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.
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I fear this is no good news story. My gut tells me something is a afoot.
More EU election gubbins here. Yes everybody’s a Nazi, so say the antidemocratic, free speech-hating, censorship-loving actual Nazis. Another lot who have perfected the art of projection;
”With the EU election over and national conservatives standing significantly stronger in most EU countries—including the two largest, Germany and France—mainstream party leaders are showing just how little they learned from what happened. Instead of listening to the people who are increasingly rejecting Europe’s dominant center-left paradigm, some are still working towards alienating them. Because, as Rod Dreher wrote in his recent column, “it is always easier to blame the supposed evils of those one hates than face up to your own side’s failures.”
During a live television event on Sunday night, Chancellor Scholz’s ruling Social Democrat (SPD) party’s co-leader, Lars Klingbeil, called the members of the national conservative AfD “Nazis” while the AfD co-chair Alice Weidel was there with him in the studio.
“The result of the European elections is a wake-up call for many people to realize that the Nazis have become stronger in this election,” Klingbeil said shortly after the provisional results came in.
Naturally, Weidel snapped and asked who he was referring to exactly. “You know that I mean the AfD and you,” the SPD chief replied. Weidel asked, “You just called me and the party Nazis?” “Yes,” Klingbeil answered.
The comment came just after it had been confirmed that, despite the constant demonization from all corners of German society, AfD finished second with nearly 16%, ahead of all three parties of the ruling ‘traffic light coalition,’ including the SPD.
The same is happening in France, where Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin from Macron’s ruling Renaissance party equated Marine Le Pen’s election winner National Rally (RN) with the Nazi regime.
The obvious counterproductivity of this hypocritical fuss about the “far-right” didn’t escape X-owner Elon Musk, who posted that he didn’t understand the outrage in the center. “They keep saying “far right”, but the policies of AfD that I’ve read about don’t sound extremist. Maybe I’m missing something,” the billionaire wrote.”
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/commentary/name-calling-shows-eu-establishment-learned-nothing-from-the-election/
For Scholz, this is very easy: The AfD is in favour of a moderately¹ more positive view of Germany and Germans than the establishment parties. And hence, they are Nazis to him, this still being code language for Germans who do not constantly feel guilt-ridden for this.
¹ Among other things, they want to have the clause in the UN charter which allows military intervention in Germany by USA, Great Britain, France or Russia if politicians of either country are really unhappy with German domestic politics removed. It’s only a moderately more positive view because they routinely engage in Russia-worship for “liberating Germany” (from really evil stuff like Stetting and Danzig and Königsberg and Breslau and the entirely abhorrent Rominter Heide …).
Ossis recognise tyranny when they see it.
The AfD was originally founded as anti-Euro and anti-EU pro-German party by a (neo-)liberal professor of economics. It’s actuallly called Alternative für Deutschland (alternate choice for Germany) because the establishment parties routinely claim that there is no alternative to the German-underwritten European sovereign debt union. But it quickly turned into an east German party with strong ties to Russia.
They’re not taking it very well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGtg5HW5aRs
Yes, loads of footage from France, as the Leftards throw a collective wobbler because they’re not happy with the outcome of the elections. But what I’m at a loss to understand is: do you mean to tell me that they actually think they’re living in a true democracy and that the ‘far-right’ are in some way a threat to that? Are there two different definitions of the word ‘democracy’ floating about or something? Do they have selective amnesia of what their government put them through during the scamdemic? I’ll bet money it’s these very loonies that happily complied with all the masks, multiple clot shots and all the rest of the human rights abuses without a squeak of protest. And on the footage they all look like student types and young people to me so that might explain a lot. I remember the protests in France during the scamdemic and the people were mainly older, working-age citizens. Nobody that was against lockdowns and all the rest of the restrictions would possibly participate in any of this nonsense given that it’s the same flaming government;
”Thousands of leftists gathered in Rennes, Nantes, and Rouen to push for a far-left ‘Popular Front’ to fight against the conservative National Rally in the parliamentary elections set to be held later this month. In Rennes, over 2,500 people protested against the right wing’s rise and chanted pro “popular front” [Front Populaire] slogans calling for the far-left to unite against the right wing. The protestors largely included left-wing parties, ecologists and trade unions.
The left-wing protesting against the rise of right-wing in France indicates that as is the common trait in leftists across the world, it is a democracy only when the Left wins and it dies when their opponents emerge victorious.”
https://www.opindia.com/2024/06/leftists-protest-against-right-wing-party-in-france-after-its-victory-in-european-parliament-elections/
France24….A mainstream Conservative party in talks with National Rally. The left are in uproar in France.
No it’s not. This means nothing for the future direction of the EU.
I sound like a broken record, I know, but these elected people don’t decide anything.
Elections are at best a thermometer of public opinion which established power uses to determine whether it pushes down on the throttle of its policies or pulls back a bit to deal with “reshaping opinion”, replacing people and taking down opposition before continuing to push ahead.
In any case, I’m happy to submit my hypothesis to a test. If I’m right, nothing, literally nothing of substance will change in any of the major policy issues. Zero carbon will continue, immigration policy won’t change, states will continue to pile up debt and rhe EU will continue to add relentlessly to its mountain of regulations. At most we will see small cosmetic gestures to appease the restless messes, small things that will be flogged as meaningful but will not represent any real change in direction.
Let’s see.
By and large I am in agreement.
Off-T.
A disturbing look at the march of islam via Halal meat.
Roger Watson.
https://thenewconservative.co.uk/force-feeding-islam/
Basic fact is that the Left have overplayed the “Wacist” and “Nazi” cards and people have looked at the policies of parties like Reform and AfD and said “Hang on, that’s what I’m saying, they make sense”. The real problem the Left has always had is that they think everyone but them is incredibly thick and will just believe what they are told. This was true during Covid but now people are, just maybe, not so easily fooled?
The economic powerhouse GERMANY. ——-Has destroyed its Industrial base because of this absurd pursuit of wind. It now has the highest prices in Europe and the country looks like a giant pin cushion. At the same time they allowed a biblical flood of migrants in to wreak havoc on their culture. ——–What a turnaround this has been and as most of Europe is fighting back against this Progressive nightmare, here in the UK as usual we are swimming against the tide and are about to elect more Progressive claptrap and pretend to save the planet absurdity.
Hmm … Germans (my German acquaintances at least) tend to whine a lot about (criminal) foreigners having overrun everything, however, even a large city (for German standards) like Stuttgart (about 635,000 inhabitants, been there fall last year) looks seriously like a German city, with the by far overwhelming majority of people in the street being Germans doing German stuff (like eating Schnitzel
). Compare that to Camden where no one would believe that it’s actually in Europe. Even in central Reading. white people are – at best – a large minority (or tiny majority) and many of them are Poles and not English.
I don’t know anything about the situation in France (never been there, not planning to change that) but for British standards, all of Germany (with the possible exception of the really huge cities like Berlin and the public broadcaster TV programmes) is still very much “terribly white”.
“As expected, they represent a repudiation of the centre-Left politics that has governed Europe for the past generation.”
If the EUs current progrom of Global Warming Net Zero Suicide and No Border/No Sovereignty immigration over the last 20 yrs is even partly of the “center” politically, Europeans need more than just new leaders.