2024 has been billed as the year of elections, with many of the world’s democracies casting their votes this year.
The elections for the European Parliament this month count for a big chunk of that. As things stand, everyone is expecting a big lurch to the Right – and not to the “respectable” Right.
The European Parliament operates in a very different way to our own. While our government is made up of MPs (and peers) drawn from the party that can command a majority of votes in the House of Commons, the executive branch of the EU, the European Commission, is unelected, but nonetheless has the sole right to initiate legislation.
Much of that legislation requires approval from the European Parliament, a body that, because of proportional representation, is made up of an array of parties, none with any particular commitment to support the executive.
The result is that the Commission needs to negotiate support for all its legislation with parties that add up to a majority. In practice this normally means that the three centrist parties, Social Democrats, Conservatives and Liberals/French Macrinite's, who together command a majority, can agree all legislation behind the scenes with the Commission, dictating changes to make it acceptable to them, without regard for other parties. Debate in the Parliament’s hemispherical chamber is then a formality.
True, the excluded parties, particularly those of the “Far Right”, sometimes make a noisy fuss, but it is all to no point, since the fix is already in.
To those used to knife-edge votes in the House of Commons, it all seems lacking in transparency and open democracy. But could all that be about to change? The one thing commentators seem to be agreed on is that the “Far Right” is going to do well in these elections.
In France, the National Rally is expected to give Macron a thumping. In Germany, Olaf Scholz’s widely despised coalition government is likely to get a drubbing from the Alternative für Deutschland, despite the candidate embarrassments it has suffered. In Spain the extreme Socialist government (whose greatest achievement has been digging up a 50-year-old corpse) has lost its popular shine. In Italy Mrs Meloni has turned out to be more durably popular than expected. The Netherlands has turned its back on liberal centrism.
In Belgium, Vlaams Belang, which wants to break the country up, is expected to come first in Flanders in the national elections that are taking place on the same day as the European elections. Austria’s Freedom Party is leading the polls there. Is this the revenge of the Boomers?
After all, we are constantly told in the UK that the young support the Left and only oldies vote Conservative. But that isn’t what we are seeing in Europe, where much of the support for the “Far Right” is said to be coming from younger voters. Emblematic of that is France’s National Rally, now led by a 28- year-old, Joseph Bardella, about whom the only current question is how big his victory will be. These parties are not at all bought into the “European Project” as understood in Brussels.
And be in no doubt that the Commission is worried. What is to become of the cosy troika of parties on whom they have relied to get their legislation passed?
Most worried of all is Mrs von der Leyen, who wants another term as Commission President and has tied herself to the Conservative group’s electoral campaign in an effort to secure the votes she needs in the new European Parliament to pull that off.
Nobody’s betting the house on that now. It could be out with the old in Brussels. Where this leaves British Remainers, most of whom are on the Left, is a question that may well give wicked delight to Brexit-supporters.
