European political leaders and mainstream political parties are shaken up, according to Andres Higgens, of the New York Times, who writes Populists’ Rise in Europe Vote Shakes Leaders.
BRUSSELS — An angry eruption of populist insurgency in the elections for the European Parliament rippled across the Continent on Monday, unnerving the political establishment and calling into question the very institutions and assumptions at the heart of Europe’s post-World War II order.
Four days of balloting across 28 countries elected scores of rebellious outsiders, including a clutch of xenophobes, racists and even neo-Nazis. In Britain, Denmark, France and Greece, insurgent forces from the far right and, in Greece’s case, also from the radical left stunned the established political parties.
President Francois Hollande, of France's Socialist Party, which finished in a distant third behind a far-right party, observed that a review of the elections shows a “distrust of Europe and of government parties. ... The European elections have delivered their truth, and it is painful.”
Higgens tells us that the success of "insurgents" has challenged the common assumption that Europe is moving steadily toward "ever closer union," and put pressure on mainstream parties to "reshape their policies, especially with regard to a wave of anti-immigration sentiment that is sweeping the EU, which has an unemployment rate of 10.5%. Far-right parties emphasized "strident anti-foreigner rhetoric" and framed integration into the EU as "a threat to national identity." Its sound almost as if Europe has developed its own "tea-party-like" upstarts.
For example, the U.K. Independence Party, UKIP, won 28% of the vote in Britain, on a platform of having Britain pull out of the European Union. This is the first time an insurgent party has topped the Conservative, Labour, and Liberal Democratic parties.
Similar patterns were seen across Europe.
“It’s an earthquake,” said France’s prime minister, Manuel Valls. “We are in a crisis of confidence. Our country has for a long time been in an identity crisis, a crisis about France’s place in Europe, Europe’s place in our country.”
Higgens provides accounts of mainstream parties across the 28 member block calling emergency meetings to assess the election results and discuss how they should react.
In Greece, however, voters turned to the left, in response to punitive and harsh austerity measures, where a coalition of radical leftists called, Syriza, surpassed the center-right New Democracy party. Is it not interesting where the distress causes by economic distress can seek resolution by turning either to left or right depending on how the issues are framed in the minds of the voters?
Economic pain in the wake of Europe’s grinding debt crisis and recession, she said, “has certainly made it easier for extreme groups to spread their message,” but a bigger reason for their appeal was a “general climate of intolerance and xenophobia.”
Higgens tell us two common denominators of all the European populist parties is their strong opposition to immigrants and immigration, and their opposition to closer alliance with the European Union - sounding like a European version of anti federal government sentiment common to our tea-party, which seems as if it could also be described as an "insurgent populist party."
Could this be some kind of generic tea-party-like reaction to unemployment and stalled economies? Could this be a manifestation of "last place avoidance" theory that as been advanced to explain this phenomenon in the U.S.?
Self-confident people in prosperous economies are more likely to be generous and want to share their collective wealth. In more dire economic times, with high unemployment, shattered career expectations for oneself and one children leads to resentment against outside groups, especially if many members of that group are surpassing these people in their own conventional measures of social status.
A consequence of these factors coming together can aggravate racism and bigotry as a way to create new definitions of social status where they are united against immigrants in other group thereby "avoiding being last" or bottom in the conventional social hierarchy.
Exit polls in France "suggested that anger over immigration played a larger role than economic worries in the far-right National Front’s upswing."
Could it be that thinking that "anger about immigration" and "economic worries" are two separable issues misses the possibility that they are both reflections of a singular, deeper psychological distress similar to the cognitive theory of "last place avoidance?" We've also read analysis of right-wing rage described in terms of the neo-Freudian concept of "impotent rage."
Maybe like multiple facets of a scintillating diamond which presents different images in many directions, economic distress and anti-immigrant anger are different facets of a deeper psychological essence of people in great stress, fear, and confusion about being unable to find a safe space for themselves in increasingly complicated world presenting new terrifying threats at every turn, with few clues for how to think about it, and little hope of finding a safe, happy, and prosperous future within it for oneself and ones family?
If we could figure out what leads people in economic distress to shrink away from others, and blame them for their troubles, rather than band together to seek empowerment through collective strength, perhaps we could transform hateful reactive bigotry into a more positive expression of collective progressive power? What would it take to move in that direction?
5:34 PM PT: Wu ming adds this comment which I would like to highlight here.
the media narrative misses what happened this is being sold as "europe lurches right," but the socialists basically held pat across europe, while the left saw gains in countries that had been subject to the worst austerity (ireland, portugal, spain, italy, greece). the huge shift was within the broader european right, as pro-austerity but also pro-EU establishment parties had huge losses to xenophobic euroskeptic right wing parties.
in essence, this is the european equivalent of the tea party winning republican primaries in safe districts. bad news, but not an overall shift right so much as voters choosing to vote for outright fascists instead of conservatives using fascist rhetoric to woo voters, and the neoliberals who have championed both the EU and austerity for years.
granted, a lot is specific to national matters, but the overall trend was internal to the right, not an overall shift rightwards everywhere.
by wu ming on Tue May 27, 2014 at 04:55:53 PM PDT
Thanks wu ming. - HD