Europe’s elites have been huddling in a defensive crouch to shield themselves pre-emptively from what they regard as the catastrophe of a looming second Donald Trump presidency.
From their chancelleries, newsrooms, academic common rooms and plush corporate and bureaucratic corner offices, they have watched with horror political trends in the US.
They can’t believe that instead of gratefully returning Joe Biden and his enlightened Democrats for four more years of the green revolution, vast increases in state spending and further devotion to the modern religion of diversity, equity and inclusion, American voters from no-name places between New York and California may succeed again in placing in the White House the man these continental elites regard as the greatest threat to democracy ever.
But it turns out it isn’t the American electorate our cultured European friends most have to fear. It’s their own people. It isn’t the loud-mouthed New Yorker with his deplorable views on fossil fuels, immigration and national security but the rising tide of populist leaders in their own countries that poses the largest threat to Europe’s comfortable establishment.
The past weekend’s elections for the European parliament provided the clearest evidence yet that large numbers of voters have had enough of the bipartisan progressive-green-secularist-globalist consensus under which they have been governed for years.
France, Germany, Spain, Italy and smaller countries saw huge advances by parties of the right that oppose mass immigration, reject extreme climate measures and resist the continuing dissolution of their civilisation into a relativist, multicultural mush.
In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, which has campaigned for years against the erosion of the country’s national identity and security through mass immigration, especially by Muslims, led the poll with almost 32 per cent. President Emmanuel Macron’s Renew party scored less than half that.
The political shock was so great, with Le Pen now firmly established as favourite in the 2027 presidential election, that Macron stunned the country by announcing immediate parliamentary elections ahead of the Paris Olympics next month. His thinking seemed to be that by translating the right’s victory in elections to a largely impotent EU parliament into control of a legislatively meaningful national parliament, he might manage to expose their lack of governing capability in the run-up to 2027. It’s a high-risk bet.
In Germany the Social Democratic Party of Chancellor Olaf Scholz was roundly rejected, as were his green and liberal coalition allies. The right-wing Alternative for Germany made big gains, as did the centre-right Christian Democrats.
In Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialist Party was beaten into second place by the mainstream conservatives, but again populist right-wing parties made the biggest advances.
The only incumbent major European leader not to see her party trounced was Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose populist Brothers of Italy is already the main governing party.
Much of the media – on both sides of the Atlantic – has reacted with predictable alarm, describing these as votes as victories for the “far right”. An instant implicit association with Nazis and fascists. But while some in these parties surely espouse an ugly extremism, most simply want to cut migration, put a brake on the self-destructive race to net-zero carbon emissions and address Europe’s chronic structural economic problems.
The big losers everywhere were the green parties, which lost 21 of their 73 European seats, providing confirmation of the progressives’ retreat everywhere.
What about Britain, that former EU member that has its own national election on July 4? Isn’t the Conservative party about to be crushed by Labour – which is thoroughly green, woke and globalist – in what polls suggest may be the biggest defeat for the Tories since their founding almost 200 years ago?
True, but look beyond who will step through the door of 10 Downing Street on July 5. A tectonic shift is taking place underneath the British surface.
The Conservatives are set for a drubbing as much because of their loss of votes to the Reform UK party, led by perennial right-wing gadfly Nigel Farage, whose campaign for Britain to leave the EU was a key reason for Brexit. He has been flaying the Tories under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak for failing to deal with immigration, for its green obsessions and for producing socialist-level taxation and spending.
He may not win a seat because of an electoral system that punishes small parties, but his influence over an annihilated post-election Conservative party may grow dramatically
It was said of the 1848 revolutions in Europe – when sundry liberals, socialists and nationalists tried but failed to overthrow the anciens regimes of the continent — that Europe, unlike America 70 years earlier, had reached a turning point and failed to turn. Perhaps Europe, emulating America this time, is now turning after all.
The Wall Street Journal
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