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.

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.

read the article

Deutsche Welle: Analysis: Key takeaways from the EU election results

The European parliamentary elections have seen their biggest turnout in 20 years. Participation in the EU elections was up by neary 10 points compared with five years ago. Europe's traditionally large centrist parties have suffered significant losses, as Greens, liberals and nationalists gained ground in Brussels. But voters delivered a complicated message: it’s a patchwork result from a patchwork union.

Politico: Little debate (literally) over best Spitzenkandidat

But with just seven weeks to go until the European Parliament election, the two main contenders — Manfred Weber of the European People's Party (EPP) and Frans Timmermans of the Party of European Socialists (PES) — are scheduled to go head-to-head in just one EU-wide debate.

By contrast, current Commission President Jean-Claude Junker of the EPP and his main rival, former Parliament President Martin Schulz of the PES, faced off in nine debates in 2014, including four times for an EU-wide audience. [...]

The main liberal party, the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), has refused to put forward a single nominee, viewing the Spitzenkandidat process as unfairly benefitting Weber and the conservatives. Instead, ALDE has put forward a slate of candidates and said that different members of that list would represent the party in debates, notably European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, a Dane, and former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, ALDE's group leader in Parliament.

read the article

Politico: Call Emmanuel Macron any name you like — but not ‘liberal’

Emmanuel Macron’s La République En Marche (LREM) is in many respects a liberal party. It is engaged in a coy flirtation with the liberal group in the European Parliament ahead of the election in May — but it refuses to fully jump into bed with the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE). [...]

Officials in the LREM say the reasons are more nuancées. As a “party of government” with an overwhelming majority of seats in the National Assembly, Macron’s 3-year-old party is reluctant to commit itself to a group that uneasily unites smallish parties from 21 countries. [...]

The popular meaning of the word “liberal” has long been variable. In the United States it means “leftie." In Britain it means “centrist.” In Europe it means secular right-wing — pro-market and pro-individual liberties, anti-state and anti-church.

In France, however, the word has taken on the darker meaning of “heartless capitalist.” Liberalism is a force in French politics but it no longer dares to answer to its name. [...]

Tocqueville, though a great liberal thinker, was more concerned with political and personal freedoms than economic freedom and the power of the market. He warned against the market-driven, despotic power of the “manufacturing aristocracy,” which he saw developing in Britain and the U.S. The “French Adam Smith,” Frédéric Bastiat, was admired in theory but ignored in practice.

read the article

Politico: Macron and Rutte form liberal dream team

Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) is a core member of ALDE, which is the predominant liberal political family in Europe, and the Dutch prime minister has emerged as a centrist, liberal powerbroker on the European Council in the wake of Brexit. Macron upended the French political establishment by catapulting into the Elysée Palace as an independent in 2017. [...]

Operatives who described the plan said the parties in the coalition would campaign around a common platform, but that the partnership would formally take effect after next May’s European Parliament election. They hope they will do well enough to form the second-largest group in the Parliament — giving its leaders additional leverage in both the backroom negotiations over filling EU leadership posts and stronger numbers in the vote for Commission president, which will require a majority in the 705-seat Parliament. The center-right European People’s Party is expected to win the most seats in the next chamber. [...]

The partnership between ALDE and En Marche would overcome this by potentially forcing him out after the election. It would also be boosted by an alliance that Macron has forged with the Spanish liberal leader Albert Rivera and his party Ciudadanos. And it would present a bold, new challenge to the long-dominant, center-right European People’s Party (EPP), which currently holds the most seats in the Parliament and all three of the EU’s top jobs — the presidencies of the Commission, the Council and the Parliament. [...]

ALDE has struggled in part because its membership includes an extremely broad political spectrum, from ardent federalists like Verhofstadt, to Euroskeptic populists like Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš. ALDE’s eight Spanish MEPs alone represent four different national parties, as well as include three independents.

read the article

Politico: Last rites for Spitzenkandidat

Since then, the power-sharing agreement has collapsed, and the heads of government on the European Council have said they will not be bound by the Spitzenkandidat process. Meanwhile, parties other than the EPP have turned against the system, recognizing that it overwhelmingly benefits the conservatives, who are once again virtually guaranteed to win the most seats in Parliament in next year’s election. [...]

Some of the strongest resistance is coming from the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), which has only the fourth-largest faction in Parliament but has made strong gains in national elections and is soon expected to hold eight seats on the European Council — the same number as the EPP. [...]

For now, Merkel has backed Weber’s candidacy, but her endorsement is largely a necessity of national allegiance, and in announcing her support she made clear that merely winning the party’s nomination would not guarantee that Weber becomes Commission president — an implicit renunciation of the Spitzenkandidat system. [...]

But unlike national parliaments, the European Parliament is co-legislator along with the European Council, and members of the Council have made clear that they are not willing to relinquish their legal authority over nominating the Commission president in favor of an unwritten process that gives Parliament overwhelming control.

read the article

Politico: Macron and Salvini face off over Continent’s future

Macron has charged Christophe Castaner, En Marche’s chief executive, with pulling together potential allies across the Continent, including Italy’s former center-left Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and the liberal Spanish Ciudadanos party. [...]

It’s a battleground on which Salvini is eager to engage. “Next year’s election will be a referendum between the Europe of the elites, banks, finance, mass migration and precariousness versus the Europe of peoples, work, tranquility, family and future,” he said earlier this month at a rally of party members and supporters in the northern Italian town of Pontida. [...]

En Marche officials have been courting members of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe parliamentary group (ALDE) with the hope of forming a large pro-European force after the election. But so far “Macronmania” has not infected the European Parliament; few believe Macron’s group will be able to rival the EPP for dominance.

Salvini’s problem is that Euroskeptics are heterogeneous and divided, and in some areas ideological enemies. On economics, for example, the National Rally and Alternative for Germany (AfD) sit at opposite ends of the political spectrum. Creating a large Euroskeptic group would require him to bridge those differences. [...]

A new Macron-centered political group would draw on the most progressive of the liberal ALDE parliamentary group, “and all those who don’t identify themselves with the EPP or Socialist forces,” said Pieyre-Alexandre Anglade, a French member of parliament from En Marche and one of Macron’s point men in preparing the 2019 election campaign. “What we offer is an alternative to populists,” he said.

read the article

Social Europe: Will Defunding Hungary And Poland Backfire?

In both Poland and Hungary, the ruling parties have brought the opposition into line through nationalist blackmail. Any criticism of the Polish or Hungarian government is spun to look like criticism of Poland or Hungary itself. And, in Poland, the fear of being labeled unpatriotic has pushed opposition politicians to concede that the country belongs to the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) and its chairman, Jarosław Kaczyński.  [...]

Opposition members who criticize the idea of suspending EU funds for populist governments may make public appeals to morality, but what they really want is efficiency. They assume the suspension of EU funds would be broadly unpopular, and would strengthen populist rule rather than weakening it. Similarly, the moralizing manifestos of Verhofstadt and Macron are not entirely unselfish. Politicians and journalists often mistakenly read this situation as if it were simply “about Poland,” or “about Hungary,” while in fact criticism of these countries forms part of a bigger picture. Both the ALDE and the European People’s Party Group (Christian Democrats) are expected to suffer severe losses, owing to Brexit and the larger collapse of the political mainstream in France, Germany, and Italy.  [...]

But if the principle of “EU funding in exchange for the rule of law” is indeed implemented, the costs might not even be borne by Kaczyński or Orbán, but rather by the next Polish and Hungarian governments. This is particularly true in Poland: although the PiS is still at the top of the polls, a coalition of non-populist opposition parties could well overtake it. The more the EU Commission sours on what was once Eastern Europe’s model student of democracy, the clearer it becomes that Brussels will not be as favourably disposed to Poland as it once was, regardless of who is in power.  

read the article

Politico: Vestager keeps Commission presidency options open

With French President Emmanuel Macron — a liberal in search of a Europe-wide political family — hinting at support for a Vestager European Commission presidency, and many in her own party pressuring her to run, the commissioner’s Mechelen trip looked very much like pre-candidate activity. [...]

Vestager’s path to the Commission presidency would not be straightforward. She would need backing from the Danish government, which doesn’t seem keen to give her another term in Brussels. The liberal ALDE alliance has little chance of coming first in the European Parliament election so its candidate would not be in pole position for the job. And she may have too much star power to win the endorsement of national leaders, who do not like to be upstaged. [...]

Speaking later in her office at the Commission’s headquarters, Vestager said that while she agrees there remain “systemic threats to the rule of law” in Poland and Hungary, she’s determined that Brussels should not impose a narrow view of rule of law on EU member countries. “Dialogue is still a possibility,” she said, emphasizing that “rule of law can be achieved in a number of different ways.”

read the article

Social Europe: Macron Takes Aim At European Politics

Macron’s “La Grande Marche pour l’Europe” will mimic the programme that toppled France’s dominant political parties and transformed his La République En Marche! movement into a political force in 2017. Over the course of six weeks, he will dispatch ten ministers and 200 parliamentarians to survey the French people’s views on Europe and European issues. The results will then be considered in developing a platform that can beat populist and Euroskeptic parties in the 2019 European Parliament election.

Macron has persuaded all other EU member states (with the exception of Hungary and the United Kingdom) to conduct similar public consultations, which he hopes will lay the groundwork for the EU-level reforms he proposed in major speeches in Athens and at the Sorbonne last year. [...]

Similarly, Macron’s vision for Europe seems to reconcile the irreconcilable: his plan is both to preserve member states’ sovereignty and deepen EU integration. Institutionally, this means supporting supranational bodies while also allowing for more flexibility in areas where national governments, rather than Brussels, are better positioned to solve problems. [...]

On migration, Macron wants both to secure Europe’s external borders and ensure that the burden of taking in refugees is shared across the EU. In the short term, he is pushing for an agreement among member states on refugee quotas. But, in the long run, he supports greater harmonization of asylum systems, or even the creation of a central EU asylum agency. [...]

The second Ricoeurian concept underpinning Macron’s worldview is the idea of a European “refoundation.” Whereas the first wave of European integration was largely limited to economics, Macron now wants to focus on politics and culture, starting with the European Parliament election next year.

read the article

Politico: Dutch prime minister says more EU integration ‘not the answer’

The Dutch prime minister — who was speaking at the annual congress of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) — did not name Macron in the speech but at one point indicated his skepticism for the idea of “democratic conventions” that was “coming from France.”

Taken together, the speech is a strong rebuff to Macron’s ambitious and detailed reform agenda, which includes a wide range of policies from introducing a new class of transnational MEPs to the creation of a common budget for the Eurozone. [...]

Rutte, who is a liberal like Macron, added that pushing for more European integration cannot be a goal in itself. “Integration for integration’s sake will only harm public support for the European Union. So before we develop new policy, before we set up new agencies, before we think up new rules and regulations, we need to ask ourselves: what problem does this truly solve?” [...]

Rutte also took a sideswipe at the EU’s conservative European People’s Party. He said he didn’t understand why the party of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán was still a member of the mainstream political grouping despite his populist policies. “Why is he still a member of the EPP?,” Rutte asked, adding that it was strange that Orban participated in pre-summit meetings with his EPP colleagues.

read the article