Illegal immigration and cost of energy help shape European election results

French far-right National Rally party leader Marine Le Pen speaks on the final day of the European Parliament election. Picture: AFP

The European elections have shown the continent moving to the right, substantially, but not quite dramatically. It was a tough election for incumbents. The right won in big European countries, the German Greens declined, and French President Emmanuel Macron’s Renew party was humiliated.

A few big things emerge clearly. Europeans don’t like mass immigration from North Africa and the Arab Middle East, they don’t like the high cost of renewable energy and associated climate change costs, they hate the general rise in the cost of living, and don’t have much faith in any parties, so change their vote pretty often.

Elections for the European parliament produce substantially lower turnout than national elections, 51 per cent this time. People treat them like by-elections, sending a message to their governments.

Back before Brexit, Nigel Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party often won British elections for the European parliament. But in national elections, though it sometimes polled millions of votes, UKIP barely won a seat. Elections for the European parliament use proportional representation, so citizens get much more value from protest votes.

Increasingly, voters shape national politics partly through European elections, even though the European parliament has limited powers. In this election, parties that even six years ago would have been called far right – indeed are still sometimes misleadingly given that label – were outright winners in three leading European nations, France, Italy and Austria. These are big nations with no recent history of voting irresponsibly.

Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, the successor to her father’s National Front, smashed the polls in France. It won just shy of 32 per cent of the national French vote. That’s about what the ALP won in Australia at the last election. This is more than double the vote for Macron’s party.

At one level, it seems strange indeed that Macron would respond by calling a national parliamentary election. His position as President is unthreatened, and he has not enjoyed a parliamentary majority since 2022. The French often have their directly elected president from one party and their parliament with a majority in the hands of the president’s opponents, a happy circumstance the French call cohabitation.

Macron may have two primary thoughts in mind. With the exception of Italy, the hard-right parties have generally been very good at protest but not had any or much experience at government, and show no particular aptitude for it. Macron may feel that the French have got their protest vote out of their system and wouldn’t knowingly embrace the institutional logjam and conflict that electing a parliament directly at odds with the President may well bring.

On the other hand, Macron could also feel that even if National Rally wins a parliamentary majority, this could be a Pyrrhic victory. If it wins a parliamentary majority, and provides a prime minister, but is no more capable of solving France’s problems than Macron has proved, voters may look elsewhere in the presidential election of 2027. Macron can’t run in 2027, as the president is limited to two terms. But he certainly doesn’t want National Rally to win the presidency.

Italy is a fascinating case study. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, leading the Brothers of Italy party, was one of very few incumbents to increase her vote, doubling her party’s numbers in the European parliament. She is proving a master politician. It’s utterly absurd to continue to label her as far right.

In Germany, the more genuinely far-right Alternative for Germany, which has had a chaotic series of scandals and extremist remarks lately, nonetheless substantially increased its vote and came second to the Christian Democrats. AfD won more votes than Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats or his coalition partner, the Greens.

The Greens suffered a dramatic loss of support. The German Greens are about 5000 times more sensible, responsible, and trustworthy in government than the Australian Greens, but nonetheless the climate and energy policies they’ve pushed have been disastrous for Germany. The European giant was so rich and successful it apparently thought it could pay any price for green policies and still remain wealthy. The high cost of its renewable energy extremism, as outlined on this page by Nick Cater on Monday, has been disastrous for the German economy and will only get worse.

The governing German coalition would lose massively on these figures to the Christian Democrats. Some elements of this overall European electoral revolt, such as resistance to net-zero policies, will grow, some will dissipate, and some have no meaningful policy to embrace.

The centre-right parties did well in this election too, and their grouping, the European People’s Party, will be the biggest single bloc in the European parliament. Yet in terms of policy stagnation, unrealistic and costly energy schemes, ineffective efforts to control mass and illegal immigration and generally feeble economic performance, they have been about as hopeless as the centre left. Some of the so-called hard-right parties, such as Meloni’s, thoroughly deserve their turn in government. Others, such as the AfD, look manifestly unfit for government.

Three particularly damaging trends continue to hurt European politics. One is the effort by all the mainstream parties to demonise the parties of the hard right, even if they don’t espouse extremist policies. If they’re sceptical of bankrupting the economy on the basis of climate policy, or want more restrictions on illegal Middle East immigration, the establishment has branded them extremists.

This has partly driven them to extremes. Le Pen’s party had a great deal of difficulty getting finance from French banks, so she ended up doing deals with Russian and Hungarian banks. But banks have no business judging people’s politics, just as it is absurd and dangerous that Australian banks baulk at financing coalmines and the like, when the parliament has decided that these are legal.

That leads to another problem in European politics. Some of the populist parties have gone beyond legitimate issues like opposing Green policy extremism, illegal immigration and cost of living. They’ve become so paranoid about all government institutions, and so contemptuous of all contemporary policy, especially policy that doesn’t put money directly in their voters’ pockets, they have become enemies of responsible defence and security measures. Some have been seduced by one our age’s greatest tyrants, Vladimir Putin.

And finally, no matter how Europeans vote, the EU bureaucracy goes on its merry way with its green obsessions, its immigration foolishness, its economic mismanagement and its periodic refusal to honour democracy. Mediocre decline versus social revolution looks like it could be the unpalatable choice for Europeans in the years ahead.