EU Election: Study Says Right-Wing Gains Could ‘Paralyze’ the Bloc
Pro-EU think-tank: “Underestimating the importance of this election could have a very high cost for liberal internationalists across the EU.”
The anti-EU parties are poised to win one-third of the seats in the EU Parliament election in May, according to a study titled “The 2019 European Election: How anti-Europeans plan to wreck Europe and what can be done to stop it,” released by a pro-EU think-tank.
By securing the controlling share of the seats, the anti-establishment rightist parties could “paralyze decision-making at the center of the EU” and end up “curbing the [bloc’s] liberal orientation and returning power to member states,” the London-based European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) said.
“Underestimating the importance of this election could have a very high cost for liberal internationalists across the EU,” the think-tank warned. If the anti-EU parties manage to cross the one-third threshold, the “EU would be living on borrowed time,” the report added.
Outlining a winning strategy for the pro-EU parties, the ECFR urged them to “position themselves as the guardians of the green agenda, and emphasize the risk that the EU will no longer be able to provide multilateral leadership in setting environmental regulations.”
Here are some of the key takeaways from the 48-page report:
The vote could see a group of nationalist anti-European political parties that advocate a return to a “Europe of the nations” win a controlling share of seats in the EP. (…)
Winning more than 33 percent of seats would enable them to form a minority that could block some of the EU’s procedures and make the adoption of new legislation much more cumbersome – with a potentially damaging impact on the content of the EU’s foreign policy, as well as on the EU’s overall institutional readiness and its political credibility to take initiatives in the area. (…)
The result of the May 2019 election will be instrumental to the composition of the next European Commission (the EU’s main executive body), including the president and the high representative for foreign affairs and security policy. (…) Although it is up to member states to propose commissioners designate, the presence of anti-Europeans in several national governments poses a serious risk that the next European Commission will become less internationalist and principled on the main global issues Europe faces, such as free trade, human rights, the rule of law, and multilateralism. (…)
The key battles in May 2019 will take place in Germany, France, Italy, Poland, and Spain, which collectively account for more than 50 percent of EP seats. Nonetheless, preserving a pro-European majority in the EU in the medium and long term will require hampering the rise of nationalists elsewhere, from Sweden and the Netherlands to Estonia and Croatia.
Describing the methodology of the report, the ECFR said: “Our network of associate researchers in EU capitals interviewed political parties, policymakers, and policy experts, while analyzing opinion polls, patterns in voter segmentation, and party manifestos.”
“Europe’s right and far right could even formally establish a new political group, which would be the second-largest political family in the EP,” the study predicted. The projections showing anti-EU parties crossing the one-third threshold, and their emergence as a major political factor in Brussels are in line with the Legal Insurrection‘s reporting on the European elections so far. I wrote last month that if the anti-EU parties “manage to set aside their political differences and turf wars before the EU election, they could upend the power balance in Brussels.”
Not surprisingly, the ECFR report suggests a divide-and-rule policy to weaken the anti-EU alliance, urging the mainstream parties to stop the right-wing surge “by driving a wedge between anti-European parties.” A prime example of this ploy is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party. Despite its clear ideological affinity to the right-wing parties of Europe, Fidesz remains a member of the European People’s Party, a pro-Brussels alliance dominated by German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic party (CDU).
While the mainstream parties may hope to poach one or more party away from the anti-EU alliance, the right-wing parties, perhaps for the first time, are reaching out to voters beyond their traditional base. In France, Marie Le Pen is capitalizing on the largely left-leaning Yellow Vest protesters. Italy’s nationalist League Party has managed to form a stable government with the help of the left-wing Five Star Movement.
The study once again confirms the surge in popularity for the anti-EU parties ahead of the May election. The successes scored by Germany’s AfD party, Austria’s Freedom Party (FPÖ), and Italy’s League in their respective national elections has shown popular support shifting in favor of anti-EU parties.
However, the anti-EU parties cannot afford to get complacent in the run up to the election. The mainstream media and the powerful EU machinery will predictably launch an all-out smear campaign to discredit the dissenting parties and politicians.
[Cover image via YouTube]
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Comments
In order for a democratic government, however structured, to function, the most important skill is the ability to lose gracefully. Around the world, most clearly in the US, we see that at least one party/grouping has lost that ability.
Yep. When the goal is power rather than good governance, loss is intolerable.
Therefore how can ‘Paralyze’ the EU Bloc be considered anything but a Good Thing, and just the start of what really needs to happen to all those un-elected EU Bloc-Heads!
“Pro-EU think-tank: “Underestimating the importance of this election could have a very high cost for liberal internationalists across the EU.”
Good. Don’t these idiots realize that they have already destroyed Europe?
But that was the very purpose of the EU from the outset – to destroy Europe and individual countries. Just read the comments of Jean Monnet (1888-1979) and the others who set up the EU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founding_fathers_of_the_European_Union
Their bringing in oodles and oodles of Muslims was intended to swamp individual countries, destroy their culture, making it quite easy to impose top-heavy government. Is that not what has happened.
See also remark of fscarn below.
This article (05/10/13) lays it all out as to socialist origin and purpose of the EU,
https://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/15360-united-states-of-europe
Excerpt,
General George C. Marshall, then Truman’s Secretary of State, delivered a speech at Harvard University on June 5, 1947 that detailed the suffering and privation of war-ravaged Europe and called for an American response. Thus was launched the European Recovery Program (ERP), better known as the Marshall Plan — a massive foreign aid program intended to reconstruct Europe along “cooperative,” i.e., internationalist and socialist, lines.
The ERP, however, did not originate with General Marshall, but rather with Jean Monnet and the Council on Foreign Relations. The Brombergers write that, prior to the Harvard speech, Marshall sent assistants H.G. Clayton and George F. Kennan (CFR) to confer with Monnet, and that Marshall himself conferred at length with Monnet at the Paris Peace Conference. Laurence Shoup and William Minter reported in their study of the CFR, Imperial Brain Trust: “In 1946-1947 lawyer Charles M. Spofford headed a [CFR study] group, with banker David Rockefeller as secretary, on Reconstruction in Western Europe: in 1947-1948 that body was retitled the Marshall Plan.” David Rockefeller would go on to head Chase Manhattan Bank, serve as Chairman of the Board of the CFR from 1970-1985, launch the Trilateral Commission, and in numerous other ways promote global “interdependence.”
Hmm. What’s important to the right wing parties? Sovereignty. Culture. Stopping the violence and disruption caused by unrestricted immigration.
And the recipe for undermining that is to emphasize environmentalism? That doesn’t make any sense at all.
I don’t think this advice is going to help out as much as the geniuses at this “think tank” think it will.
“and end up ‘curbing the [bloc’s] liberal orientation and returning power to member states,’ the London-based European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) said.”
ECFR is one of the hideous spawn of the original NYC-CFR (est. 1921). Others can be found across the globe, including the Royal Institute of International Affairs (aka Chatham House), the Club of Rome, the Australian Institute of International Affairs. All of these busybodies work to undermine national sovereignty with the aim of World Government. Blocs like the EU, NAFTA, the African Union, et alia, are intended to be temporary milestones until the ultimate is achieved.
Perloff’s The Shadows of Power (1988) is the forerunner of Truth Is a Lonely Warrior. It documents the history of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and its control of U.S. foreign policy and Presidential cabinets through that of Ronald Reagan.
Truth Is a Lonely Warrior is far more up-to-date and comprehensively depicts the broad global hierarchy of which the CFR is one component — the U.S. foreign policy branch.
https://www.thenewamerican.com/reviews/books/item/17265-review-of-the-shadows-of-power-the-council-on-foreign-relations-and-the-american-decline
Are you a JBS member?
They say that like it’s a bad thing.
I think most readers of LI get it, but many ordinary people who don’t pay much attention to Y’urp and the politics there will not — what the report is advocating is expressly elitist and anti-democratic. The ECFR does not believe that the people of Europe know what is best for them, so they need to be told, and then do as they’re told. It’s a short step from that to most any form of 20th century totalitarianism you might imagine, which for the most part would be fine with the ECFR, so long as they’re the ones in charge.
Read the Green New Deal from ACS and her followers, and you’ll see the same mentality — we’re smart and you’re not, so you should do as we tell you to do. They call themselves progressives, but they could easily call them themselves socialists, communists, fascists, Bolsheviks, Maoists, royalists, imperialists, or clergy, and they’d be equally correct.
“We are the smart ones so we are in charge. Do as you’re told and shut up.” has caused as much misery as anything ever promulgated in human history.
Gee, I wonder why some in the EU are calling for an run EU military? Easier to control all those serfs?
“… calling for an EU run military…”
geez
Europeans would be better off with EU gone, or alternatively pull EU’s bureaucracy’s fangs by limiting authority to trade.
If only we still had Sir Humphrey Applebey to weigh in on this. 😉
Right-wing? Libertarian? Or perhaps Europe has a different ideological distribution. Left is right. Right is left. Up is down…. And the center is “good”.
The terms “right” and “left” come from France, where they meant “monarchist” and “republican” respectively.
Always nice to see good news. If the European “Right” (not quite as far Left, but still Socialists) wins it will be a benefit to Jean Francois and Jeanne Publique and other non-French Europeans.