The first conclusion from the results of the European elections is none other than that European citizens are turning their backs on Europe. In institutional Europe, to be more correct, in the Europe of traditional power parties, in the impersonal Europe of Brussels. The frustration of European citizens was expressed mainly in two ways: abstention and confirmation of the extreme right turn, especially in the leading countries of the European project, France and Germany.
The large abstention – especially among young voters, who supposedly reap the benefits of an open Europe more than any other age group – is indicative of citizens’ indifference. Abstinence is not just due, for example, in our country, to the high temperatures, which made the beaches more attractive than the polls. Not even in the fact that there was no substantial discussion about daily life, much more about the European project itself.
This is due, first of all, to the feeling of a large part of citizens that nothing is changing, but also to the fact that what is happening in Brussels concerns a closed caste of people, an impersonal bureaucracy. However, in addition to abstaining, citizens chose the descendants of those who destroyed Europe to send a message of dissatisfaction. Instead of asking for “more Europe” – the welfare state, the fight against inequalities, the convergence of the center and the periphery, they chose parties whose agenda is intolerance, nationalism and racism.
In France, the party of the daughter of once-pariah Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen’s National Alarm, is sweeping with twice the percentage of Macron’s party, while the Alternative for Germany is emerging as the second largest party, strengthening its forces. The Europe that is emerging today has nothing to do with the one idealized by its founders, nor with what the former skeptics proposed, who spoke of a Europe of workers, the welfare state, equality, visions that remained cobwebbed in closets. …