Elections for the European Union’s parliament more than confirmed predictions of a nationalist rise and of a decline in support for environmentalist parties. The initial reaction was nonetheless one of shock, a reaction compounded by French President Emmanuel Macron’s surprise decision to dissolve the National Assembly and force an election as a sort of referendum on French extremism. (“The rise of nationalists, of demagogues, is a danger for our nation but also for our Europe, for France’s place in Europe and in the world,” Macron declared.) News cycles being what they are, there then followed a calming line of argument that emphasized European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s insistence that “the center is holding.” Finally, the argument was made that the center might be holding for now but the mainstream political groupings that provide that center need to change course now, before the political support for European union really does decline.
SIG’s view is that the European parliamentary election results fundamentally reflect the victory of economic concerns over moral ones. The project of European unity has always had a moral proposition at its core: that nationalist competition within Europe leads to war, and therefore European unity is a project of peace. European unification since the 1940s has been animated by a sense that it was morally superior to all the political alternatives. For a number of reasons, that sense of moral direction is being lost.
One reason is the structural problem of democratic representation. The “democratic deficit” of the European Union and its predecessors has been a chronic complaint that has been ameliorated in various treaties but cannot be entirely resolved. National governments are more truly representative and therefore more legitimate than the delegations each member state sends to Brussels/Strasbourg.
The political response to this has been twofold. The first response is to reject the EU as unrepresentative and unaccountable and revive the nation-state as the best available alternative. Alice Weidel, of the German party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), put it with characteristic bluntness: “We’ve done well because people have become more anti-European.” AfD recorded its best performance yet in European elections, moving into second place ahead of Germany’s current governing party.
The second response has been to increase the power of the European Commission and its president, that is, to increase the power of the European executive. On the face of it, this would seem to be the opposite of democratic: the empowerment of a very indirectly elected president and of commissioners approved by her after being proposed by national governments. But the rise of the Commission was in response to a strongly felt political need, during the 2007-08 financial crisis and the euro crisis that followed, for there to be greater power in Brussels. This was not a reward for Brussels’s political successes. Rather it was a response by the European political class to the inability of national governments to solve the financial crisis on an individual basis — and to the realization that if Brussels were not strengthened Germany, because of its economic dominance, would come uncomfortably close to being master of Europe. Then-Chancellor Angela Merkel shepherded a process by which German power was both acknowledged and contained within the reforms of the 2009 Treaty of Lisbon. Since 2019, President von der Leyen, who rose to prominence as a long-serving member of Merkel’s government, has enlarged the Commission’s effective power, pushing forward policies on the environment, defense, technology, competition policy, foreign policy, agriculture, the euro, and much else. Her presidency has made the EU more effective and thereby more worth voting about. The turnout last week was the highest in 30 years. In that quite real sense, the democratic deficit is shrinking.
However, if the European Union has become more responsive to voter needs since 2019 and a more plausibly effective companion to member states’ national governments, it has also become a prosecutor of war (in Ukraine), raised the barriers to immigration, and utilized regulatory, competition and other industrial policies as weapons against, principally, the US and China, though also Russia. In short, the EU is losing that sense of peace-loving, internationalist moral distinction that differentiated it from the patriotic model of nationalism it was invented to replace. The EU is becoming a center-right power tolerant of illiberal identitarian and economic policies and engaged in war.
The consensus opinion has been that the European parliamentary elections were a struggle between a morally legitimate, internationalist center and a demagogic, nationalist right surging upward from the murk of history. What seems more likely is that the EU is becoming a political manager for a European nationalism that can be relatively at ease with the sub-European nationalisms currently thriving in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Italy, Belgium and France. Austria aside (and adding Luxembourg), that has been the core group of European unification since 1951. It may prove to be the core of a right-leaning Continent.