EU voters seem to have rejected those who dismiss the idea of national sovereignty.
EU voters seem to have rejected those who dismiss the idea of national sovereignty.
A s of July 2024, all plastic bottles in the EU will have their cap attached to them by a small plastic tab. Social media is already full of videos of users trying to drink without caps scratching their nose, gouging out an eye, or cutting their lip. This inconvenience is the result of yet another green regulation, recently passed by the European Parliament, that aims to reduce the impact of plastic on the environment. It also helps illustrate the state of mind in which millions of European citizens went to vote last Sunday to elect the new configuration of the European Parliament: the weariness provoked by the fact that so much that is intended to save the planet simply makes life more difficult for its inhabitants.
The EU, dominated by centrists (or progressive conservatives), as well as social-democratic and green elites, has, for years now, been in a race to be the first Western institution to implement the U.N.’s 2030 agenda. The EU’s leaders believed that they wouldn’t have to pay for their attitudes and the consequences of their policies, such as the environmentalist madness, the massive influx of illegal immigration, their tolerance for Islamism, the ruin of local farmers, their disregard for the traditional values of the Christian West, and their push to dilute national sovereignty. And, indeed, they hadn’t paid for any of it . . . until now.
The hegemonic parties of the EU have just received a big blow: The left and the extreme left have been defeated throughout the EU. The center right, led by Ursula von der Leyen, will need to form a pact with others to remain at the head of the European Commission, and the news in all the newspapers has been the great rise throughout the continent of the new right, or what the European mainstream media usually call the “extreme right,” which should be taken to mean “everything that is not green social democracy.”
Voters seem to have thus rejected climate policies, national-sovereignty-threatening Europeanist internationalism, wokeism, and other greatest hits from the U.N.’s 2030 agenda. Everyone seems to have understood the message except von der Leyen and Manfred Weber, the leaders of the European People’s Party, who, after winning the elections by the narrowest of margins, offered a pact to the Socialists in order to remain at the head of the European Commission. That is to say, instead of trying to attract the conservatives, who are once again on the rise, they have tried to side with the losers to the left because they believe that the “Europeanists” must unite to stop the so-called extremes. It is a good time to remember one of von der Leyen’s famous quotes that best define her understanding of politics: “Climate change is advancing, just look out the window.”
The conservative parties, or, if you prefer, the new right, have obtained the best results in their history, including first place in five countries: France, Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Belgium. Marine Le Pen has won in France, causing the centrist president Emmanuel Macron, whose coalition was bested at the European polls, to call an early national election. Viktor Orbán has won in Hungary; Giorgia Meloni has won in Italy; Alternative for Germany has overtaken the Socialists there, becoming the second-largest German political force in the European Parliament and shaking up the German government. André Ventura, of the new conservative Portuguese party Chega, has won seats at the European Parliament for the first time, and the Spanish right-wing Vox has doubled its MEPs, consolidating its position as the third-largest Spanish political force in the European Parliament.
Incidentally, the Spanish communists of Sumar, Izquierda Unida, and Podemos, three of the most antisemitic parties in Europe, have collapsed in the European elections — after basing part of their bizarre campaign on opposition to Israel and solidarity with Hamas (what could possibly go wrong?) — despite having several ministers in Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s socialist government.
The only successes of the left are to be found in northern Europe: In the Netherlands, unexpectedly, the green-socialist alliance seems to have won the most seats (results are still preliminary), although Geert Wilders’s right-wing Party for Freedom is a close second. Also surprisingly, Denmark’s Green Left has won an additional seat, and Finland is one of the few European countries where the sovereigntist right is not on the rise, with Prime Minister Petteri Orpo’s center-right party maintaining first place.
The new composition of the European Parliament will reflect a year full of historic defeats for the left, including for German chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats, who obtained their worst electoral result in more than a century, and of Germany’s Greens, who suffered an unprecedented fall of nearly ten percentage points compared with the 2019 EU elections and lost nearly all of their seats. In fact, Germany’s socialist-green coalition has been one of the great promoters of the EU’s current governance model of environmentalism, globalism, and uncontrolled immigration.
It is likely that the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats and the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Party will accept von der Leyen’s offer and keep her at the head of the European Commission. However, nothing else will be the same, because the legion of MEPs from the pro-sovereignty (and, in some cases, Euroskeptic) right will make its voice heard loudly in parliament and likely hinder many proposed progressive laws. Everything points to a new era in the EU, and perhaps (let me dream) we are close to recovering our freedom from the bottle caps that are now unjustly cuffed to plastic bottles.