A new Europe is born – But much will remain with the old

May 27, 2019

By  Dik Verkuil

SOURCE: NOS Amsterdam

Europe seemed to wake up this morning in a different political landscape. “The rules have changed. A new Europe is born,” said Italian right-populist leader Salvini. “The power monopoly has been broken. This is a signal for change,” said one of his opponents, Danish Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, the liberal candidate for the European Commission Presidency.

One thing is certain: the traditional power blocks in the center have been weakened and the parties that want change have been strengthened. With this, a trend that has been visible almost everywhere in national elections in recent years is extended to the European Parliament.

Opposite trends

For the first time, European voters have not delivered the majority to the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats. The extremes have won: on the one hand, the greens, who want more European cooperation to tackle the climate problem, on the other, the eurosceptics, who want to strengthen national states and curb immigration more forcefully.

But the center has not been wiped out. The two major center parties still received 44 percent of the vote and will continue to put a heavy stamp on policy with 329 of the 751 seats in the European Parliament.

Greens absent in large parts of Europe

Moreover, there are major regional differences behind the general trend. The electoral map looks very different in Northern Europe than in Southern Europe and in Western Europe very different than in Eastern Europe. There are also major differences between neighboring countries. For example, the Social Democrats are the big losers in Germany, but the big winners in the Netherlands, while they are also doing well in Spain and Italy against the trend.

The greens are almost absent in Eastern and Southern Europe. They get three (out of 54) seats in Spain and one seat in Portugal. In Italy and Southeastern Europe they don’t even get one and in the former Eastern bloc they only get seats in Estonia and Lithuania.

The Greens owe almost entirely to their good results in Germany, France and Great Britain. That gives them a lot of potential, because in Europe, Germany and France are still the main ones.

How large is the Eurosceptic block?

The greens, with probably 69 seats, become the fourth group after the liberals, but the number of nationalists in the European Parliament is still growing. Salvini says they get at least 150 seats. It will indeed come close to that, but the image is clouded because they are distributed among different fractions.

Salvini’s own Forza, including the French Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen and Vlaams Belang, forms the right-wing populist Europe of Nations and Freedom (EVN) group, which has 58 seats.

In addition, there is the almost equally large Euro-skeptic Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EVDD), a colorful group containing the British Brexit Party by Nigel Farage, the German AfD and the Italian Five Star Movement. If the Brexit becomes a fact, this fraction will lose 29 seats in one fell swoop.

To complicate matters further, large nationalist and right-wing populist parties are also members of other European groups. The New Flemish Alliance, the largest party in Belgium, is affiliated with the conservative group, just like the Polish ruling party Justice and Justice (PiS), which received more than 45 percent of the votes in its own country and thus won no fewer than 23 seats, almost as much as the entire Dutch seat. Forum for Democracy also wants to join the conservative group.

Nationalists profit unevenly distributed

The Hungarian Fidesz party has been a member of the Christian-Democratic group in recent years, but will not stay there. It is not yet known where Prime Minister Victor Orbán’s party will join. Fidesz achieved an absolute majority in its own country and is therefore good for thirteen seats.

The Eurosceptic and right-wing populist parties have also not won everywhere. They achieve the best result in Italy, where Forza goes from 6 to 34 percent. The Polish PiS party goes from 31 to almost 46 percent.

Farage’s Brexit Party comes out of nowhere at 31.7 percent, but in 2014, Farages’ previous party, UKIP, achieved 26 percent. In France, Marine le Pen’s party gets even fewer votes than last time. Hungarian Fidesz also remains virtually unchanged, while the profit of the German AfD (from 7 to 11 percent) falls short of expectations.

The middle remains strong

All in all, the voice of the nationalist right has been strengthened, but the parties that can be counted among them do not get any further than around 20 percent of the seats, while the greens remain below 10 percent.

The result of the liberals is striking, who, as it stands, now win no fewer than 40 seats and reach 109. This is largely, but only half, due to En Marche, the party founded in 2016 by French President Macron, who joins the liberal ALDE group.

The liberals are in favor of innovation, but of course they are also part of the moderate middle – in that sense, the traditional parties in the European Parliament still have a large majority. The new Europe that was born this morning will therefore still closely resemble the old.