Pisani-Ferry is rightly influenced by Macron’s success in winning an election by running on an avowedly pro-EU platform, and he is right that a realignment in European politics is needed. He is wrong, however, to think that it should be between, as he puts it, those who ‘uphold or reject the open economy and open society’. Instead, what European politics needs is a change in how established political families of the centre-right and centre-left address the issues of European integration and national sovereignty.
The current competition between the centre-right and centre-left leaves many voters unrepresented. Social-democratic parties are unequivocal supporters of European integration even though large parts of their traditional working class following is weary of cultural openness and the dilution of national sovereignty. Centre-right parties, on the other hand, are trying to adapt to the relentless pressure of the far right on issues of immigration and cultural identity, while being forced to concede ground to the populists’ advocacy of national sovereignty as the solution to problems of security and community. This puts the centre-right, theoretically and (apart from the British Conservatives) still a pro-European party family, in a bind. Both these families need to be shrewder in absorbing the openness-closure divide in their competition. [...]
Pisani-Ferry is right that European politics is in a period of flux and that politicians must adapt. It is important, however, to manage these changes in a way that does not play into populist narratives of polarization and crisis. In this, the established centre-left and centre-right political families have an important role to play if they exit their ideological comfort zones and accommodate popular concerns about sovereignty, community and security in their respective ideologies. Europe does not need a new realignment that would elevate populists to the status of one of the two poles of party competition. It needs the old alignment of left-right politics to rediscover its capacity to represent citizens’ concerns as European integration moves forward.
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