 |
Supporters of the Greek ultra-nationalist
party Golden Dawn wave both the national and party flags at a demonstration in Athens this year.
Photograph: Milos Bicanski/Getty Images
|
The enemy invasion: Brussels braced for influx of Eurosceptics in
EU polls
Special report:
parties demanding everything from reform to withdrawal are riding high on wave
on discontent
Jon Henley
in Coulommiers, Erfurt and Helsinki
The Foire
aux Fromages et aux Vins in Coulommiers, an attractive town on the undulating
Brie plateau an hour east of Paris,
is a fabulously French affair: a monumental marquee, hordes of happy visitors
and more than 350 stalls laden with Gallic bounty.
Among the
cheeses are tomme from Savoie, crottins de chèvre from Aveyron, and great
roundels of brie from nearby Meaux, alongside case upon case of chablis,
Pouilly-Fumé, Nuits-Saint-Georges. And today, in amiable conversation with a
local cheesemaker, there is Aymeric Chauprade, academic, author, consultant,
and leading candidate in the European elections for Marine Le Pen's freshly
fumigated Front National.
Here's the
problem, explains an immaculately suited Chauprade, who besides degrees in
maths and international law has a doctorate in political science from the
Sorbonne: all this – he gestures around him as the throng prods, nibbles,
squeezes, swills and swallows – is at risk.
 |
Aymeric Chauprade, leading candidate for
Marine Le Pen's Front National. Photograph: Jon Henley for the Guardian
|
These
artisan French foods, proud produce of our terroirs and all protected by
Appellation d'Origine status, will soon be at the mercy of multinationals,
under the new transatlantic trade and investment partnership the European Union
is negotiating with the US.
"American
farmers and 'big food' will rule; our regulations and standards will count for
nothing," Chauprade continues. "This is an EU that has no respect for
national specificities; it's an EU of bureaucrats, of ever greater
normalisation, in the service of big banks and corporations. It is not the EU
we want."
Understandably,
this message plays well here. But not only here.
Across the
EU, insurgent parties from right and left are poised to cause major upset,
finishing at or near the top of their respective national votes. As a result,
rejectionist parties look set to send their largest contingent of anti-European
MEPs ever to the European parliament: perhaps 25% of the assembly's 751
members. (Down from 766 in
the current parliament.)
Does this
matter? Dominated by the mainstream centre-right European People's party and
centre-left Socialists & Democrats, which between them almost always muster
a "grand coalition" of nearly 500 loyally pro-European MEPs, and with
much of its work consisting of complicated compromises cosily worked out with
envoys from the EU's other decision-making bodies, the European parliament does
not function much like other parliaments.
Nor, although it now has a greater say over
many more areas of EU law than before, are many European voters yet convinced
of its relevance: while it supposedly represents some 500 million people, voter
turnout among the 28 member states has fallen steadily since the first ever
elections in 1979, when 62% of the electorate turned out, to just 43% at the
latest vote in 2009.
But the near-certain election in a few
weeks of a very substantial minority of MEPs actively working to derail, or at
the very least disrupt, the parliament's work passing EU laws could come to be
seen as something of a defining moment in the European project.
"I think," says Juri Mykkänen, a
political scientist at Helsinki University, "that there is a lot of
potential for these elections to become some kind of turning point for Europe,
in large part because of the populist parties. I think the established
pro-European parties are going to have to start listening. This has to be seen
as a signal that for a lot of people in Europe,
the European Union has gone far enough in this direction."
National sovereignty
Mykkänen's home country is a good case in
point. Nervously sharing an 800-mile border with Russia,
Finland
had more reason to join the EU than most when it made the leap in 1995.
"For us, the EU actually offered a
better chance of national sovereignty," Mykkänen says. "That's a big
deal for us: we've only had it since 1917. Except it has been a false promise.
Then there's the financial crisis, having to pay for other people's mistakes …
Support for the EU is falling."
Capitalising on that growing sense of
disillusion is the Finns party. In national elections in 2011, stealing votes
from right and left, the Finns' fiscally leftwing but socially conservative and
unashamedly nationalist platform – it supports the welfare state and marriage,
and strongly opposes immigration – saw it capture nearly 40 seats in the
Finnish parliament. Currently polling at about 18%, it could field up to a quarter
of Finland's
13 MEPs.
"There's a vicious circle in the
EU," says Jussi Halla-aho, one of its leading MPs and a European
parliament candidate MEP, in a striking brick-and-glass annex of the Helsinki parliament.
"Integration creates problems, so more integration is proposed to solve
them."
Not that Europe
is altogether "a hopeless case", he adds, his words chosen carefully.
"It has tools and instruments that bring added value to everyone. I accept
its existence. But it has to focus on the functions that are beneficial for
everyone … and not on political integration. Political integration, in my view,
does not serve the interests of the nation states that make the union."
 |
Freedom party (PVV) leader Geert Wilders.
Photograph: Michael Kooren/Reuters
|
If the Finns party is polling high on its
anti-EU ticket, others are doing even better. The Front National, on about 24%,
seems comfortably on course to win at least 20 of France's 74 seats. Nigel Farage's
europhobic Ukip, which according to the most recent poll enjoys more than 30%
support from those who say they will definitely vote, should also finish top or
a close second, and seize a similar number of the UK's 73 seats.
In Denmark the anti-immigrant Danish
People's party is ahead on 27%; Austria's Freedom party (FPO), which campaigns
against "Islamisation", is on track for 20% of the vote; Geert
Wilders' anti-EU, anti-Islam Freedom party (PVV) was leading in the Netherlands
until its controversial founder triggered a public backlash – and several
resignations – by publicly egging on people chanting against Moroccan
immigrants. It could yet bounce back.
But anti-EU sentiment is not solely the
preserve of the xenophobic, the nationalist, or even the somewhat socially
conservative right. True, if parties such as the Front National are making
strenuous efforts to ditch their past (and its young, highly qualified and
personable candidates have now made the party most popular in France among
18- to 24-year-old voters), some anti-Europeans remain indelibly nasty.
With 18 seats in the Greek parliament,
Golden Dawn may reject the neo-Nazi label, but its emblem bears a strong
resemblance to the swastika, its leaders are prone to giving Nazi salutes, and
six of its MPs are in jail accused of using the party to run a criminal gang.
Similarly, Hungary's Jobbik, which took 20% of
the vote in April's general elections, may prefer the term "radical
nationalist", but its ideology is so freighted with antisemitism, racism
and homophobia that far-right groups in western Europe, including the Front
National and the PVV, steer well clear.
As the continent struggles to emerge from
its economic crisis, distrust and disillusion with Brussels
are now fuelled by more than the spectres that have traditionally haunted the
more thuggish elements of Europe's far right.
To older fears about loss of sovereignty,
mass immigration and (more recently) the rise of Islam have been added an
equally potent anger about bitter austerity, rampant unemployment and
inequality – a cocktail that means contemporary Euroscepticism is alive across
the political spectrum.
These Euro-insurgents appeal to people
unsure about their own future, worried about where their country is going and
whether they belong there, and doubtful that mainstream parties can or will do
anything about it. With little sign of any real fall in unemployment or serious
economic recovery, that's a lot of people.
Disillusion with the EU, certainly, is at
record highs across the continent. The surveys are unequivocal: 60% of
Europeans "tend not to trust" the EU now, against 32% in 2007; in 20
of the 28 member states a clear majority feels the EU is going "in the
wrong direction"; for the first time, Eurosceptics outnumber supporters by
43% to 40%.
"In our analysis, the real turning
point came in the late 1980s, when the big industrialists started laying down
the plans for the future of Europe," says
Dennis de Jong, a leading MEP from the impeccably leftwing but fiercely
Euro-critical Dutch Socialist party. "Until that moment, the EU seemed
like a logical post-war development. But industry, not ordinary people, has
driven much of what's happened since, from opening internal borders to the
euro. This EU – the EU of multinationals, of harmonisation – makes people
uneasy. People like difference. They like identity."
Coming from a polar ideological opposite,
the words bear a striking similarity to those used by the Front National. But
left and right see eye to eye, too, in their verdict on Brussels.
Socialist De Jong says: "Power is
concentrated there, and it is growing all the time – like every bureaucracy, Brussels feeds itself.
And so every problem has to have a European solution."
And this is the Front National's Chauprade:
"It's the bureaucrat's dream: a completely uniform, formatted Europe. Never mind that the EU was founded on the idea of
subsidiarity, of no one telling anyone else what to do. It's hard for them to
admit – they've devoted their lives to building it. But this EU is not serving
its citizens."
 |
Beppe Grillo, leader of the anti-euro Five
Star Movement in Italy.
Photograph: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images
|
Similar views prevail on the radical left
in Greece,
where Syriza could finish top of the European poll. The party has yet to
translate into concrete European policies the fiercely anti-EU, anti-austerity message
that made it the largest party in the Greek parliament in 2012, but it is
unlikely that the eight or nine MEPs it could have will feel particularly
warmly towards the European commission.
In Italy, too, comedian Beppe Grillo's
anti-establishment, anti-corruption and anti-euro Five Star Movement,
consistently polling above 20%, could easily capture up to 20 of the country's
73 European parliament seats. It has promised to wade in and "shake
up" Brussels.
"What we mean by that," explains
Manlio di Stefano, a Five Star MP, "is that the EU has to return to its
original concept. Not a union but a community, based on principles of
solidarity and dignity. We are saying that we must renegotiate the Europe we have, or we cannot stay. We cannot exchange our
people's dignity for an agreement to stay in Europe."
Perhaps most remarkably of all, pretty much
the same anti-EU song – set to an only slightly different tune – is now being
sung even in Germany.
In a cavernous conference centre on the
outskirts of the handsome east German town of Erfurt last month, some 1,500 people gathered
for the congress of Alternative für Deutschland. Formed barely a year ago by a
mild-mannered professor of macroeconomics at Hamburg
University, Germany's
newest political organisation does not pull your usual protest-party crowd:
there are college lecturers, lawyers, doctors, judges, academics, company
directors. More than 70% have never been members of a political party before.
"We are the revolt of the reasonable
people," says Frauke Petry, chemist, businesswoman and an AfD
spokesperson. "We'd like to get back to the basics of the community. We
think the EU has lost sight of its fundamental freedoms, with this never-ending
harmonisation – for which Germans fear they will end up paying." (Germans
have no problem with Greek civil servants wanting to retire at 50, she adds, as
long as they do not have to meet the cost.)
Loss of identity
There's more, and it sounds quite familiar.
"We think the commission is pulling more and more rights to Brussels," Petry
says. "We think that while Germans are very, very patient, they are
starting to feel they are losing their identity. And although that is naturally
rather a sensitive subject in Germany,
they don't like it. We think it's wrong that there are subjects – Europe,
immigration controls, national responsibility – that cannot be discussed in Germany,
because it is not acceptable."
As a party founded by an economist, though,
Alternative für Deutschland – which is now looking at up to 10 seats in the
European parliament – thinks above all that something has to be done about the
euro. "It is clearly harming Europe,"
says Jörg Meuthen, an economics professor from Kehl and European parliament
candidate. "In this party we are about facts, evidence, reason. Not
ideologies. And the clear facts, we have to face it, are that while the common
market is a success story – it works, it has increased prosperity, it has
brought us together – the common currency is precisely the reverse. It does not
work. It has reduced prosperity. It is pushing us apart."
 |
Nigel Farage, leader of Ukip, which wants Britain to walk
away from the EU. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
|
One of AfD's democratically chosen slogans,
says another candidate, Dirk Driesang, is "less EU, more Europe".
"Solidarity is important," he says. "But on Greece, the EU
showed solidarity with the banks, not with the Greek people. The euro's a
problem that can't be fixed. It's political will trying to trump economic
reality."
On this, almost all the insurgents agree:
FN, Finns, AfD, Five Star, Dutch Socialists – the euro, they argue, has been a
disaster. "As an experiment, it's been a catastrophe," says Ludovic
de Danne, European affairs adviser to Marine Le Pen. The currency is
"structurally unstable", says De Jong.
"We quite clearly should not be in the
same currency as Greece, Italy and Spain," says Halla-aho.
"It is not based on financial realities. It was a nice idea to think the
euro would push countries like Greece
to raise their game, but it hasn't happened. And the euro is far too strong now
for Finland,
which depends almost entirely on exports."
Where they fail to agree, however, is on
what to do about it. The Front National would like France out the euro, and to hell
with the consequences. The Dutch Socialists want "serious and open
discussions, among all member states, about how to dissolve it in an orderly
manner".
AfD quite likes the sound of a smaller,
northern eurozone, made up for example of Germany,
Austria, the Netherlands and Finland. The Finns think some
countries should leave, but aren't sure yet who: the southern states, or themselves.
Divisions over the common currency are
mirrored in other equally fundamental areas. Ukip, for instance, wants Britain
to simply walk away from the EU, regardless; the FN and PVV would go the same
way given half a chance; AfD and the Finns see their own countries' exits as
unthinkable, even suicidal, urging – like many continental sceptics –
structural reform and the rebuilding of a kind of enhanced, free-trade
community of sovereign states instead.
Several anti-Brussels parties, including
the Front National and the Dutch Socialists, propose denying the unelected and
– as they see it – centralising, ultra-liberal, bought-up and sold-out
commission the right to initiate legislation, giving it instead to MEPs and the
Council of Ministers representing national governments. Many, too, want a more
flexible union, with member states able to say no to specific measures.
On other issues they face fundamental
disagreements. Questions around immigration, "Islamification" and
identity politics are no-go areas for many: Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders may
recently have agreed to form a continental anti-European alliance aimed at
wrecking the EU from within, and other hardline nationalists such as Italy's
Lega Nord, Austria's FPO, Vlaams Belang in Belgium and the Swedish Democrats
may well join them, but more moderate parties will not go near.
"Wilders and Le Pen are simply out of
the picture for the Finns," says Sakari Puisto, a young academic standing
for the party in Tampere, in central Finland.
"We could not envisage allying ourselves with neo-fascists. Or with
communists, for that matter."
Unity against EU
De Jong says his party "will not
engage with anyone proposing discriminatory policies, wanting to create
tensions on the grounds of race or religion". Farage has said that while
he admires Le Pen's drive to decontaminate her party, the whiff of historic
antisemitism that still hangs over it rules out any formal co-operation with
Ukip.
Unfortunately, formal co-operation is
important in the European parliament: forming a political group, which needs 25
MEPs from seven states, qualifies its members for offices and funding – as well
as, crucially for any party pushing for change, a say in what gets debated in
the parliament's plenary session, the right to table motions for resolutions
and chair parliamentary committees, and extra speaking time in the chamber.
Will the insurgents manage to overcome
their differences long enough to form an effective opposition to the
pro-integration behemoths of centre-right and centre-left – to become, in
effect, a kind of European Tea Party, paralysing the European parliament in
much the same way as ultra-conservative Republicans have paralysed Washington?
While all stress "flexibility"
and willingness to co-operate with anyone who shares a specific view, few can
imagine Syriza ever sitting down with the FPO, AfD with Jobbik, or Ukip with
the PVV. Most EU observers seem to think the Wilders-Le Pen group stands a fair
chance of hanging together, however, and the current Europe of Freedom and
Democracy group – which includes Ukip – will almost certainly reform with new
and different members. The radical left, too, should comfortably form a group.
 |
A demonstrator burns an EU flag in Nicosia, Cyprus.
Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
|
Whether that will be enough for the rebels
to seriously challenge the status quo is another matter. "At the end of
the day," points out Hugh Bronson, an AfD candidate, "even if the
combined anti-Brussels forces – I don't like to say Eurosceptic, we're not all
anti-EU, just anti this particular EU – even if we manage 25 or 30% of seats,
the Christian and Social Democrats will still have 70%. It could just be
business as usual; same old, same old …"
Some observers feel the anti–EU parties'
best chance of really influencing debate over the coming years is at a national
level.
Perhaps the clearest example of this is in
Britain, where Ukip, despite not having a single seat in Westminster, has
parlayed a string of strong byelection performances and the winning media
persona of its hail-fellow-well-met leader into real political gain, pushing
David Cameron into pledging a referendum on Britain's membership of the EU and
rushing through measures to reduce "unwanted" EU immigration in the
form of so-called "benefit tourism".
But in the Netherlands, too, Wilders'
anti-Europeanism has contributed to growing Dutch dislike of austerity and
secured clampdowns on immigration and asylum-seekers, while in France the Front
National, after a carefully planned and efficiently implemented local campaign
that targeted winnable town halls and concentrated more on policy credibility
than outraged protest, has both the ruling Socialists and the opposition UMP
running scared.
Even in Finland, notes Halla-aho with the
satisfaction of a man who has got at least some of what he wants, "the
best way to make a politician act in a certain way is to make him fear the
results of the next election".
It is at the heart of Europe,
though, that these parties want to make their mark. "I really hope the
established parties listen after this shock; they really have to," says Di
Stefano of the Five Star Movement. "The fact that so many political
parties, of such wildly differing ideologies, now share such a fundamentally
similar analysis of where the European Union is failing – that, surely, is a
measure of how far things have gone wrong. It's going to have to change."
And if Brussels does not listen, the rebels believe,
there will, eventually and inevitably, be an explosion violent enough to blow
the whole European construct to pieces. "If we are ignored," says the
Dutch socialist De Jong, "then in five years' time, our voice will be even
louder. People will be even more angry and frustrated."
Back in Coulommiers, Chauprade's European
affairs adviser, Adrien Mexis, 33,
a lecturer in European law at the prestigious Sciences
Po in Paris, former staffer at the European commission in Brussels, and newly elected Front National
local councillor, is harsher still.
"I spent six years in Brussels,"
he says, "where we were supposed to be defending the interests of the
people of Europe. Instead, we defended the
interests of the lobbyists, big industrial groups and multinationals. We
defended ever-deeper integration and ever-wider federalism; a uniform,
homogenous Europe, devoid of identities.
"Is that really what the people of Europe want? I don't think so. And I think they're waking
up to it. This is a big moment."
