very expensive. I mean, it can cost like hundreds of thousands. Payouts in Ireland have also been really high. They've been based on juries and they've often tended to side with the complainant. So it's quite stacked against media. And it's actually something I mean, I'm someone I've reported, I work for an Irish publication now, but my background before this is an international publication, and I would say that the the threat of defamation suit looms much larger and heavier over reporting here than it does in other countries. But because people are used to it, it's perhaps become and like a sense that it's normal. It's not really normal. And it actually like it, that's quite bad. That would be a good thing to reform. Thank you very much for this conference. It was really interesting. My question is about the impact that may have in the future of the radical right. In the way that in European circle, there is this theology that we start Europe by an alliance between six countries on a small subject and it's going to become step by step to a federalist entity. And in the case we see raising European right wing, which is still in favor of Europe, of Europe, such as Marine Le Pen, for instance. And if there is like in twenty six or twenty five, I think we're going to see Hungary at the presidency, then Poland and then Denmark. So it's not going to be the easiest things for the institution and are the institution ready to be governed by this kind of right wing. Can we do the ordinary legislative process with them? Can we do a three log in this context? And I'm not sure about that. I'm not sure what I think in based on this hypothesis. So what is your view on that? So it's about the the future of these sort of countries that like in your skeptic and when they assume the EU presidency, how the institutions are going to cope with it. I think in certainly in the case of Hungary, Hungary, Hungary, the state and the government behaves quite differently domestically as it does internationally. Hungary has not really yet done much blocking of stuff like Russian sanctions. Did a little bit. Managed to get a patriarch curial taken off the functions list. But in general, it's actually agreed to things. It blocks selectively because they know there's a limit to what they can how far they can push the other EU member states. They've seen with the new there's a new what do you call it? Conditionality mechanism, which has been introduced by your commitment being commissioned, which ties the provision of funds to Hungary to rule of law by saying if there's if there's a risk of these funds due to lack of rule of law and Hungary, we do not have to give them to you. This is a big problem for Hungary. Hungary is quite reliant on these funds needs it. Victor Orvin needs them. And so they basically said, yes, we will do all your reforms. Yes, where can I sign? So they're introducing an anti-corruption court and all these kind of reforms that you're being commissioned has asked for. Now, how, whether these things will have teeth or not, I don't know, but they they they don't necessarily have the sort of the like solely destructive approach that you might you might expect from their rhetoric and from what they say. I think that Orvin knows how to talk about what he's doing to his own electorate and his own advantage. But then he shows a different face in Brussels often, not always, but often all of the member states have become very, very used to working to each other with each other, particularly during the pandemic. The ambassadors of the member states that meet in the co-reper format. They were the only ones that continue to meet face to face. They never went remote during all of the pandemic. And they formed this sort of like bond came very powerful and they became very good at working through difficult issues. I don't know if this is like a generation of ambassadors that will change over time, but at the moment, the states are working well together, even where they have really quite profound differences. So we'll see what happens. Orvin has also sort of set a and Poland as well to a certain extent, they've set a model, a bit for right wing governance to follow that maybe Maloney will follow where you you seek to you don't say we're going to leave. You stay within Europe and then you try to bend it to your advantage. So that is that. I mean, that is what all members do. They seek their own advantage. They just have their particular interpretation of what that advantage is. So we will see. Great. We have two more questions, I think, or do we have three? Yeah, I think we three. OK, so we'll take the three together then, please. Thank you very much for your fantastic presentation. I suppose my question will more focus on the solutions available to policymakers for today. And what do you think like decision makers have felt in their approach to address the root cause of the problem for certain individuals to deviate towards a certain political tendency? I think I'll use France as an example. What I come from is in the previous election, the current government has kind of put in the same baskets. The left wing coalition, which was presided by Minocial, but also Maloney, the press coalition with more like towards far right tendencies. So do you think that this has been a failure and the push to to to address the root cause of the problem because they can put in the same baskets and that's they just like see it also as an us versus them narrative. So it's almost like they're replicating the same kind of populistic narrative, which they use, you know, towards them. So yeah, that's those I enjoyed the presentation as well. I just wanted to ask just in terms of hypocrisy, like it seems to be in the way and weapon of the extreme groups in that, like I know Claire Daly and Mick Wallace, if I was to talk to him in the morning and I said, oh, I've seen a piece of you in the Irish Times to probably look at me. Oh, yeah, well, that's a Finca paper or they'd look the other way or whatever else. And I'm just kind of wondering, does the media kind of catch on quick enough to say, well, like, what is the actual hypocrisies? We should be calling out and watch, like with the established parties, like just, for example, drag car change, the spritzing candidate and system in the European Parliament a few years ago, he more or less said, well, we know Europe is shifting left a bit, but we're going to impose our will. Anyway, I didn't really see him getting called out on us. The same thing, which shouldn't find the last election, like I'm not a big fan of theirs, but at the same time, they had this big swing and I suppose the question then comes, well, hang on a minute, there's all these stories about them and, you know, house or whatever else, but I didn't see many of the media actually turn around say, hang on a minute, why has there been no other election? You know, is democracy being represented here? So yeah, that's my question. Thank you. Hi, thanks very much for your presentation. And I found your statistics very interesting about the kind of different variables driving the kind of demand for right wing parties. And my question is in terms of Ireland, in terms of like perhaps supply side, such after the Great Recession, we clearly had really bad economic crisis. So the environment for the political opportunity was there and it's still even now perhaps you could even argue with the rise of immigrants and the kind of integration of them in our societies. Why has that not been at all taken up by any political entrepreneur? If you have any ideas for them all, I don't know if I remember. I should have I should have written in there. The first one was about whether it's wise for like the parties say currently in power to sort of jointly demonise the right and the left together. I mean, I guess it's a political choice of those of theirs. One of the things I mentioned is that it does seem that voters like insurgent new political forces have less of an attraction to voters if they feel they have a genuine choice in terms of policy options. And I think it's really important for politicians to just get back to basics. I mean, do people have the things that they need? Do people have homes, good homes? Do people have employment that's decent? And like it's Italy is an interesting one. It's always an interesting story to look at, but it also shows it often shows political trends earlier than other countries. It's an aging society and it's a little bit ahead of other countries and in its demographics in that way. And there's a kind of a noxious like a vicious cycle that politics has has been captured by there, where the older generation, which has more privileges and wealth, votes then to keep that the young then emigrate or like tune out of politics altogether. And so the political class end up serving this like older and more privileged section of society. And it becomes like a vicious cycle. And it's just spells disaster for the future, because you need younger voters to be brought in to society, to democracy and to have something to lose. Like if you want to avoid people from making drastic decisions and taking huge risks, you need to give them something to lose, right? So, yeah, that's I don't know if that really answers the question. What was in the next one? You remind me? Oh, yeah, about whether the media fairly reports on different parties. I'm like, I'm difficult to answer because it would cover such a broad, broad range of reporting. But of course, they I mean, of course, media should that's what should be happening. Definitely definitely something that I think media organizations need to do better is to better reflect the society that they serve. So that means like generationally, in terms of age, it means diversity of backgrounds. And like to there's a risk if you're not diverse enough in an institution, you miss stories that are of importance to other people. The like the the last election, I reported on that for political. The rise of champagne to me was a housing story that was that for me was like the main story of the election. And I think that I had more of an insight into that because generally generationally, it's something that affects me more. And it's not necessarily as real to people who grew up in a different time, you know, the kind of reality of precarity and so on. And the way that that affects people's lives and prevents people from just starting an adult life in a way that they like should expect to just have as a normal. And then the final question was about why do we not see these radical right movements in Ireland yet? We do to a certain extent and people have tried, right? So there are quite far right groups in Ireland who are trying quite hard to have these kind of breakthroughs. And also they they come with all the rhetoric that we were talking about, about discrediting all the institutions of democracy, like whether it's like civil servants, whether it's journalists, just all of the sort of structures that uphold democracy, they seek to like so doubt and mistrust in. So those groups are right there and they are a choice for people. In terms of why people haven't gone for it, I mean, Ireland is, it does have specific historical circumstances in that we, we are a country which like provided an enormous amount of immigrants for the whole world. So there is a certain irony when Irish people start being like anti immigrant. Then another one is also that we are a little bit unlike many European countries in that we weren't a kind of major global colonizing power. And actually we were on the other half of that equation, right, we were actually colonized. So that gives us a very different political tradition. Our nationalism, our national movements grew out of national liberation movements. And they, we also have had political innovation in this country. We do actually have political innovation. And our big story is the rise of Sinn Fein. And it's really important that Sinn Fein as a party, and divide itself, it's in the nationalist party, but it's a progressive nationalist party. So that kind of that like eats up the space that there could be for a nationalist exclusionary party. So any anyone who wants to get into that space and sort of campaign on like, I don't know, Ireland first, something they're faced by a very, very strong competitor, which is extremely experienced in Ireland has, you know, built up a very effective party apparatus and is extremely well tuned in to political currents in the specific stark on societal context that there is. And also there's a limited number of people who actually are willing to go into politics and become politicians and be campaigners in any generation. And they have been already taken up by one party or another. So it can be difficult for and perhaps Sinn Fein so that it can be difficult for newcomers to just replicate good politicians and good campaigners out of nowhere. I don't know if that helps. Yeah, absolutely. I'll just go up on time, but I have my own kind of theory around, you know, the various groups that are supporting Sinn Fein. And, you know, I think there's more of an establishment group who are kind of not happy with the direction of the current parties. I think then maybe you have ideologically centre left voters as well people who want to United Ireland. But then I think there is that other group perhaps who are maybe a bit more fundamentally disillusioned with, you know, the establishment and government generally. I suppose my fear would be that I think those people are supporting broadly Sinn Fein now. That's not to say all Sinn Fein supporters are these people. But I think, you know, if you are one of these people who is fundamentally disillusioned with government and the state, I think quite a chunk of them are supporting Sinn Fein. So I suppose my fear would be that if Sinn Fein go into government, and I think it's probably more fundamentally when Sinn Fein go into government now at this point, and what happens then at that point when maybe those people look for an alternative. But I'm conscious we've come up on time. So thank you so much for all the great questions. I suppose maybe one more question tonight, only I'm conscious we're a young professionals network here and we might have people in the room who are maybe interested in a career in journalism at some point down the line. So maybe just quickly as we finish up, what your advice might be to anyone who's interested in a career in journalism. So I have it there's different ways in. Some people do like a journalism master's. I didn't do that because the investment required with too much of a gamble with an industry that doesn't have very many jobs. So I myself just started I got into student journalism as much as I could and then just started like pitching to more professional operations, not like big newspapers or something like that, but but online magazines and stuff tried to teach myself and then leaned in like you got to look at what you have that makes you stand out a bit. In my case, I happen to have another language like I had Italian because I did an Erasmus in Bologna and that was like my little edge that I had. So kind of use that plus a little bit of knowledge about financial markets and stuff and economics, which is useful in any job and journalism. I use that then to get on to the graduate training scheme of lawyers and then I kind of move my way in there. So opportunities are difficult, but you yeah, you need to assess what makes you stand out a little bit and kind of lean into that. Just almost start doing it like build a presence online, right? Or if you're whatever the whether it's video, whether it's audio, just try and actually do it. It's it's it's it's a it's a profession where it's very skills based. So it's things that you you just take time to learn things like interviewing people and like how to ask questions, how to not be nervous, sifting through all that information, getting the quotes, transcribing, spotting what the story is and writing it up. All of these things are like skills that are required over the time. And it's the same with audio editing, video editing and so on. So like the more you can just like develop them, the then if you can get an internship or a foot in the door or something at a media organization, you have a little bit of those skills already, that puts you in a position to just make yourself really useful. And you know, like journalists are into are in demand, people who can do the job are in demand. So yeah, I don't know if that helps, but if anyone wants to chat to me more about it afterwards, feel free to come up to me. Right. I think some I think some good advice there for anyone who's interested in all sorts of different careers. So thank you so much to Naomi for giving so generously of her time and expertise.