gracchusdixit

In 1897, Mark Twain, a.k.a. Samuel Clemens—thought by many to have been the greatest master of the American language—embarked upon a world-wide speaking tour in the hopes of raising enough money to pay off his considerable debts.  For all his enormous literary talent and commercial success, Twain was a big spender and had for years lived beyond his means.  The tour was a chance to recoup his fortunes.  

It also required him to be gone from our shores for a very long time.  As a result, rumors began to circulate back home that Twain had died.  Indeed, one newspaper actually printed his obituary.  This was the age of the steamship and the telegraph, not the smartphone or the internet.  There were no text messages or email.  Thus, to be on the opposite side of the Atlantic was not far from being marooned on the moon.  

An American journalist was finally able to contact Twain during a stop-over in London and eagerly asked the famous author to confirm for his readers that he was still among the living.  Twain responded with his usual wry concision:  “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”  

Much the same can now be said of the European Union.

Seven days ago, the citizens of the 28 member states of the EU went to the polls to elect a new parliament that will govern, not the individual countries to which they belong, but the entire continent of Europe.  After years of declining interest on the part of the European electorate, voter turnout surged to its highest level in two decades:  51 percent overall and in some countries almost 90 percent.

For months before this election took place, we were bombarded by a steady drumbeat of doomsaying about its likely outcome.  We were told that Europeans would lurch to the right, that the “European project” was poised to collapse, that the toxic racism and bellicose nationalism of Donald Trump would soon become the new political paradigm for the entire Western World.  

As it turned out, the Europeans surprised all the doomsayers, proving once again that they are too complicated to be boxed in by trite simplifications and too decent to give up hope without a fight.   Germany is no Georgia, Ireland isn’t Iowa, and Spain is most certainly not South Carolina.

There is no denying that right-wing, anti-immigrant political parties gained ground in these elections, particularly in Britain, France, Italy, and the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium.  But they did not sweep the continent, as so many pundits had predicted, nor did they gain enough seats to control the European parliament or come even remotely close.  

What’s more, the fear that Europe’s far-right parties would unite in some grand coalition of rage and repudiation turned out to be a delusion, perhaps because the deluder-in-chief wasn’t even a European.  He was Donald Trump’s doppelgänger and one-time advisor, Steve Bannon, 

After being kicked out of the White House, Bannon moved his xenophobic sideshow to Europe, where he sought to ingratiate himself with right-wing politicians like Marine Le Pen in France and Matteo Salvini in Italy.  How seriously such politicians took Bannon we shall probably never know.  What we do know is that his scheme for a grand alliance foundered on the rocks of reality—the reality that Europe’s far-right parties were just as eager to gobble away at one another as they were to gnaw at the marrow of their left-wing opponents.  Unless Maestro Bannon’s luck changes soon, he may once again be looking for another stage to host the opéra bouffe he calls a political program.

Such operatics aside, the electoral gains made by the far-right were more than offset by gains on the left.  In Spain, for example, the Socialist Party and its Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, emerged stronger than ever.  In neighboring Portugal, the governing Socialists and their Prime Minister, António Costa, did the same.  In the Netherlands, the big winner wasn’t the far-right Freedom Party, led by a Trump wannabe named Geert Wilders; it was the decidedly left-wing Labor Party.  In Denmark, the right-wing People’s Party, which has been gaining ground by demonizing immigrants, simply collapsed, with the result that country’s Liberal Prime Minister is now securely in charge.

More surprising still was the surge of Europe’s Green Parties.  In Ireland, the Greens swept into second place, a hair’s breadth behind the governing center-right party.  Much the same thing happened in Finland, Portugal, Estonia, the French-speaking part of Belgium, and Germany.  The outcome in Germany was particularly stunning.  Not only was it a humiliation for Angela Merkel’s middle-of-the-road Christian Democrats, it was also a clear signal to the Social Democrats on the left that the old way of doing business has come to an end.   Once the largest socialist party in Europe, Germany’s SPD has for years been migrating to the so-called “center,” accommodating its principles to the neoliberal consensus imposed upon Europe by the United States. The rise of the Greens in Germany and elsewhere is a repudiation of such accommodations.

Because there is no true American analogy to Europe’s Green political movement, our pundits and prognosticators have had a great deal of difficulty wrapping their heads around the significance of this development.  Many imagine that the political agenda of the Greens is focused narrowly on the environment and the threats posed by climate change.  The reality is that the Greens are no less focused on the political, social, and economic causes of the environmental crisis.  In their view, the cause of the crisis is the unfettered waste and greed of global capitalism.

If there is one unambiguous message in the outcome of the European election, it is that the EU must change its ways if it hopes to survive.  The right-wing parties of Europe would tear up the EU if they could.  The left-leaning parties hope to preserve and transform it.   The “European project” is not dead, at least not yet, but the neoliberal economic consensus that has governed its behavior for the last 30 years most assuredly is.  If the bureaucrats in Brussels don’t wake up, they will soon find themselves out of work.