Sitemap

Opinion

5 Lessons from the European Election

Sweden Likely To Becoming First Smoke-free Country

Sweden has the lowest smoking rate in...

Von der Leyen Announces Plan For Bringing The Western Balkans Closer To EU 

Fellow leaders, Ladies and Gentlemen, The war against Ukraine...

Maduro Says Venezuela Wants To Join BRICS

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said on May...

Japan Will Try To Beam Solar Power From Space By 2025

Japan and JAXA, the country’s space administration,...

The President Of India Draupadi Murmu Visits Serbia

The President of India, Draupadi Murmu, has arrived on an official visit to Serbia, where she will stay for...

Slovenia To Take Up Seat Of UNSC Non-permanent Member For 2024-2025

Slovenia, not Belarus, will take up the seat of a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council for 2024-2025...

Čadež: The Western Balkans Is The Region Of Potential And Not Problems

Europe should accept, as soon as possible, the fact that the Western Balkans (WB) is not the region of...

World Environment Day 25 June: Solutions To Plastic Pollution

More than 400 million tonnes of plastic is produced every year worldwide, half of which is designed to be used only...

Serbia To Celebrate The EU Green Week

Serbia is celebrating the EU Green Week again this year, with a set of events that brings together hundreds...

If European elections used to be a sedate affair, the 2019 iteration was anything but. Besides the obvious — a growing fragmentation of European politics, a solid but not dominant position of the far right and an increasingly green left — five lessons emerge from EU’s vote

THE EU IS HERE TO STAY

Since the outbreak of the debt crisis in 2009, observers of European affairs treated every crisis that the European Union has faced as an existential one and every moment as a critical juncture. Yet, for all its dysfunction, the EU is here to stay. Overall support for the integration project is at historic highs, and the benefits of membership are obvious even to its populist critics. Perhaps because of this reality, nationalists and Euroskeptics are calling for an unspecified reform of the EU, instead of advocating for the bloc’s disintegration. The fight’s not over, of course. If the EU no longer faces the risk of collapse, it remains at risk of hollowing out and becoming ungovernable due to zero-sum nationalist politics. ALL

EUROPEAN POLITICS IS LOCAL

This may have been the most “European” of European elections to date. The ever-sharper political divide between nationalism and a pro-EU outlook is one that is shared across the Continent, as are sensitive policy challenges, like immigration. High-profile political figures — including Italy’s Matteo Salvini, France’s Marine Le Pen and Belgium’s Guy Verhofstadt — have taken part in election campaigns far outside their home countries.

Does this mean we have witnessed the birth of a truly European public square? Not quite. Not many voters watched the televised debates of the Spitzenkandidaten — or lead candidates for the European Commission — and only a very few could even name any of them. In most countries, European themes were eclipsed by domestic fights. Despite French President Emmanuel Macron’s best efforts, the campaign in France reflected the country’s domestic malaise. For understandable reasons, the debate in the United Kingdom ended up being exclusively about Brexit. And in Poland, much energy was channeled into a discussion of LGBTQI issues and of sex abuse scandals in the church. For pro-EU (and anti-EU) forces, the lesson is simple: Local context matters, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions, and there can be no substitute for taking domestic politics seriously.

A lazy view of European politics sees the “new” member states in Eastern Europe as proxies for populism, backwardness and corruption.

DON’T APPEASE THE POPULISTS

Both the collapse of Austria’s governing coalition and British Prime Minister Theresa May’s resignation demonstrate the perils of the “no enemy to the right” strategy adopted by many conservative parties. Les Républicains in France have become virtually indistinguishable from Le Pen’s far-right National Rally, but its shift toward extremism only netted it a little over eight per cent of the popular vote. The lesson for Europe’s center right is that its efforts to compromise with the far right — including the European People Party’s current ambivalence toward Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — erode its character as an ecumenical and fundamentally moderate political force and push it into a race it can’t win.

LOOK TO THE EAST

A lazy view of European politics sees the “new” member states in Eastern Europe as proxies for populism, backwardness and corruption. In many ways that view has a basis in reality; by conventional measures, Hungary is no longer a liberal democracy but a hybrid regime resembling Turkey or Russia, and Poland’s current government has not hidden its ambition to “build a Budapest in Warsaw.”

Yet, this binary view obfuscates the fact that both old and new member states are facing the same challenges. What is more, it is increasingly the ongoing political ferment in some countries in Eastern Europe that carries in it the promise of revitalising the European project. Slovakia, for example, is leading the way, with a new moderate, pro-EU coalition of the center right and center left (Progressive Slovakia-SPOLU) that ended up winning the election by sizeable margin.

Related Articles

Slovenia To Take Up Seat Of UNSC Non-permanent Member For 2024-2025

Slovenia, not Belarus, will take up the seat of a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council for 2024-2025 from the Eastern European Group....

Serbia To Celebrate The EU Green Week

Serbia is celebrating the EU Green Week again this year, with a set of events that brings together hundreds of citizens of all ages...

H.E. Emanuele Giaufret, Ambassador And Head Of The European Union Delegation To The Republic Of Serbia

We Want To See Serbia In The EU

The EU accession framework is very clear, and where Serbia is, and what its priorities should be to move faster on its accession path,...

European Heritage

Europe’s 7 Most Endangered Heritage Sites 2023

The list of the 7 Most Endangered monuments and heritage sites in Europe for 2023 – which marks the 10th anniversary of this innovative...

Sweden Likely To Becoming First Smoke-free Country

Sweden has the lowest smoking rate in the European Union, and is likely to be declared a "smoke-free" country soon, a term used for...

Von der Leyen Announces Plan For Bringing The Western Balkans Closer To EU 

Fellow leaders, Ladies and Gentlemen, The war against Ukraine is a pivotal moment for Europe. And we must meet this moment. It is of course a...

Statement By HRVP Borrell Regarding The Confrontations In The North Of Kosovo

The European Union condemns in the strongest terms the violence in the north of Kosovo that we have seen in the last few days....

Statement By The Spokesperson Peter Stano On The Latest Tensions And Clashes in Kosovo

European Union strongly condemns the clashes involving Kosovo police and protesters in the north of Kosovo, initiated by the attempt of newly elected mayors...