Don't worry Joe. People in the US feel differently. Haha.
Good luck putting the Genie back in the bottle.
Europe Follows Sweden in Tilting to the Populist Right
The new right’s success has alerted liberals to the threat to social cohesion from mass immigration.
By Dominic Green, WSJ
June 11, 2024 5:32 pm ET
Voters across Europe, to the chagrin of the Continent’s political class, are turning to “new right” parties. The votes are still being counted, but the results of last weekend’s European Parliament elections show gains for the parties of the nationalist right and losses for moderates and the environmental left.
This is what Swedes call a “Jimmie moment,” after Jimmie Åkesson, leader of a populist conservative party that performed unexpectedly well in Sweden’s 2018 elections. Sweden was once a cohesive, orderly society with a comprehensive welfare state. In 2015, Sweden accepted more than 160,000 asylum applicants, mostly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan—more per capita than any other European country. An increase in serious crime paved the way for the success of Mr. Åkesson’s Sweden Democrats.
A Jimmie moment is when good European liberals realize that borders are broken, liberal technocracy can’t sustain social cohesion, and drastic changes in policies and leadership are needed. American liberals live in a Scandinavia of the mind, but the real Scandinavians have shown that becoming too permissive about immigration and assimilation makes it impossible for societies to remain liberal at all.
European Muslims view the war in Gaza as a domestic issue. The Continent’s governments are struggling to reconcile their national interests with the passions of their immigrant populations and to pre-empt “lone wolf” stabbing attacks like the one on members of the anti-Islamist Pax Europa group in Mannheim, Germany, on May 31, which left a police officer dead. Sluggish economies, disquiet over the Ukraine war and the erasure of post-1945 taboos against nationalism are also pushing young voters sharply right.
The European Parliament was designed to contain exactly this kind of democratic instability. It can’t propose legislation, only veto or alter the proposals of the European Commission. After its first members were elected in 1979, the parliament became a repository for cost-free grumbling about the Brussels technocracy and moderate parties at the national level. Turnout in European Parliament elections fell steadily from 1979 to 2014 but has been rising alongside the popularity of new-right parties.
The parliament’s composition suddenly matters domestically in the European Union’s three largest economies. France, Germany and Italy all voted to send more anti-immigration and Euroskeptic representatives to Brussels. The emergence of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni as the Continent’s leading conservative will be boosted by the victory of her Brothers of Italy party. In France, the victory of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally caused President Emanuel Macron to gamble on snap parliamentary elections. In Germany, where the Social Democrats rule in coalition, Alternative for Germany, or AfD, finished second. The Social Democrats came third, obliging Olaf Scholz’s government to consider calling elections.
Members of the European Parliament join transnational “groupings” by ideology. One thing they are permitted to do is choose the European Commission’s president. Germany’s Ursula von der Leyen will probably retain the presidency, because her center-right European People’s Party will ally with the declining center-left and liberal groups rather than the right-wing groups, which are growing but divided. A question now is whether the Italian, French and German right-wing deputations can combine into one grouping.
The Brussels moderates’ rearguard action resembles the reaction to the first Jimmie moment in 2018, when Sweden’s established parties bonded together to repel the “far right” insurgents. The likely next phase, an alliance on the EU’s right, would resemble the second Jimmie moment in 2022. That’s when Sweden Democrats started supporting the center-right Moderates from outside the government in a “confidence and supply” deal.
In the same year, Ms. Meloni’s victory in Italian elections sparked media talk of a “fascist” revival. Yet Ms. Meloni has governed as a stabilizing force, a conventional center-right leader who opposes the Russian invasion of Ukraine and calls for reforming the EU from within. Germany’s AfD is newer and still linked to the lunatic fringe. It cut one link during the election campaign by dropping its leader, Maximilian Krah, for suggesting that not all members of the Nazi SS paramilitary force were criminals.
The Italian and French nationalists have already become respectable enough to win elections. Ms. Le Pen began as a neofascist, canvassing for her thuggish father. Her protégé in the European Parliament, Jordan Bardella, sounds like a Gaullist in a hurry and looks like a social-media influencer. If National Rally becomes a significant presence in the French Parliament, it would smooth Ms. Le Pen’s path in the country’s 2027 presidential elections. If she were to win, that would be the biggest Jimmie moment yet.
Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
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