TITLE: The EU has been shaken to its core
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/10/the-eu-has-been-shaken-to-its-core/
EXCERPT: These elections have…busted a number of persistent myths about anti-establishment voters. The caricature of these voters as angry, racist Baby Boomers needs to be retired immediately. For one thing, young people, all across Europe, are also rejecting the woke, green Europhile consensus. In France, a third of voters aged 18 to 24 told pollsters they would back [the right-wing populist National Rally (RN)], led in the European Parliament by 28-year-old Jordan Bardella. (Bardella is tipped to be the next French prime minister, if RN repeats Sunday’s success in the upcoming legislative elections.) In Germany, the centre-left government’s decision to lower the voting age to 16 seems to have backfired spectacularly, with polls putting youth support for the [hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD)] between 18 and 22 per cent – a higher proportion of support than in other age groups.
Nor is the rise of the European right all about immigration, as we so often hear. The EU Green Deal, which includes a vast array of costly and authoritarian measures aimed at bringing down carbon emissions, has infuriated voters across the continent. The fiercest opposition to these Net Zero policies has come from Europe’s farmers, who have staged angry, disruptive protests in just about every EU member state. Right-populists were quick to jump on the bandwagon. Unsurprisingly, parties that have challenged the EU’s climate agenda have tended to make gains in these elections, whereas green parties have faced heavy losses all across the bloc. In Germany, once an environmentalist stronghold, the Green Party’s vote share has nearly halved since the last EU elections. The French greens, Les Ecologistes, only just managed to avoid a total wipeout. In the eyes of the European public, ‘green’ has become a byword for bureaucratic interference and deindustrialisation.
Voters have used these elections to deliver a powerful challenge, both to their complacent rulers at home and to the unelected bureaucracy in Brussels. The mainstream elite consensus – on borders, climate change and ever-greater EU integration – is coming under unprecedented populist pressure. The EU has rarely felt more fragile.
TITLE: Why Europe is lurching to the right
https://www.vox.com/politics/354601/european-parliament-elections-macron-afd-national-rally-far-right-fidesz-france
EXCERPT: [It’s] important to remember that elections are often rejections of the incumbent, especially when people are struggling with daily cost-of-living expenses; inflation remains elevated, especially in countries like Austria, and sanctions on Russian fuel have driven up energy costs. That means these elections weren’t just about embracing the right, but voters wanting to rebuke centrist and left-leaning policies they felt weren’t working for them.
This weekend’s elections followed that rule — yes, far-right groups…won a larger number of seats than they had in the previous election five years ago. But the left and Green parties also lost seats, and centrist parties like the [European People's Party (EPP)] — which still has the largest number of seats of any party — moved to the right ideologically in some ways, like on immigration policy, to cater to right-leaning voters.
“The immigration crisis, to the extent there is one, it's just one of five or six big crises, which have rocked the European Union over the last 15 years,” Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, told Vox. “The picture is different from country to country. So if you look at countries like Poland or Estonia, the biggest driver is the Ukraine war. If you look at Germany, it is immigration. But in places like France and Denmark, it's the climate crisis, which has the widest constituency. And in a lot of southern European countries, it's still the economic crisis” of 2008 and 2009.
Therefore, it was difficult for any party to campaign on one marquee issue, like many on the right previously did on Euroscepticism or pulling out of Europe. And that is one thing that separates today’s ascendent right from the early days of the movement: It isn’t trying to gain power in order to dissolve the European Union.
“Brexit — many British voters regret it, so I think that [far-right parties] don't want to go through that experience,” said [Patrick Chamorel, who researches populism, political movements, and fractures in Western democracies at the Stanford Center]. “They'd rather influence the EU from inside. So that's true for most European far-right parties with the exception of Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party in Hungary.”
The war in Ukraine also made it much more difficult to imagine breaking from the union and having to face a threat like Russia alone, although that’s a more significant concern for countries closer to Russia like Sweden and Finland than it is for Western European nations like France and Germany. That means the far right is more likely to use its new power to try to reshape EU policy. How much influence it will actually have, however, remains an open question.
TITLE: Europe's insurgent Right won't change anything
https://unherd.com/2024/06/europes-insurgent-right-wont-change-anything/
EXCERPT: Before we fall down the trap of predicting a Right-populist dystopia, there are, however, some important caveats. While it is true that the Commission is nominated by the national governments, and thus it may appear like the latter are in control, it is equally true that the supranational institutions of the European Union hold a huge sway over national governments, insofar as they control crucial aspects of their economic policy. This is especially true in the eurozone, where the European Commission and the European Central Bank (ECB) can effectively enforce whatever policy they want on elected governments — and even forcibly remove them from office, as they did with Silvio Berlusconi in 2011.
This means that, in the eurozone at least, the political survival of governments largely depends on the goodwill of the EU. This is why even Right-populist parties, once they get into government — or start to think that they have a good chance of doing so — tend to quickly realign with the establishment, in the European Council as well as in the European Parliament. Take Giorgia Meloni. On all major issues, Italy’s prime minister has aligned her government with the EU and Nato — and has signalled her willingness to support a second term for von der Leyen, with whom she has developed a close relationship. In France, meanwhile, Marine Le Pen has also started to undergo a process of “Melonification” — abandoning her anti-euro platform and softening her position on Russia-Ukraine and Nato. Even if her National Rally party wins France’s forthcoming elections, all the signs suggest it won’t be the disruptive force she is promising.
There’s also another to point to be considered. On the one hand, the fact that the European Parliament, the only democratically elected institution in the EU, exercises some oversight over the Commission’s policies, might be seen as a positive development. In this sense, the bigger presence of the Right-populist parties will certainly have an impact of the legislative process, especially on highly polarising issues such as the European Green Deal and immigration.
But on the other, this doesn’t change the fact that the European Parliament remains politically toothless. The entire legislative process — which takes places through a system of informal tripartite meetings on legislative proposals between representatives of the Parliament, the Commission, the Council — is opaque to say the least. This, as the Italian researchers Lorenzo Del Savio and Matteo Mameli have written, is exacerbated by the fact that European Parliament is “physically, psychologically and linguistically more distant from ordinary people than national ones are”, which in turn makes it more susceptible to the pressure of lobbyists and well-organised vested interests. As a result, even the most well-meaning politicians, once they get to Brussels, tend to get sucked into its bubble.
On an even more fundamental level, none of this will ever change, even if the European Parliament is granted full legislative powers; for the simple reason that there is no European demos for the Parliament to represent. Such a demos — a political community generally defined by a shared and relatively homogenous language, culture, history, normative system — still only exists at the national level. Indeed, the EU remains deeply fractured along national economic, geopolitical and cultural fault lines — and this looks unlikely to change.
All this means that, while we may expect a change of direction on some issues, these elections are unlikely to solve the pressing economic, political and geopolitical problems afflicting the EU: stagnation, poverty, internal divergences, democratic disenfranchisement and, perhaps most crucially for the continent’s future, the bloc’s aggressive Nato-isation and militarisation in the context of escalating tensions with Russia. In this sense, it’s hardly surprising that around half of Europeans didn’t even bother to vote. Ultimately, the EU was built precisely to resist populist insurgencies such as this one. The sooner populists come to terms with it, the better.