15 May 2012

The shifting tide towards sovereignty sweeps the European Union


Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling Christian Democrats have just suffered disastrous losses in a weekend election in Germany’s most populous state.
If you are looking at this from across the water from the US, this may seem hardly world-shaking. In fact it is another confirmation that the grand project called European unity is quickly coming apart at the seams.
Support for the Christian Democrats slumped from 35% to 26% in North Rhine-Westphalia. The Left Social Democrats thoroughly trounced Merkel’s party with 38%. The Greens boosted their share to 12%. This suggests an incoming red-green coalition, which has in the past ruled Germany at the national level. Commentators seem united in the view that voters in this prosperous well-heeled state turned against Merkel’s unpopular austerity policies. But I think this is under-stating the real message coming from the ballot box.
North Rhine-Westphalians were really rejecting Merkel’s slavish obsession with a bigger and ever more bullying EU. In so doing they are reflecting a mood that is now detectable everywhere in Europe, while no-one dares to speak its name. A clear pattern is developing. The Christian Democrats earlier crashed in the election in the Schleswig-Holstein, again on the back of the austerity issue. But looking deeper this of course is nothing more than the stalking horse for a popular mood utterly disenchanted with power-grabbing supra-national European institutions.
The Spanish, Italians, Greeks, Dutch, Brits, Danes, Swedes, Portuguese, Austrians, and Irish are increasingly turning to a plethora of non-establishment parties who hold their political noses at the mere mention of Brussels.
In the weekend German election, the Pirate Party, which campaigns against internet censorship imposed by the EU and national governments, won 7.5%, enough to vote them into the state parliament.
The Pirates are now represented in four federal German states. What is really interesting here is that defense of the Internet is now developing into a serious vote-winning trend, the first time this has happened in Europe.
It is another way of speaking out against the overwhelmingly bullying of Brussels bureaucrats who are so manically obsessed with the imaginary ‘threat’ posed by freedom of speech.
In the local government elections held in Italy a fortnight ago, the shock-haired political satirist Beppe Grillo’s 5 Star Movement bagged 250 council seats and its first sindaco (mayor).
With nine million voting this was a genuine taste of the popular mood in Italy: rejection of the EU imposed austerity package which has put millions out of work, two fingers to the monetarist techno-premier Mario Monti (or Rigor Mortist as Grillo calls him), and a big Yes to Grillo’s championing of internet freedom.
Everywhere in Italy non-party civic activists triumphed, while the mainstream parties to the left, center and right, sagged to record lows of support.
We have just seen the triumph of the Syriza anti-bail out party in Greece, at the expense of the pro-European swindlers who have been misruling the country for years.
In the spring local government polls conducted across Britain, the unremitting anti-EU UK Independence Party performed for the first time as a serious political force. It is only a question of time and some convenient by-elections before UKIP has its first MPs at Westminster.
The message is plain. The EU fantasy has been exposed for what it is: a dream that soured into a nightmare.
Voters are plainly expressing their long pent up demands for sovereignty to be repatriated from Brussels to home governments. This band wagon has only just started to roll, but just watch how it will soon acquire unstoppable force.
It is indeed a delightful irony that swelling anti-European sentiments are actually serving to unite Europeans of all creeds and countries.
If a referendum were held in Germany right now to stop the EU making laws over the heads of national legislators, it would be easily carried. Fifty percent of Germans also want the return of the mark.
This is a direct consequence of Merkel poking the embers of German nationalism with her excessive zeal to have the EU push its nose everywhere.
The new fiscal straightjacket that she drew up with the late departed Nicolas Sarkozy and her new friend, the unelected gaulieter of Italy, was the last straw in the eyes of nearly all Germans. That is why she and her party will crash to defeat in the general election next year.
This is increasingly the battle-cry of all European voters: taking back sovereignty, albeit within a looser form of union confined strictly to an agreed and limited menu of transnational issues.
Some countries will go further. Within three to five years, one major state will leave the bloc. Most people think of the UK as the prime candidate. But there things are complicated by Scotland having its own pro-independence nationalist government which eyes favorably the prospect of an independent seat in Brussels.
So my money is on either Spain or Italy, both of whom are also early candidates to abandon the euro. After that, we will likely witness a rush for the exits, so don’t stand near the doors.
I wonder in my idler moments whether the two-party system in the United States will not eventually break apart under similar pressures. After all, it happened once before.
The emergence of the United Dem-Reps and effectively therefore a one-party state could well provoke the same voter backlash which is changing the political face of Europe.
California, Texas, Maine, and Massachusetts strike me as states where the loss of political capital at the center might rebound as state-focused grass roots activism.
Unfortunately the Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation might have something to say about that, given that ‘sovereign’ Americans are now regarded as potential terrorists.
In Europe, on the other hand, they are increasingly seen as national saviors.
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