Point: as far as Europe goes, its collective elections are like its pop music… there is something very basically skew-whiff about it all — a Wes Anderson touch. So it wouldn’t do to make too much of them. The paradox of the EU elections, held last week and with stonking victories for the right, is that they fail to draw to the polls the people who most believe in the project and the liberal, borderless, post-national ideal it represents, while those voting most fervently and reliably want to abolish the very institution they are voting for. It’s really nothing to pay much attention to.
Counterpoint: panic. Absolutely panic.
Coming weeks before the UK elections and the just announced snap French Assembly elections, the elections to the European Parliament saw a complex process of movements, across the board. They were almost all related to immigration.
Thus in Germany, the Greens lost nine seats, down from 21 to 12, and the Left Party lost two of their five. The Alternative for Germany gained for seats, but the BSW, a breakaway from the Left Party that’s in favour of heavy cuts to immigration, gained six.
In France, Macron’s “Ensemble” coalition lost 10, to 13 down from 23; the Greens went from 12 to five; and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally gained seven to now hold 30 seats.
Italy looked like a move to the centre-right, but it was really a transfer from the old discredited League to Giorgia Meloni. The far-right Freedom Party in Austria doubled their number to six, and Vox in Spain went from four to six. There were a couple of small Green and Left gains, but it was largely the right’s night.
Now obviously there is a catch here. The EU Parliament is a giant con and talking shop, since the EU is run by commissions composed by nationally elected governments, and all the decisions are made there. Progressives know that, in cultural matters, the EU is an agent of their values. Its economic neoliberalism is more obscured, and anyway, there is no guarantee of a fit of left economic to left cultural positions, since so many progressives are now prosperous.
But if progressivism, or the left more generally, were in rude health, it would be piling into the election to this powerless body in any case, simply to keep the right out and ensure its own dominance. That the left can’t draw people in is a product of the way in which progressivism and the state have overlapped, if not fused.
Sure, progressive parties turn out, but there has been nothing like the grassroots enthusiasm that their supporters have displayed in national politics. Into that vacuum has rushed the right, starting with Nigel Farage’s UKIP a decade or so ago, followed by the Farage-Revolutionary Communist Party co-pro, the Brexit Party. With voluntary voting driving the European election towards 30% in several of the voting regions, Farage’s barmy army cleaned up.
Few of the new right forces will use the Parliament as Farage did: as salaries and office space to run their national insurgency. Those on the continent who want to leave the EU are a small minority. The hard right varies in their demands on it.
The overwhelming one, as it is across the world, is that the nation should control its own borders and immigration flows. But this has already been done by figures such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, without censure. Italy’s Meloni, and the “Brothers of Italy” — a political movement that sounds like a Thornbury olive oil collective — are more Thatcherite in their free market liberal-conservative mix, and want a lifting of EU restrictions on working hours, conditions etc. Many of her supporters did not know this — they were deserting the “League” and the populist Five Star movement, both of which were perceived to have sold out. After a poor result in Sardinia in February, it seemed as if they were starting to desert Meloni, as she becomes drawn into the system. Perhaps some voters still are, but this result is a boost.
The great victor has been Marine Le Pen and the National Rally — certainly against the conventional right, which they have now thoroughly replaced. Gaullisme, c’est fini. Will the Rally now cruise on to victory in the snap elections that Macron called after the vote? The French president had hoped to capitalise on conflict within the right, and their organisational demi-arsedness to sweep to victory in a three-week campaign. Now, the right appears to have pulled itself together, while Macron’s centrist party has fallen behind.
Macron had hoped to become, once again, the Popular Front candidate, the eternal return of past French politics. Now, Le Pen has presented herself as the representative of “everyone else” promising to work with Macron — who has another two years to run as president — and govern responsibly blah blah. Macron’s Popular Front has become his Maginot Line.
Should Donald Trump gain the White House and Le Pen the uh, whatever building the Assembly meets in, then only Sir Keir Starmer and UK Labour remain as a systemic bulwark in the UK. And there, Reform UK appears to be gaining ground on the Conservatives as the right party. Which is another story. Ca plane pour moi.
Counterpoint: the right, drawn into system management, will be discredited, giving great opportunity to the left. Point: the BSW’s result shows the left can win if it listens to what working people are saying about immigration. Counterpointpoint: it will not.
