Slate: In Europe, Green Is the New Red

When Green parties throughout Europe saw unprecedented success in European Parliament elections last year, it was clear that voters were responding to concerns about the climate crisis as well as a loss of confidence in the big mainstream parties that have dominated politics for decades. But EU elections are often favorable for protest votes and fringe parties, and there were questions about whether the enthusiasm would last. “People were already starting to flirt with us. Now they have had a one-night stand. Whether this is a permanent relationship is totally unclear,” Sven Giegold, a leading German Green MEP told me last June. Judging from recent election results, the infatuation hasn’t faded. In fact, in several countries the greens appear on the verge of eclipsing old-school socialist or social-democratic parties as the main electoral voice of the left. [...]

The coalition deal was approved by an overwhelming 93 percent of the Green Party’s membership. Writing in the American socialist magazine Jacobin, activist Teresa Petrik suggests we shouldn’t be surprised by this. “Some Green voters might identify as left-wing,” she writes, “Yet most of the party’s base are highly educated and financially well off. They are not the people who will suffer from continued welfare cuts and the neoliberal policies the new government is pushing forward.”

Austria’s strange new government is more troubling evidence of just how easily environmental concerns can be wedded to a hard-line anti-immigration agenda. But on the other hand, it’s also a sign that the climate issue has become so mainstream in Europe that even the bona fide right-wingers are embracing it. The U.S. is not quite there yet.

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UnHerd: Will Boris lose his seat?

The constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip, created in 2010 out of the old Uxbridge seat, was once deemed safe, if not rock-solid, Conservative territory. Between its two incarnations, it has returned a Tory at every general election since 1970. But things are suddenly less comfortable for the Tories here. In 2017, the seat saw a 13.6% swing to Labour and Johnson’s majority halved to just over 5,000 – the smallest for any prime minister since 1924. Labour needs only a 5.4% swing to win next time out, and is going all out to achieve it. [...]

The number of benefits claimants is significantly lower than the average across the UK, and the high street seems, unlike many across Britain today, to bustle with activity and trade. Resistance to HS2 and a third runway at Heathrow – both of which will impact on the constituency fundamentally – is widespread, with many residents mildly irritated that their MP’s own opposition has been less than unequivocal. In fact, chatting to people here, it is obvious that the new prime minister cuts as divisive a figure locally as he does across the country. [...]

The Tories are determined to ensure that Johnson does not become their first party leader since Arthur Balfour in 1906 to lose his seat. They will no doubt throw everything into protecting their star player. For its part, Labour has been co-ordinating a series of “Unseat Boris Johnson” days, and the grassroots organisation Momentum has promised to flood the place with activists.

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The Guardian Longreads: Are your tinned tomatoes picked by slave labour?

Discrimination and violence against African workers gets worse in Italy with every passing day. In 2018, there were 126 racially motivated attacks recorded in the country, some fatal: in May last year a neo-fascist shot and wounded six black people in Macerata, near the central city of Ancona. A Cameroonian was shot in the city of Aprilia, an hour’s drive from Rome. A few weeks before, in July, a Moroccan man was beaten to death there. The problem is so severe that the Italian intelligence agency warned earlier this year about the rise in far-right groups and “a real risk of an increase in episodes of intolerance towards foreigners”. [...]

Rather than denying the situation, the country’s interior minister, Matteo Salvini, has repeatedly said immigrants are the “new slaves”. The observation isn’t sympathetic but strategic: publicising their destitution is a calculated attempt to dissuade more from coming to Italy. It serves his political purpose to perpetuate their ghettoisation, and also shores up the far-right narrative that immigrants can never integrate. [...]

Something similar was happening all over the country. The Roman mafioso, Salvatore Buzzi, whose consortium repeatedly won contracts to arrange housing for migrants, was heard in a 2014 police wiretap boasting: “Have you got any idea how much I earn through immigrants? I make more from immigrants than I do from drugs.” His consortium enjoyed annual revenues of €55m. [...]

Many activists believe this modern form of slavery is not a perversion of 21st-century capitalism, but the logical result of putting profit before every other consideration. “Unless you counter the huge power of the multinationals,” Yvan Sagnet told us, “it will be difficult to resolve the problem of working conditions. Because caporalato and modern slavery are the effect of a system, not the cause of it: the effect of ultraliberalism applied to agriculture.”

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The Guardian: ‘I want my country’s image to be good’: has Romania’s ruling party moved on?

In less than 48 hours in May, Romania’s ruling party was given a triple dose of reality when it was badly beaten in European parliamentary elections, rebuked in a referendum on its attempt to reverse tough anti-corruption laws and had its powerful party leader, Liviu Dragnea, jailed for three-and-a-half years for abuse of office. [...]

More than 80% backed a ban on the government having powers to change judicial legislation by emergency decree and the use of pardons in corruption-related cases, as the PSD’s vote share simultaneously more than halved from the 45% it won in the 2016 general election. [...]

In the aftermath of the May votes, Dăncilă vowed to abandon the controversial judicial proposals, a pledge she reiterated this week. “We have understood the message from 26 May. We have not spoken about the justice system, we have not let anybody get involved on that topic … I would like to go back to the agenda that is focused on the citizen, less on the justice system,” she said. [...]

Dăncilă would not be drawn on whether her government would continue to oppose Kövesi’s appointment, but said that she personally believed Kövesi must “solve her issues with the justice system” before taking this kind of role. “What do we do if those accusations are real? I don’t know if they are real or not, it’s a hypothesis, but I believe that the Romanian image will be affected and I want my country’s image to be very good,” she added.

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UnHerd: The battle for Brexit Britain

The Brexit Party’s tilt towards regional grievances is the latest example in Western democracies of how a sharpening divide between what the French geographer Christophe Guilluy calls the “metropole and the periphery” is rapidly being politicised.

It’s a familiar enough refrain now. On one side are those who can afford to live in the big cities; they are strongly liberal and have little interest in rebalancing the settlement. On the other, are those who are stuck in the periphery and outer regions – or who choose to live there – who have seen life sucked out of their once thriving communities. Left behind and left out, these voters know that our ‘open’ cities are actually among the most ‘closed’ places on earth. [...]

The pivot suggests that Farage and the Brexit Party have realised that their future lies not in affluent southern Tory seats but in blue-collar, left-behind Britain. “There are many seats in the country”, Farage told his supporters last week, “especially Labour-held seats, where we are the main challenger”. The Brexit Party will contest every seat at the next election and it looks like those Labour redoubts scattered along coastal England, in the Midlands, the struggling north and Wales will be key targets as a result. [...]

The problem for the Tories is that they also need to make inroads into these Leave-voting areas if they are to offset their likely losses to Labour and the Liberal Democrats in Remainia. Yet Brexit Party insiders argue that this will simply never happen because of long established political traditions: voters in these areas will never turn out in large numbers for ‘the Tories’. “If you vote Tory,” Farage declared, “you will get Corbyn and you should stand aside for the Brexit Party who can beat them in those constituencies.”

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EURACTIV: Treaty against democracy: Franco-German arm wrestling reflects different political visions

On the other hand, since coming to power, Emmanuel Macron has given clear priority to decision-making rather than debate, and has taken full advantage of Parliament’s reduced powers in France. For him, taking into account the will of the European Parliament was not a priori on the agenda.[...]

On the German side, the emphasis on candidate Manfred Weber is based precisely on the democratic legitimacy of the European Parliament, and of the candidate representing the strongest group. Who happens to be German.

It is only after hearing the voices of two European Parliament heavyweights that Germany considered reevaluating its unfallible support for Manfred Weber. The situation has changed when the social-democrats and the liberals have indicated they were not supporting the EPP candidate.[...]

The French president had tried to turn things around in February 2018, by trying to set up a small proportion of transnational lists in the European elections. This was rejected as there was no majority in favour in the European Council.

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EURACTIV: Orban lost in the European wilderness

Moreover, Orbán’s illiberal rhetoric and cultural war elevated to the European level contributed to the rise of liberals at home as well as in Europe. In Hungary, the party of the former Socialist prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsány, led by the energetic Klara Dobrev (Gyurcsány’s wife) came second with 16% of the votes. The young, Western educated liberals Momentum secured third place with 10%, giving a sign of hope for the opposition.

In the EU, the new political division lines are climate change and illiberalism – and less so on migration or particularly economic governance that European voters are actually unhappy about. Representing two different angles of behaviour but the same neoliberal economics, Orbán needs French President Macron to maintain his position as much as Macron needs him. [...]

However, Hungary was in a different situation when he took over in 2010. The economy was in tatters, the country needed an almost $26 billion bailout in 2008 after years of high deficit, unsustainable debt levels, very low social spending, and mismanagement by the socialist-liberal government coalitions. For the majority of Hungarians Orbán is managing the economy better, what is the main reason behind Fidesz`s continuous popularity. Meanwhile, the opposition is oversaturated with previously discredited political figures.

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openDemocracy: Over the worst in Europe: the 2010s have not ended like the 1930s

There are only two known ways to bring together diverse countries into one political unit. One is from above – empire-building. The other is from below, via the mechanisms of democracy, leading to the birth of entities such as the USA. The European Union tried to find a third way, avoiding both empire and democracy: achieving union by technocratic imperative.

With the demos thus effectively shut out and with no Emperor to exercise oversight, the experts took it upon themselves to move political integration along, bereft of effective control and accountability. With the marketplace seen as the default mode of all human activity, it was decided to start political integration with the introduction of a single currency, the euro. The rest, it was assumed, would follow in due course, given that people are only interested in market outcomes, rather than in participating in the politics of “Brussels”. [...]

We know now something that was not generally known (but should have been) even ten years ago: when governments place the common good in the care of “independent agencies”, thus divorcing decision-making from democratic oversight, the common good gets hijacked by special interests. In the end, in spite of being shut out from the decision-making, it is the demos who pay the price. This is what happened to the demos of Europe in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 and the sovereign debt crisis of the early 2010s. In both crises, the culprits bought themselves yachts; the ordinary people got saddled with record public debt.[4] [...]

Identity politics does away with this kind of individual, closing human beings into cages of group “identities”. The French thinker Raphael Glucksman has rather cleverly translated such identities as “groups of origin”: “communautes d’origine, de foi, de couleur, de peau”.[9] You cannot escape from the tribe you were born into; and everything you think, say or do is an expression of that tribe’s identity. If you try, as an autonomous individual, to escape from the tribe, by for example making the necessary efforts and sacrifices to get a good education, then you are not congratulated for achievement; you are denounced for having acquired a privilege.[10]

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Jacobin Magazine: Syriza’s Failure Has Hurt Us All

Added to this, a closer analysis shows that the Syriza electorate in 2019 in fact bears little relation with the voters who first put it in government in 2015. Admittedly, given the lack of any credible alternative on the Left (in the broadest sense) of the political spectrum, it has not collapsed entirely. That’s the big difference with what happened to Pasok in 2012, after its own implementation of austerity measures. [...]

In generational terms, it has lost nearly half its support among younger voters (17 to 24 year-olds) but has shed only 4 percent backing among the over 65s. From an electorate polarized around wage-earners and the youth, it is now a party with a nearly uniform average score among most social strata and age classes (around 20 percent) and is ahead of New Democracy only among the unemployed. The “qualitative” profile of its electorate has undergone an even more dramatic change. A look at the choice Syriza voters made among its candidates for the European Parliament is instructive in this regard. [...]

Syriza’s electorate today looks less like the popular base of a left-wing party than the “de-ideologized” clientelist support of a party of government. It is moreover obvious that it is in part the heir to the “social-liberal” Pasok of the 2000s. Syriza came first in just four constituencies nationally, and of these, three were among PASOK’s historic symbolic bastions: two in Crete and one in the northwestern Peloponnese, around the city of Patras, cradle of that party’s long-dominant Papandreou family.

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Jacobin Magazine: Can Anyone Save the SPD?

But what comes next? The contradiction that broke Nahles — the need to renew the SPD while simultaneously governing with the conservative CDU — remains as urgent as ever. And this also means that no one is particularly keen to occupy the newly vacated leadership spots. In the immediate term, the party will be led by a three-person commission consisting of Malu Dreyer, minister-president of Rhineland-Palatinate, Manuela Schwesig, minister-president of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, and Thorsten Schäfer-Gümbel, outgoing SPD parliamentary speaker in Hesse. All three emphasize that their appointment is temporary. Finance minister Olaf Scholz also turned down the job, and the party’s uppermost layers continue to grow noticeably thinner. [...]

In an awkward attempt to seem more “authentic,” Barley bravely campaigned across the country in a blue hoodie adorned with the stars of the European Union. But hardly anyone fell for her calculated, plastic European hype and nor did anyone believe the promises about climate protection and turning the EU into a “social union.” Ultimately, most voters interested in such motifs ended up voting for the Greens instead. Barley was forced to defend the SPD’s policy in favor of so-called “upload filters” — accused of driving online censorship — even though she was on record opposing the law. This decision cost the party the youth vote, with exit polls last month indicating that only 10 percent of first-time voters opted for the SPD. [...]

For years now, the SPD’s image has been characterized by a toxic mixture of cowardice and being utterly overwhelmed by events. Thus, any break with the status quo would have to be of a three-fold nature: a leadership change, a political shift, and a cultural transformation. Is the party still a locomotive into the future, or a co-manager of the existing order? Can it withstand competitive internal elections and tensions, will it find the words to talk about its historic decline and the courage for a new beginning? [...]

Regardless of who emerges victorious from its internal power struggle, the SPD can no longer afford to sidestep the question of the welfare state in the twenty-first century. The same is true of the need for a sober analysis of the party’s spending and redistribution policies both in Germany and the EU as a whole. A sustainable, left-wing industrial policy — thus far no party celebrity has been willing to use those three magic words, “Green New Deal” — could point the way towards a new, progressive program. The party would then have to use that program to compete with Die Linke and the Greens, while at the same time revolutionizing itself from within.

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openDemocracy: Polish opposition united to beat populists in Euro elections – and failed

PiS’s increased their vote by more than 13%, gaining 45% of the total vote. Meanwhile, the opposition coalition, KE, only won 38% of the vote, a decrease of more than 10 points compared to the 2014 EU elections. This victory for PiS is even more impressive due to the fact that the turnout in these elections was two times higher than in 2014 (rising from 23% to 45%). There has therefore been a huge growth in the number of citizens participating in the democratic process during PiS’s term, with the largest proportion of these new votes going to the ruling party. [...]

The incoherence of KE’s political campaign and message was particularly evident in the countryside. PiS essentially won these elections in the countryside and small towns where it won 56% and 36% of the vote (in contrast it only gained 27% in cities with a population of more than 500,000). Its main political rival in the rural regions, the PSL, was neutralised and its electorate demobilised partly due to its participation in KE. This left the field open to PiS, allowing it to advance its aim of becoming the recognised leading party in rural areas. [...]

Although, it may seem to many liberal politicians and academics that the major issue facing Poland is the threat to its liberal democratic system, this view is not necessarily shared by the majority of the population. Campaigning on issues like the independence of the judiciary or Poland’s relationship with the EU are not sufficient to defeat PiS. The European elections have shown that such a strategy has actually shrunk the vote of the opposition and strengthened the position of PiS. In order to efficiently challenge the monopoly of PiS, the opposition must actually divide into different blocs and parties. Rural and leftwing parties must fight PiS on socio-economic issues to pushback against the expansion of the conservative and nationalist right into those layers of society disillusioned by neoliberal centre-right parties. And the left urgently needs to consolidate itself into a single organisation, distant from the centre, to offer a real positive alternative to the current administration.

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The Conversation: SNP surge in European elections has major implications for a second independence referendum

Unlike most of the rest of the UK, where the upstart Brexit Party topped the poll, in Scotland the SNP finished first yet again. The party took more than 38% of the vote, picking up half of Scotland’s six seats in the European Parliament.

This is quite a remarkable success for a party that has been in power in Scotland since 2007 and has finished top in every election since 2011. [...]

For the SNP, Scotland voting differently from the rest of the UK feeds into the narrative that Scotland is just politically different and should make its own decisions. [...]

The Conservative anti-independence message to an extent prevented the party from having an even worse election. They are likely to remain the main unionist party, particular as their leader Ruth Davidson has a very high profile, rivalling only the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon, and is also relatively popular too. [...]

Meanwhile, the Brexit Party did finish a distant second with around 14% in Scotland but this does not place them to do well in the next Holyrood election. UKIP won a seat at the 2014 EU elections in Scotland and gained less than 2% two years later at the Holyrood elections.

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The Guardian: Tsipras faces fight to stay in power after EU elections mauling Inbox x

After suffering an unexpectedly heavy defeat at home, Tsipras’s Syriza party was also resoundingly rebuffed by diaspora Greeks, it emerged on Thursday. With 100% of the vote counted, the country’s interior ministry reported that 33.9% had cast ballots in favour of the centre-right New Democracy party in contrast to 15.3% for Syriza. [...]

Asked why the electorate seemed bent on punishing the ruling party he responded: “It’s a little bit of everything; what has happened to the middle class, the [strictures of] bailout oversight, their style in power, a know-all approach and general over-assuredness.”

Diaspora Greeks from America to Australia, who also participated in the European poll, are believed to have been particularly negatively swayed by perceived concessions over Macedonia: in exchange for the neighbouring country agreeing to change its name, the leftist government recognised a Macedonian language and ethnicity which has left many enraged. Although applauded internationally, the name-change deal was aggressively derided by the conservatives as part of concerted efforts to appeal to nationalist voters globally. [...]

“One of the biggest reasons for Syriza’s defeat is the middle class,” said Kaki Balli, editor of the Sunday Avgi paper which reflects Syriza’s views. “Greece, unlike other European countries, has always had a lot of class mobility. Given that every Greek wants to belong to the middle class they have been lured by the promise of less taxation and those are promises that New Democracy is making.”

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TLDR News: What EU Elections Tell Us About How Europe Feels - Brexit Explained

Last week people across the EU went to the polls to vote for their new representatives in the European Election. This is an important vote and gives us a reading on the feelings of people across, and how they feel about politics and the EU. In this video, we analyse the results, explain the groupings who won and lost and discuss what the results mean for the EU going forward.

Al Jazeera: Brexit Britain set to wield little influence in new-look Europe

The Brexit Party gained 29 seats in the new chamber - as many as Angela Merkel's CDU/CSU, and more than Matteo Salvini's League in Italy, which got 28 seats as 34 percent of Italians who voted opted for his far-right, anti-migrant party. [...]

A number of smaller far-right parties across Europe support Salvini's bloc, however, most did not perform well in the elections. Geert Wilder's anti-Islam Freedom Party in the Netherlands, for one, lost all of its seats. [...]

"But ultimately, they don't have the same aims, so it's unclear at this point how much they are going to cooperate. Traditionally, Farage and his colleagues have rarely taken an interest in the works of the EU. They weren't really active in the committees, they didn't hold any of the important roles," she said, adding that it remains to be seen "how invested they [Farage et al] are in the European Parliament". [...]

"[However], the League is much more oriented towards playing the European game. Of course, they have positioned themselves against some of the decisions made by the EU, but unlike Mr Farage, they do not want to undermine the EU and the institution of the European Parliament per se," Frantescu told Al Jazeera. [...]

"A more fragmented EU parliament shows there is more polarisation, and I think that makes for a more healthy debate. But it will also make EU reform much more difficult," Wright added. "There are going to be lots of challenges ahead for the EU and I'm not sure where Brexit sits in that list of priorities."

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Jacobin Magazine: Power Has Returned to Power

On April 29, as Spaniards woke up the day after the general election, it was the Right that was left wondering what might have been. The right-wing Partido Popular (PP) had achieved its worst ever score, and the far-right Vox’s breakthrough was less than expected. For the conservative FAES — the country’s most influential think tank — the blame for the right-wing parties’ poor results lay with the division of their forces combined with voters’ “reckless ignorance.” Federico Jiménez Losantos, a hard-right radio host, declared Spain “lost, stupefied, and idiotic.” [...]

We should not underestimate the scale of this defeat. Five years after its triumphal breakthrough in the 2014 EU elections, Podemos has suffered a resounding defeat, losing almost all of the key municipalities it won with grassroots coalitions in 2015. The exceptions are Cádiz — whose anticapitalist mayor, Kichi, won an impressive absolute majority — and Valencia, still governed by a leftist coalition, but where Podemos has failed to secure a municipal foothold. [...]

More broadly, we can today characterize the current situation in Spain as governed by a stabilization of the center after years of popular revolt. Indeed, for all its threatening appearance, even the emergence of the radical right Vox has facilitated this process. Failing to make a breakthrough in this weekend’s election, it appears to have hardened as a small party that appeals only to wealthy Spaniards and members of the armed forces. It is enough to propel the conservative PP to regional and local power, but also serves PSOE prime minister Pedro Sánchez as a convenient boogeyman. As he forms a national-level government may now be tempted to draw the liberal Ciudadanos away from a right-wing coalition and toward a large, centrist alliance. [...]

Sánchez, however, is under no hurry to invite Podemos into the government — even less so after Sunday’s results. In previous televised debates, he refused to clarify, when pressured by Iglesias, whether he would seek Ciudadanos’s support. It fell upon Rivera to insist that his party would rather join forces with the radical right. But Rivera has broken his word before, and he has a proved talent for overnight ideological conversion. In four different regions, Ciudadanos’s support could prove instrumental for PSOE to hold power. One of them is Madrid, without which the PP would lose its last remaining stronghold.

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openDemocracy: The war on Europe’s women and LGBTIQ people has only just begun

Salvini held a rosary and kissed a small crucifix, thanking the “Immaculate Heart of Mary” (as he did during campaign rallies). Announcing it is time to “save Europe” and “its Judeo-Christian roots”, he pointed to the victories of Marine Le Pen in France and Nigel Farage in the UK, saying: “It is a sign of a Europe that has changed”.

Across the European Union, 50.5% of registered voters participated in the 26 May elections – the highest rate in 20 years, and the first significant increase since 1979. Many commentators responded to the results with a measure of optimism: the populist far-right did not conquer the European Parliament, as they had campaigned to. [...]

Take the issue of immigration, Salvini’s favourite: after almost one year of his so-called “closed ports” policy, and a decree on asylum and humanitarian protection rules that left thousands of people in precarious status, there is now a draft of a new harsh security decree against migrants and solidarity, ready to be discussed by the government. [...]

While Salvini has said that the 1978 law that legalised abortion in Italy isn’t up for discussion, his positions against sexual and reproductive rights are quite clear. On Mother’s Day, he sent wishes “to all mothers, but not to parent 1 or 2” (a jab at same-sex parents). He’s also issued a decree replacing the gender-neutral term “parents” with “father” and “mother” on the forms required to fill out for minors’ ID cards.

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Politico: Europe’s populists can’t be defeated — but they can be contained

Containment is about separating our assessment of the political reality from the outcome we morally desire. Today, the facts speak for themselves: Populists have seized more than a quarter of seats in the European Parliament and run governments representing more than a quarter of the (post-Brexit) EU population.

Support for populists is also far from fleeting. Hungary has had an illiberal government for almost a decade now. In France, Marine Le Pen’s nationalists, who came out ahead of the beleaguered French President Emmanuel Macron’s liberals, have posed a serious threat since the 2002 presidential election. Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, which took power in 2015, trounced the opposition this weekend, with over 40 percent of the vote. And, one year into its government, Italy’s League is successfully eating up the support of the relatively more moderate 5Star movement and shows no signs of slowing down. [...]

In practice, we should waste no opportunity to up the cost of illiberal politics, but we need to do so selectively and proportionally. The EU’s decision to open Article 7 proceedings against Poland and Hungary for breaches in the rule of law set a positive example. To be sure, the Commission may not have the votes in the European Council to enforce sanctions against either government. But that does not render these measures meaningless. The proceedings have sent a clear signal to Hungarian and Polish societies and weakened the legitimacy of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the leader of Poland’s ruling party, Jarosław Kaczyński. [...]

There are signs that the paradoxes inherent in right-wing populism are even more startling than those of Soviet communism. You cannot “keep migrants out” and pay for the growing number of pensioners. As a mid-sized nation-state, you cannot both “take back control” and strengthen your position in the global economy. You cannot make government more accountable to “the people” at the same time as you destroy independent institutions. And you cannot build an innovative economy while stifling critical thinking.

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The Atlantic: What to Make of the European Elections

This narrative points to some important facts. Far-right populists had a disappointing night in a number of big countries, including Germany and Spain. Their advance slowed or went into reverse in a few smaller countries where they once looked as though they could pose a real threat, including Denmark and the Netherlands. And though their overall ranks have swelled, they are in no position to take down the European Union anytime soon. [...]

The results in Italy were especially striking. By engaging in ever more extreme demagoguery against immigrants, Matteo Salvini has transformed the Northern League, a small separatist party fighting for northern independence, into the dominant force in national politics. When he entered government last year, his party was the junior coalition partner to the Five Stars, a populist movement with roots in the political left. Now he has eclipsed his rivals, winning six times as many votes as he did five years ago, and twice as many as he did last year. In the process, he has cemented his position as the likely next prime minister—and radically transformed Italy’s political geography. [...]

It’s tempting to imagine that some of the progressive parties that are now in the ascendant across Europe might be able to stem the right-wing tide. As they have shed the radicalism of their founding period, the Greens have, for example, become ever more popular in Germany. Five years ago, they took 11 percent of the vote, finishing third. This time around, they doubled their share of the vote, comfortably taking second place. For the first time in history, they have beaten Germany’s Social Democrats in a nationwide election. And Germany’s Greens are part of a wider trend: Their sister parties also posted significant gains in France, Portugal, and the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, liberal parties, which tend to pursue more pro-market policies but have similar views on many social issues, performed strongly in Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, and parts of Scandinavia. [...]

Traditional parties have disappointed too many people, too many times. The Greens and the liberals speak a different language, directed at a different audience. For now, only Salvini directly addresses the disenchanted voters of the Monte Amiata. Unless that changes, he may be able to count on their support for many years to come.

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The New Yorker: A Scandal in Austria and the Far Right’s Fortunes in Europe

In France, for example, President Emmanuel Macron called the potential victory of his main opponent, Marine Le Pen, and her National Rally (formerly National Front), an “existential threat” to the E.U. Le Pen, in return, predicted that her victory and those of her kindred parties—in Italy, Poland, the U.K., and Hungary, among other places—would be a “historic feat.” Such either-or narratives, as might have been anticipated, proved cheap. Le Pen came in first on Sunday, and she picked up half a million more votes than she received in the 2014 European election. But she earned a slightly smaller proportion of the over-all vote, and her party will actually lose two seats in the Parliament. In his young party’s second-ever election, Macron, facing exceptionally low approval ratings at home and besieged by a popular uprising that has changed the course of his Presidency, came in behind Le Pen by less than a point. His La République En Marche! party will now enter the European Parliament for the first time, with a mandate to further his “European Renaissance” agenda. Because the Party will be centrally positioned, and therefore able to make alliances with the left and the right, it may end up having more power than anyone anticipated.

The Brexit Party won in the United Kingdom, but it did so in an election that wasn’t supposed to happen, and for a governmental body that the country was no longer supposed to be a part of. Right-wing parties also won in Poland and Hungary, but these were hardly insurgent campaigns—nationalists are a part of the political establishment in both countries. But the continued erosion of the stronghold of traditional parties was evident on the left as well. In France, the Green Party doubled its number of seats, thanks, in part, to young voters. In Germany, the Green Party, which entered the national Parliament for the first time in the nineteen-eighties, came in second and doubled its results from five years ago; one in three first-time voters in Germany chose the Greens. Over all, the nationalist block in the European Parliament fell short of winning a third of the seats, as many leaders (and Steve Bannon) claimed it might. Instead, it will hold about fifty-eight seats out of seven hundred and fifty-one. Across Europe, liberals and greens gained more seats than the right-wing populists and nationalists did; pro-European parties won two-thirds of them. [...]

For the past two years in Austria, Kurz, youthful and brash, was held up by conservatives as someone to emulate. “Up until last week, many people on the center right in Europe saw Kurz as a kind of hero,” Jan-Werner Müller, a professor of politics at Princeton, told me. This idea extended beyond Europe: Trump’s Ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, made clear, after arriving in Berlin last spring, that he was more interested in meeting the “rock star” leader of the small country next door than the vastly more powerful Chancellor of the country in which he was being paid to behave diplomatically. Kurz brought the F.P.O., a party founded in 1956, and whose first chairmen were former S.S. officers, into his government promising to tame them. “If you ask people today, what does the center right stand for, I think most people could not really give you an answer,” Müller told me. “And this vacuum of ideas has made it easier for the center right, in a very opportunistic way, to mainstream the far right as a kind of desperate measure.”

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