EU election: Not enough will change — and that’s the real problem

Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.

For all the Sturm und Drang over the European Parliament election and the widely predicted surge of support for right-wing populists — notably in France and Germany — the question remains whether established centrist parties will do anything more than circle the wagons and continue as though nothing much has changed.

Sure, the European Commission and its Eurocrats are all in a tizzy, bemoaning how the barbarians are now scaling the gates, lamenting how the Parliament will be full of surly, combative copycats of Brexiteer Nigel Farage, disrupting and breaking club rules. And there are stern warnings against any sort of relaxation of the cordon sanitaire against cooperating with even the more moderate new right radicals — not continuing to ostracize them would betray fundamental principles.

“The people have spoken, the bastards,” as Dick Tuck, a key Robert F. Kennedy adviser, might have put it. But in this case, simply ignoring them seems to be the sentiment. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen summed it up on Sunday night as the results unfolded, stating the “center is holding.” “Today is a good day for the European People’s Party,” she added.

And in the short term, she’s right — it can still be business as usual. Voters largely backed centrists in the election, and von der Leyen is likely to secure her coveted second term without having to do any deal with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and the European Conservatives and Reformists group that her Brothers of Italy party belongs to.

As POLITICO reported Wednesday, even the feared battle over who gets the top EU jobs may already be over, with former Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa likely taking over as European Council president, Malta’s Roberta Metsola continuing as Parliament boss and Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas slipping in as foreign policy chief.

But complacency over the the serious inroads that right-wing populist and national conservative parties made would be a mistake. The center may have held at the European level for now, but that’s no guarantee it will do so next time. And with upcoming national elections — especially in France — the whole ‘business as usual’ mentality won’t hold up.

Centrists have been all too quick to accuse populists of weaponizing these issues. | Filippo Monteforte/AFP via Getty Images

The EU election is a further shrill alarm bell that needs to be heeded seriously by Europe’s mainstream establishment, and one that should prompt considerable soul-searching. It shouldn’t be yet another exercise of papering over the cracks.

In France, President Emmanuel Macron has had little option but to acknowledge this would be an error. Although his tactic of dissolving the country’s National Assembly and calling for new legislative elections is a characteriscally hubristic gamble that has every chance of blowing up in his face — as it did for former President Jacques Chirac in 1997. “The rise of nationalists and demagogues is a danger for our nation and for Europe,” Macron warned.

But he and other centrists must also share the blame for this rise of the new right. They’ve been condescendingly disconnected from desperate voters exhausted by seemingly permanent crises, and they’ve all too often failed to adjust in the face of public backlash — or they’ve done so belatedly and half-heartedly. This was certainly the case with changes to the bloc’s migration policies, as well as the rushed scrapping of plans to halve the use of pesticides and backtracking on emissions recommendations for agriculture — plans that should have been thought through with a greater appreciation of what they would mean for farmers.

Those who have been left behind and are falling behind quickly — or worry they soon will be — aren’t going away. They’ve been buffeted by the economic woes of high energy prices and inflation, which quickly followed the societal trauma of Covid-19 restrictions and lockdowns, again generally dictated by an incontestable technocratic consensus that, in hindsight, got some things badly wrong. The intensity of popular anger shouldn’t be underestimated.

And if it’s going to be business as usual in Brussels — with a technocratic and corporatist consensus, partly driven by unrepresentative NGOs, dismissing complaints over the pace and cost of the green transition, concerns about enlargement and national sovereignty, the burden of regulation, the lack of affordable housing for the young and high youth unemployment — this anger will only deepen. These are all key factors in voters turning to the right, as well as a level of migration that still frightens people and prompts alarm about identity and culture.

Centrists have been all too quick to accuse populists of weaponizing these issues. They blame disinformation and demagogic manipulation, talking almost as though the here-and-now challenges and fears faced by ordinary families are either made up or overblown. They overlook the widening gap between everyday concerns on the one hand, and centrist politics and cross-party consensus on the other.

But electoral breakthroughs for conservative nationalists and populists on the Continent have been piling up. Last year in Italy, an emphatic win by the Meloni-led right-wing coalition unbuckled the country’s “red belt,” its formerly most reliably left-leaning regions. And despite setbacks for the new right in Hungary and Poland, in the EU election, France, Germany, Austria and Italy have now all seen strong populist and national conservative performances.

After all centrist setbacks, there’s typically an absence of unfeigned and serious dispassionate self-criticism. But this time, there needs to be considerable rethinking, including the balance of power between Brussels and national governments. Pragmatism needs to trump idealism or Europe won’t become stronger — it will grow weaker and more divided.