This year could see a notable upturn in voter participation. One big reason seems to be that it is becoming more evident as time goes on how much havoc the far-right populist opponents of the EU can wreak. The political chaos that Brexit is causing and the sad spectacle of the British political system's fumbling befuddlement in dealing with it has dramatized the problem.
Ironically, the far right parties have been arguably more successful in using EU elections to their advantage in the anti-EU efforts than the pro-EU parties. Neil Farage, the pro-Brexit agitator, used his position as MEP (Member of European Parliament) for the UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) to press his case against the EU. The UKIP is surging, it seems, in the runup to the May 26 elections. (Toby Helm and Michael Savage, Poll surge for Farage sparks panic among Tories and Labour Guardian 05/11/2019):
On Saturday Farage was cheered by hundreds of voters at a rally in Houghton-le-Spring, near Sunderland, as he described the prime minister’s Brexit deal as “like a surrender document of a nation that has been defeated in war”.Incidentally, the report also contains a reminder of what a sad character former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair is, "Writing for the Observer online, the former prime minister Tony Blair says it is vital that Labour supporters go to the polls, even if they choose a party more clearly in favour of Remain than Labour."
There were signs of mounting panic and recriminations in both Tory and Labour ranks as their MPs attempted belatedly to mount “stop Farage” operations.
May was accused by senior Conservatives of “fuelling populism” with her indecision over the Brexit issue, while Labour politicians urged their backers to come out and vote despite the party’s mixed messages on Europe, which are depressing its support.
The Brexit mess has made far-right parties more cautious in the hostility to the EU in this election. In Austria, for instance, Christian Democratic Chanceller Sebastian "Babyface" Kurz recently called for renegotiating the EU treaties. Harald Vilimsky, the head of the EU list for the far-right FPÖ, Kurz' junior partner in the national government, initially rejected the idea publicly. Then FPÖ party chief and Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache endorsed the idea, stressing that the unanimity rule in foreign policy be maintained. That rule allows a single country to veto a common EU foreign policy, arguably one of the most serious aspect of the "democratic deficit."
It's worth remembering a fact not so often commented on in the press, that US foreign policy under the Clinton, Cheney-Bush, and Obama Administrations was to support a broad but relatively weak EU, following conventional power-political calculations to hamper the emergence of the EU as a "peer competitor" to the US hyperpower, which is inevitably becoming relatively less "hyper." The Clinton Administration pushed the EU to expand to previous Warsaw Pact countries, with two effects that are particularly notable today. Countries like Hungary and Poland are currently seriously restricting democracy and the rule of law, and the EU does not have adequate measures in place to address those problems. And with the unanimity rule, the more members the EU has, the more difficult it becomes to maintain a common foriegn policy.
The far right on the EU in 2019
The current (12.05.2019) issue of Profil (Vienna) carries a feature story on the EU election stances of the major far-right parties, with particular reference to Austria's FPÖ, Italy's Lega, Germany's AfD, France's RN (National Rally/Rassemblement national), and Hungary's Fidesz. (Gregor Mayer, et al, "Das Europa, das sie meinen") The FPÖ and the Lega, whose main leader is the more-or-less openly fascist Vice Chancellor and Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, are both junior partners in national coalition governments.
Unsere aktuelle Titelgeschichte: https://t.co/V53p941RgW#euwahl2019 #europawahl2019 pic.twitter.com/sJUvyN8ouR— profil online (@profilonline) May 12, 2019
President Viktor Orbán's Fidesz is the ruling party in Hungary (with a small Christian Democratic coalition partner), while the RN and AfD are still opposition parties.
The FPÖ, the Lega, and the RN are all partners in the European parliamentary group, Europe of Nations and Freedom (EFN). They are campaigning in 2019 as part of the European Alliance of People and Nations (EAPN) party, which also includes the AfD. Orbán's Fidesz is still formally a part of the Christian Democratic European People's Party (EPP), although Fidesz is currently partially suspended.
An international alliance of nationalist parties has its challenges. Orbán is obviously politically closer to the EFN parties than to the conservative Christian Democrats. But he also wants to maintain a close cooperation with fellow Visegrad country Poland, which also is ruled by an authoritarian party, Law and Justice (PIS/Prawo i Sprawiedliwość), which is affilited with the European Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists in Europe (ACRE). However, EAPN parties tend to be friendly toward Russia, including the FPÖ, the RN, and the Lega. Fidesz is, as well. Poland's nationalist governing party PIS, though, is distinctly anti-Russia, and Orbán puts a high priority on friendly relations with Poland. At the moment, each of the two countries can provide a veto in the EU against sanctions on the other for their breaches of EU governance requirements.
As Profil reports, current polls indicate that after May 26, the EAPN "will constitute the strongest rightwing populist presence that the European Parliament has yet seen." But their previous EU rhetoric has shifted:
Currently, there is no more talk from the EAPN parties about smashing the EU or leaving it: Le Pen, Vilimsky und Company have recognized for quite a while, that it would hurt them more than help them - and at the same time is not wanted by their voters. The new plan says: reconstruct the EU completely according to their ideas. [my emphasis](All translations from the German are mine.)
This rhetorical strategy is basically political fluff. They gripe endlessly about EU regulations and grumble about seemingly odd EU legal requirements in a manner reminiscent - at least for those who remember the 1970s - of American conservatives feigning outrage at the OSHA regulations on toilet seats. I.e, supposedly "common sense" complaints that almost no one actually knows the specific reason for the obscure regulation. A stock conservative polemical device, in other words. Chancellor Milchgesicht sagt, "nobody needs EU guidance, for example, on how to prepare schnitzel and French fries." (EU-Wahl: Kurz fordert Ende der "Bevormundung" durch Brüssel Oberösterreichische Nachrichten/apa 12.05.2019)
Xenophobia still the far right's main focus
The focus of the far-right's current anti-EU is both a strength and a weakness:
The refugee influx of 2015 is the most effective propaganda issue for rightwing populists in the fight against the EU: It is unwilling or unable to secure Europe's borders. "I see a Europe that cannot protect itself from migration," Marine Le Pen said most recently in an interview with the German daily Die Welt – notwithstanding the fact that the number of migrants has fallen to a fraction of 2015.The strength and the weakness of that position are essentially the same as with the xenophobic politics of the Trump and the Republicans in the US. It's effective because it's largely a phony problem at the moment. The current level of immigration of refugees, asylum-seekers, "undocumented" immigration, and legal immigration cannot be reasonably described as any kind of serious economic challenge in the US or the EU. Much less as a crisis in any meaningful sense of the word. That's a strength because if you're riding politically on a phony "problem", you don't have to worry about it being taken away as a political issue by actually solving it.
It's telling in this regard that polling in the US, Germany, and Austria consistently show that the areas where hostility to immigration is highest are those areas where people have the least contact with real live immigrants. Modern societies can count on a significant percentage of citizens having an authoritarian outlook which makes them fearful of various social hierarchies involving race, language, and religion and well as class relationships. So xenophobia will continue to be a significant political motivating factor for a notable minority in the EU and the US.
But it's obviously a weakness as well. Despite the widespread indifference by most supporters of the far right to what we quaint call "facts," facts actually do matter. And reality does have a persistent tendency to impose itself as a priority. The fact that agriculture, food processing, construction, and various home services in the US are largely or even completely dependent on not just immigrant labor but undocumented immigrant labor is pretty hard for even rightwingers to ignore completely. Agriculture is about, you know, producing food, which even fans of the Intellectual Dark Web still need, obviously including Jordan Peterson fans who prefer an all-meat diet. Gene Lyons has used a horse stampede as a metaphor for what happens when voters start realize they're been conned over a phony issue. (Herd shifts Arkansas Times 12/06/2018)
And unless governments like Hungary's quickly come up with a way to have a prosperous economy without population growth, which would require a strikingly radical Green New Deal that has little appeal to oligarchs like those Orbán represents, they need immigrants. Former Warsaw Pact countries like Hungary and Rumania are experiencing net emmigration, as large numbers of their native citizens move to other EU countries seeking better job and life opportunities. This is a distinct aspect of the xenophobia in eastern Europe compared to central and western Europe: people are seeing their neighbors, kids, and grandkids move away in significant numbers.
We can speculate how things might have developed differently if the US and the EU and the international financial institutions closely aligned with them hadn't insisted on various kinds of market-fundamentalist shock therapy in those countries post-1989. But that one-time possibility is now part of the Owl of Minerva retrospective view. For the forseeable future, countries like Hungary and Rumania have a choice: either make higher immigration work for them, or accept a continually shrinking population. Recognizing that reality and making informed decisions about it has far more implications than paying attention to more realistic, non-xenophobic reporting on current immigration. That kind of reality imposes itself, whether the governments are making realistic and informed decisions about them or not.
Exception 1: the longterm immigration crisis and the EU's lack of serious policy on it
There are two exceptions to this for the EU, in which immigration poses a real crisis. One is the fact that wars and climate change create pressure for immigration from African and the Middle East into Europe. In the longer term, the unusually high influx of immigrants in 2015-16 was an acute phase of a longterm crisis. But in the current debates, anti-immigrant politicians use "crisis" in the sense of, "Foreigners are streaming across our borders, aiii-eeeee!" Just as Trump does in America. This is not an immigration "crisis" in that sense for the EU.
Broadly speaking, the longer-term issue needs to be addressed by EU plans for dealing with crisis situations like 2015 that would include all EU countries accepting portions of such immigration spikes according to some kind of quota system among EU countries; expansion of emergency immigration capabilities including housing facilities; an active EU peace policy in the Middle East which would include drastically restricting arms sales to Middle Eastern countries and more active opposition to disastrous US interventions like the one the Trump Administration is currently threatening against Iran; and, serious long-term economic development programs in African nations whose primary aim is not increasing exports by European corporations to those countries.
If such measures are currently being seriously discussed in EU politics, it has escaped my attention. When such discussions come up in retail politics at all, it's in the form of raising such issues to deflect criticism from currrent and proposed xenophobic policies and rhetoric.
(Continued in Part 2. A German version is available here.)
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