Why Are European Politics So Chaotic?
Across the West, social factions are in flux and socieities are ageing.
The EU elections that took place this week haven’t had much coverage in Southeast Asia. The region only tends to focus on elections abroad when it involves the United States; the belief being that US elections have more significant global implications. I’m dropping an article in DW this week on the implications of the EU elections on Southeast Asia, but here’s a few thoughts off the top of my head about the elections and the implications—something of an explainer for what’s happening in Europe politically right now...
ON FRANCE. The hard-right and far-right made substantial gains across Europe, especially in Germany and France. The centrists, left and greens did appalling. So much so that French President Emmanuel Macron called a snap election after his party was devastated by the right-wing National Rally of Marine Le Pen, which won almost double the number of votes as Macron’s Renaissance party.
This is a very clever move by Macron, although most commentators have focused only on the potential downsides. These are legion, indeed. The RN could become the largest party in the country, take control of parliament, and force through its appointee as prime minister. You’d essentially have a centrist presidency and a right-wing prime minister who cannot agree on anything. That said, parliament currently doesn’t agree on anything that Macron does, which is why he’s forced through dozens of policies with executive orders, bypassing parliament. That’s not so democratic.
However, the snap election makes sense for the following reasons. It will force all of the smaller and factional parties to rally around Macron’s Renaissance party with some tactical candidacies and voting to weaken the National Rally’s chances. If that doesn’t work and Le Pen’s party wins a majority in parliament, and possibly takes the prime ministership, it will be forced to work with Macron for another three years—the next presidential elections are in 2027). That will taint the party by association and force it to soften some of its more extreme ideas. It would also show the public what a National Rally presidency would look like—the president is far more powerful than the prime minister or the party in charge of parliament.
In other words, if the worst comes to the worst for Macron and anyone who doesn’t want the far-right to hold power, giving it a little taste of power in the short term, it’s hoped, might weaken its future ambitions to gain the presidency.
ON EUROPE MORE GENERALLY. Two broad points. The first is that everywhere in the West, including the United States, is seeing a once-in-a-generation—or potentially once-in-several-generations—shakeup of the political factions. This is very obvious in the United States. Before Donald Trump came along, the Republican Party, which has always been smaller in terms of members and voters than the Democrats, had a very stable coalition—and could attract enough independents, who have decided most US elections for decades. It was the party of business, of the military, of security hawks, of evangelicals, of small-government-ers, of economic nationalists, and of some crackpot.
Trump came along and shook this all up. He turned faction against faction. The security hawks now hate the populists—such as by the populists stalling the bill to supply aid to Ukraine. The big business faction hates the economic nationalists. The small-government folk hate the hawks who want state intervention to combat China. Everyone hates the crackpots, who now actually have a say in the party.
But the Democrats are also going through a shakeup. The biggest faction up for grabs for the last decade is the labor movement, which has typically been Democrat but which flirted with Trump because the unions are as anti-immigration as the Trumpian populists. Biden is trying to cling onto their support, which is why he’s been as anti-immigrant as Trump. The Democrats are also trying to woo the big business faction, which has found itself cut off from dominating the Republican agenda. The religious factions are for the take, too, given Trump’s own peccadillos. All of this, I believe, means that Biden will easily win the November election.
The same factional shakeup has also impacted Europe, although slightly differently.
Because now every single party of any stripe accepts social democracy—some state intervention to provide welfare to people when the labor markets cannot— the left has found itself without a niche. Because welfarism is no longer an actual debate in Europe—the discussion is over percentages, not the idea itself—the left-wing parties have had to resort to other issues, namely culture. In Western Europe, that means what could be called “wokism” and environmentalism and some questionable ideas about foreign policy; in central and eastern Europe, that means populist economic policies, anti-immigration and euroscepticism—look at Slovakia’s Smer-SD party, for instance.
The centrists don’t know where their factions are; they’re surviving by appealing against things, not for things. The labor movement in Europe is also strongly anti-immigrant, so is aligning with some right-wing parties. The security hawks—what of those there are in Europe—haven’t had a political home for decades because most of Europe through history had ended in the 1990s, so they’re now trying to find a political home. Big business factions don’t like the right-wing lurch towards populism, so they’re also unsure of where to go.
Look at the Tory party in my homeland. Who knows where it stands on anything anymore. It used to be the party of business, but then Brexit came along and Boris Johnson, the former PM, famously remarked, “fuck business”. It used to be the party of small-government, but the populist Tories, mainly in working-class areas, committed the party to even more public spending than the Labour Party. The Tories have always been a broad-camp of centists, center-right, populists and far-rightists, but the coalition has broken down because some many social factions have been up for grabs for the past decade—helped by Brexit—that the party’s wing are in open rebellion against one another about how best to capture these factions.
So European politics is in a flux. It seems unlikely to die down too soon. It will probably do so in the UK after July’s general election—and probably in the US after November’s election—because those two countries have first-past-the-post systems, which means you get two large broad-tent parties that have to appease all their factions. The reason why the US and UK have seemed so much more chaotic than other parts of the West in recent years is because the broad-tents burst open, yet the nature of their politics will mean things will get less chaotic more quickly.
That’s not the case for the rest of Europe, where you have proportional voting and far, far more viable parties. The hard-left seems done for, although it can take some solace from the fact that it has made itself redundant by making welfarism uncontroversial. That leaves the centrist and right-wing parties of various hues to battle it out. My guess, as we’ll see in France very soon, is that the center-right folds and merges in all but name with the centrists to compete with the far-right. The centrists will also bring what remains of the leftists and the greens on board, too, resulting in fewer political parties and making it easier for the various social and interest factions to pick sides. Such large coalitions are now becoming more common in central and eastern Europe (see Poland) and that will probably gravitate to western and southern Europe soon. But that will be a long process.
FAR-RIGHT GAINS. My second point: why does most of Europe seem to be lurching to the far-right. That’s not the case everywhere, but it’s more than obvious in some of the bigger countries—notably Germany, where the Alternative for Germany (AfD) was the second-largest party at the EU elections. Again, this partly to do with the factional chaos. These parties have attracted the working-class anti-migrant voters who used to vote left, captured some unions, and captured the rightists who think the center-right is too elitist and timid.
However, it’s also down to demographics. Europe is aging fast. Very soon, in the next ten years, the likes of Germany, Spain and Italy will really struggle to maintain basic economic functions as their working-age populations collapse in number. Germany’s working age population is projected to fall from around 50 million in 2015 to as low as 35 million by 2050. Even that projection by the government assumes basic migration. And Germany needs another 15 million migrants by 2050 just for its economy to stay on par. The same goes for many European states.
So Europe needs migrants, although that naturally produces a counter-reaction especially in countries where immigrants are relatively new and where mass migration has to happen a lot quicker. European politicians are awful at explaining any of this. Second, because Europe is aging fast, you have a lot of old people. Around a quarter of the Italian population is aged 65 years and older. It’s around 22 percent in Germany and 20 percent in Spain. This is going to increase substantially in the 2030s and 2040s. Old people, by and large, tend to turn up more often to vote; they tend to be a lot more anti-immigration and adverse to outsiders; tend to like it when the far-right promises to protect the national culture; and they tend to like the far-rights promises to protect the elderly through welfare.
Anyway, that’s a few musings on the European elections. Tomorrow I’ll offer some thoughts on Southeast Asia’s vast scam industry.
Cheers.
Interesting line of argument about Macron's decision. It's possible he calculates that an election is less high risk than it looks because having the Rassemblement National involved in government under a cohabitation, which is sure to be a mess, will discredit them. But that scenario will also hand the RN a plausible line of argument that they need the presidency to implement their programme. It was the establishment and the mainstream parties which stopped them despite their mandate. The RN is now promising all sorts of goodies like retirement at 60 in return for a free hand on immigration. There's a good chance Macron has speeded up the day when are able to do it. There is no silver bullet for the rise of the far right in France and I fear the disillusionment will only start once they have held the presidency and done huge damage to the country.
Media people have a very odd notion of instability. Does Europe have problems? Who doesn't? But I wouldn't exactly call it unstable. Literally the region you're covering is having a civil war, military coups and extra judicial killings.
People in Asia need to stop reading so much western media. In my home country of Bangladesh there is a biweekly article about Israel Gaza but barely biannual articles about Myanmar's civil war.