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EU elections - predicted Far-Right surge a damp squib [1]

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Date: 2024-06-10  

The 2024 European-wide elections for the EU’s Parliament took place this weekend and, surprise surprise, the far-right parties once again failed miserably in their attempt to become the parliament’s top dogs.

As with the US mid-terms’ widely-predicted Red Wave, the European far-right parties held a widely-proclaimed and commanding, at times frightening, lead in the Media Commentariat, threatening to upend the old established order of the centre-left & centre-right parties and free the continent from the tyranny of woke, progressivism, civility, technocratic merit and political correctness.

Sure, in certain countries, the far-right parties picked up a substantial share of the vote — large enough in France for the FN to have Macron call snap parliament elections (but which is not the same as the presidential election) and substantial enough in Germany to give the AfD their best-ever share in any type of election so far (but still well-short of being able to do much with it).

However, in countries such as Hungary, long seen as a high bastion of anti-EU troublemaking, a newly-formed upstart pro-EU party claimed over a third of the national vote, severely denting Orban who saw his party’s share of the national vote drop to below 50% for the first time.

The way the European Parliament works is that all the different EU countries’ political parties tend to group together in blocs and thus claim an appropriate share of the votes cast and therefore number of seats allocated. Typically, this grouping-together tends to occur along party-political/ideological lines. so you’ll find the (small-c) Conservative/Christian Democrat parties grouping together under the EPP umbrella, the Labour/Social Democrat parties grouping together as the S&D bloc, the Greens grouping together as Greens and the Liberal/Progressive parties grouping together as Renew.

It is these four blocs which form the unabashed pro-EU centre-left/centre-right mainstay of the European parliament and comfortably hold the largest number of seats between them, this time around claiming 453 seats out of a total of 705 seats - only down 36 seats from the last election.

Now, an amusing feature of far-right parties is that they really, really don’t get on with each other, often fighting like rats in a sack and this is reflected in the European Parliament, where there are three far-right blocs of reasonably-similar size, but each of wildly-inflated self-importance and unwilling to yield to any other ideological ally because of tiny and infinitesimally-absurd policy differentials and other assorted whacko crazy beliefs (similar to what you see in the US Congress: “if you’re not with me, you’re against me!”)

By comparison, all the European far-left parties (essentially hard-left/proto-communists) manage to group together under one single umbrella as the Left — but the crazies on the far-right let their personalities dominate who never ever want to yield and thus the ineffective scattering and isolation of the far-right vote.

Sure, the three far-right blocs managed to pick up 13 seats this time around, raising their combined total to 177 seats, but when you have just the Greens and the progressives of Renew picking up 131 seats between them, it really doesn’t amount to that much.

As such, the EU’s foundations remains firmly safe, much to the teeth-gnashing chagrin of the UK’s Brexit- & Trump-supporting press, desperate to to see their country’s exit from multinational collaboration and co-operation not as a sad & lonely outlier, but as a path-finder and beacon for isolationism and revanchism. Yeah, good luck with that . . .

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/6/10/2245809/-EU-elections-predicted-Far-Right-surge-a-damp-squib?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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