The results of the European parliamentary elections are in.
As expected, they represent a repudiation of the centre-Left politics that has governed Europe for the past generation. The dominant Christian Democrats of the European People’s Party (EPP), the Right-leaning ‘soft’ Eurosceptics of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and the nationalists of Identity and Democracy (ID) all added seats. The big losers, meanwhile, were not only the liberal centrists of Renew but also – and above all – the Greens.
It is too early to say what this will mean for the future direction of the EU, except in very broad terms. As Green influence over the EU wanes, there will be less political capital to spend on climate insanity. The EPP, which has been a terrible collaborator in abominations like the Green Deal, will probably be forced to seek more support from the parties to its Right instead. There may be some shift in momentum, but I am pessimistic that we will see any great change from this election alone. The EU is by design well-insulated from the popular will, and the great centre-Right villain of the past decades, the EPP, has only grown in strength.
But that is less than half the story. The EU parliamentary elections are not only about the EU; they are also an informal referendum on national politics, and here the seemingly minor shifts in party representation have had astounding consequences. In France, the National Rally party of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella bested Manuel Macron’s Renaissance party by 31.4% to 14.6%. In response, Macron has announced new elections and dissolved the National Assembly. In Belgium, where they hold elections for national and regional parliaments alongside the European election, Prime Minister Alexander De Croo has resigned in the face of strong gains by the New Flemish Alliance and Vlaams Belang.
We will not get new elections in Germany, but what is happening here is no less dramatic. The three parties of the coalition Government barely cracked 30% in Sunday’s vote, with the social democrats posting their worst results in history, and the Greens down a full 8.6 percentage points compared to their 2019 showing. It is a stinging repudiation of the traffic light coalition. Alternative für Deutschland, despite an endless string of media smears and manufactured scandals, came in at 15.9%, the second-strongest party in the Federal Republic behind the centre-Right CDU – and by far the strongest party in the East.
There are four points to make about these elections and their significance for Germany:
1. The Scholz Government has been Humiliated
As the election results rolled in and Macron announced new elections, the German Chancellor maintained a deafening silence. It took him a full day to acknowledge the defeat.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz first commented on his party’s performance on Monday evening. … “The election result were bad for all three governing parties,” he said.
“No one is well advised to simply go back to business as usual,” said Scholz. “At the same time, however, it is also important that we do our work to ensure that our country becomes modern and moves forward.”
Wolfram Weimer sums it up as follows:
With this European election, voters have… issued the coalition Government a death certificate. For months, the polls have shown that this Government is the most unpopular in history… Now the Germans have dramatically deprived their leaders of legitimacy. Any normal Government would draw the consequences and signal to the population: “We have understood.” … In France, President Emmanuel Macron is demonstrating in a particularly consistent way what this can mean with his decision to call a new election.
Scholz does not appear to have this courage. In fact, the Chancellor is apparently planning the opposite. Despite the result, which has been dubbed a ‘debacle’, a ‘lesson’ or a ‘disaster’, he appears unimpressed … In plain language: the Chancellor will not take responsibility, and he hopes to muddle through and sit out the crisis.
Whether he can do that is far from certain. His junior coalition partner, the liberal FDP, will use the election results as a reason to increase its intransigence in the ongoing budget negotiations for 2025. Being in Government has been a disaster for the liberals, and they face a serious chance of disappearing from the German Bundestag entirely in next year’s elections as they continue to bleed voters. Thus, as Weimer writes, “the budget dispute represents for them an opportunity for heroic resistance and even a last-ditch way out of the coalition”. It may be in the interests of the FDP to bring down the Government rather than continue to associate itself with this catastrophe.
Weimer further notes that the SPD has lost 40% of its voters between 2021 and today, and that in the coming elections in Brandenburg, Thüringen and Saxony it will be humiliated yet again. It is not beyond question, for example, that the SPD will fail to meet the 5% threshold and disappear from one or more eastern state parliaments entirely. The internal pressure on Scholz is only growing, in other words, and nothing would be more in keeping with the history of the social democrats than for his own party to bring him down before the voters get their chance.
2. The Greens are in Crisis
Above all it is the youngest voters who are leaving the Greens. Among those 24 years old and younger, 34% voted either for the CDU or the AfD. This is a stinging rebuke for a party that has presented itself as a youth movement and as the way of the future. The problem is both that climate politics are losing their salience for much of the electorate, and that the Greens have terrified everybody:
The decisive factor for the Greens… is that their issue of climate protection has not attracted voters, but rather deterred them. Since Economics Minister Habeck’s Heating Ordinances, the mood has increasingly turned against climate protection and more and more against the Greens.
“We have overestimated the willingness to change,” Green veteran politician Jürgen Trittin said …
The problem for the party is that it cannot hope that anything will change here… One way forward might be to distance themselves from climate issues, and rather to emphasise that they will not leave people to fend for themselves when it comes to climate change … and to ensure social balance. “We have to tell the story differently,” a leading Green politician says.
When the party leaders… appeared before the press… on Monday afternoon, it seemed as if they wanted to put this realisation into practice straight away. They spoke of “security” again and again. This kind of talk is otherwise familiar only from the CDU …
On Sunday evening, some admitted that this tactic had limited prospects. After all, the federal Government is currently negotiating an austerity budget. More social support is hardly possible.
The Leftist parties are caught in a trap of their own making. Their insane home heating ordinances merely accelerated the gradual decay of climate change as a political issue in the Federal Republic, and since the courts ruled against their budgetary wizardry last November, they have no money. A Leftist party that cannot increase entitlements and that manages to be more terrifying than its own sermons about the climate apocalypse has nothing to offer anyone.
This is one facet of a much bigger political shift that will mark the coming decades. Social democracy is already in long-term decline, not only in Germany but across Europe, and if indeed it is true that the Greens have had their moment and are facing a future as a marginal party too small to play coalition king-makers, you have to ask what will become of the Left more broadly. They have no successor movement waiting in the wings, and their own political clients – the migrants they have welcomed to Europe by the millions – have an entirely different illiberal political vision.
3. The Fight against the Right Amounted to Nothing
For months we have had nothing but one freakout after the other about “the extreme Right”. Chancellor Olaf Scholz called millions of people into the streets in January to defend democracy against the alleged fascists of the AfD. His Interior Minister and our constitutional protectors have issued proposal after proposal to harass and intimidate their political opponents and to realign the “thought and speech patterns” of ordinary Germans. They have denounced the alleged violent tendencies of AfD supporters and their general “contempt for politics” and demanded that the “silent majority” put the Right-wing extremists in their place.
And after all of that, the AfD is still the second-strongest party in Germany. Yes, it claimed only 15.9% of the votes, well below its polling high around 23% last autumn. Part of that loss, however, is down to competition from the new party of Sahra Wagenknecht, and in any case we must remember that the regime has thrown literally everything it has at the AfD for half a year now. Fake Nazi hysteria, strange stories about collusion with Russia and China, even the late-breaking scandal over Maximilian Krah’s interview with Italian media and the ensuing split with the Identity and Democracy faction – for months our media would talk about little else. The blitz was powerfully reminiscent of the Covid insanity, and in the end the AfD is still standing.
If anything, the attacks have only hardened the convictions of its core voters. Fully 95% of AfD supporters “think it’s good that the party wants to further limit the influx of foreigners and refugees”, 90% “think it’s good that there’s a party that wants to fundamentally reform the EU”, and 82% “don’t care that the party is considered partly Right-wing extreme, as long as it addresses the correct issues”.
Suddenly the press is singing a different, and much more measured, tune:
The affairs surrounding the AfD’s leading candidates for the EU parliament have clearly not harmed the party at all. Nor has it been harmed by the fact that the other Right-wing parties in the European Parliament have turned away in disgust from the Right-wing populists centred around Maximilian Krah. The secret meeting in Potsdam, at which AfD representatives (and also CDU members) pondered the mass expulsion of migrants, did not diminish the AfD’s success either. Neither did the categorisation of high-ranking party representatives as Right-wing extremists.
It is clear that the AfD has become a popular party in the East. And it has successfully immunised itself against criticism. It can now expect the votes of a core constituency, no matter how scandalous the party may appear. … This is also due to the fact that the party has created its own counter-public – primarily via social media. It reaches young voters like no other party via TikTok. Sixteen and 17-year-olds in Brandenburg can also vote in the state elections in the autumn.
4. The East-West Split
The German election results, colour coded by dominant party and broken down by district, yield a clear pattern:
Aside from the urban centres, German voters are no longer divided about whether the Right or the Left represents the best path forward for the nation. Instead, they are divided about which flavour of ‘the Right’ they prefer, with the Union parties continuing to command the plurality of support in the West, and the AfD becoming overwhelmingly the choice of the East.
This split has establishment politicians worried:
In light of these results, Thuringia’s Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow (Left Party) has warned of a growing divide between East and West Germans. “In social networks after the European elections, I now read sentences like: ‘Where is the gratitude of the East Germans?’ These are questions that we don’t need right now,” Ramelow said. …
“The East has nothing to apologise for. It should rather be seen as an opportunity. Instead, emotional unity is increasingly collapsing. And the fact that East Germans are expected to be grateful [for reunification] is fuelling this spiral,” Ramelow continued.
Hendrik Wüst, who is CDU Minister President of Nordrhein-Westfalen, wants more cultural exchange between the East and the West, apparently because he imagines that the easterners are just under-socialised or something:
“It’s time for a Unification Treaty 2.0 that not only brings formal unity but also brings people together better – for greater trust and cohesion between East and West,” Wüst said… “Because dialogue creates trust and opens up prospects for greater mutual understanding.”
What Wüst and many others like him are too stupid to realise, is that it’s the West that is the anomaly here. Consider France, where the ‘Right-wing extreme’ National Rally and Reconquest together claimed well over 30% of the vote in most districts. In Italy, the Fratelli d’Italia and the Lega together saw similar results. The preferences of East Germans in this context just look normal. It’s the Wessies who are outliers and isolated with their insanity in the broader European context, who are out of step with the political preferences of younger generations, and whose lectures for all of these reasons will only grow more strident and less convincing every day.
This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
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Mark Steyn made the best comment on this many years ago.
Decrying the airport security checks, building checks, scanners, barriers, concrete blocks in every town, city, he said to just be honest about the problem. Islamists.
Ban them. Outlaw them. Refuse them entry. Expel those who are here.
It really is that simple unless your afraid or want them to vote for you.
To the government, every non-compliant individual is a threat.
You think this will only be about Islamists?
We’re all terrorists now. Well, not really – but we are being treated as if we are.
I think the real problem is politicians seeking popular approval. This means when something like 9/11 happens, something must be done about it, even when nobody has an idea what could be done about it which would actually work. Let this fester for twenty odd years and you end up with something like today’s totally bizarre dangerous goods regulations.
All of the following are dangerous good which must not be brought into an aircraft.
However, a single disposable lighter filled with flammable gas under pressure (and thus, a potentially explosive device(!)) using a flint for ignition is not a dangerous good and may thus be brought onto a plane.
It’s hard to fathom how something like this could come into being in another way than Joe Public Offical calling Zippo Manufacturing Company and asking “Hey guys! How much are you willing to pay if we don’t ban bringing any of your products into a plane?” and after no satisfactory offer was made, the list about was the outcome.
Which is why people with the same opinion as Steyn need to box more clever so the establishment UN and WEF lackeys cannot get rid of them so easy.
Who invited them here? Our politicians of course. And who elected them?
Anyone who has voted for establishment parties over the last 30 years has voted for the end of our culture, our identity, our replacement, our safety and our security. How could anyone not have seen exactly what our political class were up to? You didn’t need to be a genius, you could see it unfurling with your own eyes, year in, year out.
Expel the I*slami*ts by all means but I am quite comfortable in expelling the establishment party voters too – they are a menace and a threat to what is left of our broken country.
Expel most people? I expect most people vote to keep someone out rather than in.
Ummmm, HMG introduces a Bill to combat terrorism requiring cricket clubs to undergo “training”. Meanwhile, those world class upholders of the Law of this land, led handsomely by the Met and “LawLite Rowley” actively, with exceptions for sure….:
Tempted to say I find this hard to understand but cannot lie – I understand completely why this happens. UK police has been taken over by UFLW Police College graduates – easy to spot them because when giving statements to the Press they use 50 words, many of multiple syllables, most of which are meaningless – when half a dozen would be enough – AND very thick regulars at the local tattoo parlour.
Rowley claims “no evidence” that pro Palestine march will be anything other than peaceful. Bollux – ” watch the footage, and turn up the audio, arrange for translation and subtitles, of the previous marches. Multiple examples of breaches of the peace, overt support for an illegal terrorist organisation; Cenotaph defaced, other War memorials likewise and Poppy sellers assaulted. Hundreds of thousands of people involved, <200 token arrests – any bets for how many the CPS prosecute..? Thought not.
Mark Steyn is 100% right; and it is going to get a lot worse very soon.
If you ever needed proof that the laws of today are created by people who have done nothing, made nothing and understand nothing, apart from that that is within their own safe little gold fish bowl existence, then this is it.
Create an atmosphere of distrust in your club such that no-one wants to attend (at notable expense) or close. One less unmoderated forum in which to criticise the government.
An individual standing alone, could be construed as loitering with intent, 3 people a conspiracy, Darby and Joan coffee mornings a target for a terrorist attack, where the real treat to civil liberties comes from the very people who are responsible for its continuance.
But that’s the root of the problem right there. They actually believe they’re responsible for our liberty now. That it’s theirs to apportion out to us if we’ve been very very good – like a kid getting Haribo after using the toilet for the first time.
Red, yellow, green or blue, we need to smash these feudalist imbeciles to atoms. The current political system is broken beyond repair.
It’s less a belief in responsibility for our liberty, more an insatiable desire to control.
It’s “theirs to apportion” because they took it and we have yet to stop them. These people have no more or less rights than anyone else. What we see is the success of action over inaction.
It will probably be pubs and concert halls next. Obviously any place where plebs gather and DISCUSS is now fair game.
One more stone on the heavy load of rules and regulations that already bears down on us.
The best way for me to describe this sort of petty, needless, meddling regulation is ‘suffocating’.
So when you say churches, are you including mosques? Asking for a friend.
Don’t be silly. Everyone knows islam is the religion of peace.
Well done for remembering to take your “savage irony” medication today.
They already get plenty of terrorism instruction.
If you recall, numerous village halls, community sports clubs & facilities, churches, etc reduced capacity to meet the miraculous 6 ft plandemic limit. It’ll be interesting to see just how many suddenly reduce overall capacity to 99.
Good point.
A better point is how many Cricket clubs which have any, a majority or wholly consisting of members of a certain religious persuasion adhere to the proposed requirement to undergo anti terrorist training.
Safe to say some cricket clubs are going to find that requirement a lot easier than others….
Will the eventual act allow for such training to have “learning material” in any language? I foresee a lot of opportunities for lateral thinking and satire – if Plod willl allow that freedom of expression….
Picture Vito Corleone at the meeting of the 5 families and their associates after a turf war and the assassination Sonny Corleone; “How has it come to this” he asks with a shake of the head. What happened next after the accommodation reached resulted in a truce?
Death and destruction. I hope life does not reflect that high class art.
The devil will be in the detail. Will it be per room or per building.
Some “small” cafes, pubs and restaurants over 2 floors could exceed this number. Will it include those sitting at tables outside in a courtyard?
I am just counting some of my rural favourites in my head and they could exceed.
What about the barn our friendly farmer lends us each October for a harvest festival supper for the parish? We don’t have any village halls and are a 5 parish combination. Many non-church goers attend.
We all have to undergo police checks and safeguarding training if we’re dealing with children (or at-risk adults, come to that), but in practice children are mutilated and put on sex-hormones despite it all and those invoking safeguarding guidelines are sacked or prosecuted..
I wonder how many people, in a village church or scout group targeted by Islamist jihadists will survive such an attack, who wouldn’t have done without the designated person undergoing the anti-terrorism training? Or perhaps they really do mean the terrorism of angry parents attending school-board meetings there.
This is just another part of the attack on our civilisation that has been going on for a long time but became extra-vicious after 97 and even worse since the last GE.
I resigned from the local scout group committee when they introduced CRB checks, which I considered entirely unnecessary since I had zero interaction with the youngsters at all.
This won’t fix terrorism. However, it will generate a cottage industry in anti-terrorism inspectors under OFTER. There will be an army of inspectors armed with tick-boards checking that everybody has undergone the mandatory video training and questionnaire. We had this with Housing Energy Efficiency ratings, COVID compliance snoopers, and coloured bin enforcers. A couple of decades ago under OFSTED the inspectors had to check that school lesson plans supported The Narrative on Global Warming and the NSPCC Narrative on “Indicants of SRA”. More recently we had the precursors of the DIE standards being introduced into the school curriculum.
Much of this has the side effect of creating a Climate of Fear in the general population, that it may be “clamorous to be led to safety” [vide Mencken], usually by paying more taxes and foregoing long fought-for freedoms.
The definition is problematic for many reasons. I wouldn’t worry about it. You are never going to be free of enemies. Even if you destroy all your political enemies still some people would hate you for your looks or personality. Just understand the language of the heart.That is the true test in our time.
Pubs affected too?
Counter Productive
A lot of this stuff ends up being mindless box ticking counter productive buck passing nonsense. I have done ‘on-line’ safeguarding, diversity and equality training, you sit at your computer with headphones on and tick obvious answers to banal questions. At the end you are pronounced trained to some level or other. In practice you have learned nothing and proved nothing but the boxes are ticked.
Everyone then complacency does nothing more because everyone has been supposedly trained. In effect this increases any risk as people assume this totally ineffective training has done the job.
It does achieve one important thing. It means that in the event of an ‘incident’ somewhere down the line, the organisation which mandated the ‘training’ can point to your having taken part, and correct ticking of all the boxes, and therefore pass the buck on to you.
Intended to make people fearful ….. nudge, nudge, nudge ….. shove.
Yes, let’s give an 84 year old Christian sitting in a wheelchair, anti- terrorism training. They closed all the mental asylums but one………..Parliament
May I be rude and correct you – three, HoC, HoL and Whitehall….?
We import all of the worlds sectarian clutter and expect everything to tick along just fine. ————–Eh no it won’t and it isn’t.
It hasn’t worked in France, Belgium, Holland, Sweden and now Germany…?