After the four-day, 27-state democratic marathon that is the European parliamentary election, a picture has emerged of a fragile centre just holding amid a shift to the right that carries a significant potential to shape the near future of the EU, despite having fallen short of producing the earthquake some predicted.
After some early relief among centrists over Dutch and German projected returns, the French figures provided a swift jolt, with the RN (led by Marine Le Pen’s protege Jordan Bardella) producing its highest ever nationals levels, decimating Macron’s own “Renew Europe” coalition led by Valérie Hayer into the “second-lowest EU election finish ever for a party in French government”.
Across the EU though, the picture is more nuanced. Despite predictions that the European Parliament would garner more members than ever before from the populist and extreme right, the EPP representing mainstream conservative views in Europe has increased its overall size in this election, having retained the centre ground, in its role as “the chamber’s historically dominant force”, on track to gain roughly 25% of the parliament itself with 184 MEPs.
The centre-left Socialists and Democrats (S&D) group also retained its previous toehold. Having reconsolidated its power base, the EPP will retain clear responsibilities regarding EU policy, including industrial, agricultural and climate policies now deeply contentious with EU citizens. To do so, the EPP now needs to identify its preferred leadership in the next stage of EU institution elections, including to the European Commission.
While the EPP and S&D have retained the centre ground, far right parties still did remarkably well. They represent a range of views, and it was already impossible for them to band into a single electoral group, due to intractable splits on everything from Russia to European defence.
In France, the Len Pen/Bardella RN walked off with a stunning third of votes, while in Italy a quarter of voters backing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy. Totalling up the remaining far right votes across the EU illustrates that two key parliamentary groups on the hard right (ECR), and far right (ID) will between them control 131 seats. Alongside, there are 34 additional hard right independents drawn from Germany’s AfD, Viktor Orbán’s Hungarian Fidesz party, and those from Poland and Bulgaria.
There may be just enough in common among some of those to pull together nationalist, anti immigration blocs in the European parliament, setting them up as 2024’s biggest winners, eminently capable of shifting EU strategic policies to the right including on immigration, trade, agriculture and climate change.
The numbers suggest that a single far right group would be the EP’s second largest party after the EPP. Coalition-building is tricky particularly amongst far right groups, but the numbers certainly count for something; “its sheer size will nonetheless put rightward pressure on EU policy,” reported specialist site Politico Europe.
Even if not formally consolidated, a conglomerate of far right voices will concern the EPP and & S&D groups. At this point, far right successes have three significant consequences. First: they confirm the anticipated tilt to the right of the parliament itself; second they may further entrench far-right preferences in a sizeable minority of EU member states; third, within the parliament – and across the EU – they send an signal to international partners, including the US, that the EU may abruptly change tack in terms of policy, and preferred partners.
In the Netherlands, despite heavy predictions that Geert Wilders’ far right Freedom party (PVV) party would triumph in the parliamentary election, the Dutch Labour/Green alliance tied with them, with seven seats apiece. For the Labour/Green alliance leader and former EU Commissioner Frans Timmermans, the outcome is something of a Pyrrhic victory. While no clear reprieve is in sight for the Netherlands itself in the face of recent slides to the right, the Dutch Labour/Green alliance has held together sufficiently to return an even number of seats to the EP, and in symbolic terms. It gives them, said Timmermans, much-needed “strength to keep fighting for a social and green Europe” at the EU level.
Green triumphs elsewhere were harded to find. German results for example put them fourth, a drop of 8.5% from 2019. In France, the Greens returned roughly 5%, the minimum electable threshold for MEPs. Absent the backing of French and German Greens and despite small increases in the Netherlands and Denmark, Europe’s Greens will now slip from fourth to sixth in the parliament, making them far less of a policy leader than previously, despite the extreme climate crisis facing Europe.
For many, the parliamentary election outcome is totemic of where the EU as a whole is headed: these results serve as a barometer of where national politics is headed in some of Europe’s most crucial capitals. In 2019, the EP returned a “green wave” of MEPs which catalysed a slew of ensuing green actions on climate change and green deals aimed at restructuring the EU from top to bottom in climate-friendly terms. Despite the ideological differences between conservative, populist, groups on the one side and the far and hard right on the other, the critical mass of avowedly Eurosceptic groups represents a categoric desire to remake key parts of the EU’s legislature, possibly decoupling the EU project itself from its post-war foundations.
For others, the parliament is not a microcosm of the EU. Not only will the series of right-leaning parties struggle to produce a super-group of any coherence within the party-specific complexities of the EP, the EU is a leadership-based entity, its key policies steered by big chiefs leading the European Commission, the European Council, the foreign policy chief, and to a far lesser extent, the parliament itself. The composition of the parliament, they will contend, has less to do with the strategic direction the EU will take post-election, and indicates instead preferences which are far more salient at national level, rather than continental.
With weeks of coalition building on the cards for core parties and individual MEPs, at least five big-ticket items remain for the parliament, and indeed the EU as a whole, beginning with the package of executive elections to EU institutions. Most important is the two-stage process by which Ursula von der Leyen needs first to be backed by the EU Council (heads of state) for a second term as President of the Commission, and whether she now has the 361 votes needed in the 720-seat parliament (she won by only nine in 2019).
After that, with new teams in place, the to-do list will include the war in the Ukraine and European security, the Israel-Hamas conflict, and ongoing cost of living squeezes, which currently comprises a lethal cocktail of “high consumer prices, loss of purchasing power, rising social inequalities and stagnant economic growth”, as well as migration and asylum issues, and retooling climate change obligations. Set against the outcomes of the UK and indeed US elections later in the year, the EU’s inbox – and the EP as watchdog for both the EU budget and key policies – is still at the mercy of the “polycrisis” phenomenon: a mix of volatile and protracted emergencies without real resolution.
Amelia Hadfield, Head of Department of Politics, University of Surrey
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On June 8 1023, 1,001 years ago, King Cnut took a bath. In itself this was not particularly remarkable. Contrary to the image of a ubiquitously grubby middle ages that dominates film and television, there is evidence to suggest that among the upper classes, at least, bathing was a regular pleasure.
What is unusual is that Cnut’s bath seems to be the first in English history that a (fairly) reliable written source, Osbern of Canterbury, chooses to pin to a particular time and place. But why? What made this particular bath 1,000 years ago deserving of this honour? The answer lies in the complex world of 11th century national power politics.
First we need to go back to 1012 and the grisly fate of Ælfheah, archbishop of Canterbury. Captured the previous autumn by a band of Vikings, Ælfheah was considered a valuable prize. By the spring, the leader of the band, Thorkell the Tall, was trying to negotiate a ransom for him from the English, while holding him captive at an encampment in Greenwich.
Disappointingly for the Vikings, Ælfheah refused to be ransomed. This courageous move placed the archbishop in a distinctly perilous position. He was a rapidly depreciating asset in the hands of a bunch of rowdy and bloodthirsty men, who were happy to take their amusements where they found them.
At a feast on April 19 1012, his captors threw “bones and the heads of cattle” at him until eventually one of them, a Christian convert, took pity and despatched him with an axe-blow to the head. St Alfege’s church in Greenwich supposedly stands on the site of the martyrdom.
Ælfheah’s body was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral, where it lay for the next 11 years. In the meantime, the Danes completed their conquest of England.
The Dane Cnut, crowned king in 1016, set about the business of reconciling himself to his new English subjects. And as a dead man, Ælfheah gained more political power than he had had when alive. The corpse of the archbishop, casually slaughtered in a peculiarly gruesome way during a drunken binge, was a continuing reproach. It was a reminder of a version of the Danes that did not square with Cnut’s aspirations to godly English kingship – particularly while it remained uncomfortably close to where the deed itself had occurred.
Cnut decided to have Ælfheah reburied in Canterbury with full honours. The move would at once acknowledge the enormity of the crime and hail the sanctity of the archbishop (harnessing it to his own regime). He hoped it would neutralise Ælfheah’s power as a nexus of friction between his English and Danish subjects.
Putting his plan into effect, Cnut summoned Ælfheah’s successor as archbishop of Canterbury, a man named Æthelnoth, to London. He was to preside over proceedings so that they were seen to be carried out with the blessing of the church.
At this point we can return to Cnut’s bath. Barely had he entered it, Osbern tells us, when a messenger arrived to tell him of Æthelnoth’s arrival.
A 14th-century portrait of King Cnut.
Der Spiegel Geschichte/Wiki Commons
Cnut – achieving the dubious honour of being the first person recorded in English history to have been disturbed by something frustratingly urgent just as he had stepped into a bath – immediately arose, dried himself and embarked for St Paul’s to take control.
The body of a martyr was a valuable spiritual, and perhaps also commercial, commodity. Cnut knew that any attempt to take it away from London would almost certainly be resisted.
Cnut ordered his men to create a distraction while the tomb was opened by a vigorous pair of monks named Godric and Ælfweard the Tall (who proved surprisingly adept at surreptitiously demolishing cathedral walls). The corpse of Ælfheah was retrieved and spirited away to a ship on the Thames (with Cnut himself at the helm) under the very noses of the citizenry of London.
Ælfheah was then taken on to Canterbury to be reburied, becoming the focus of a minor, but politically useful cult. Canonised in 1078, there are a scatter of churches dedicated to him (normally as St Alphege) in England. The document which tells us the story (Translatio Sancti Aelfegi, Translation of Saint Aelphegus), was produced at Canterbury by Osbern in the 1080s. He wrote it alongside a Life of Ælfheah as part of a campaign to ensure his recognition as a legitimate saint in the aftermath of the Norman conquest.
The Normans regarded most pre-conquest English saints with scepticism. So Osbern, wrote these tracts to bolster Ælfheah’s status and guarantee that the saint would continue to attract gifts, pilgrimages and benefactions to the diocese with which he was strongly associated. To the city of Canterbury, Ælfheah was a valuable piece of intellectual property and it was vital to protect it.
There is a great deal to unpack in this story, but the focus on Cnut’s interrupted bath in Osbern’s account is an especially fascinating nugget. Writing some 60 or so years after the events in question and using sources that are entirely unknown, why did Osbern feel that this element of the story deserved attention?
It certainly brings the story alive and gives it – at least to modern eyes – a vividness, immediacy and interest it might otherwise lack. But for the medieval audience, the story of Cnut’s immersion at this critical moment would have overtones of a spiritual rebirth akin to Christian baptism.
Osbern’s implication is that as a reward for removing Ælfheah’s remains to Canterbury and doing them proper honour, the saint will cleanse Cnut of his sins – and of any residual guilt for deaths during his conquest of England. This is represented in physical form by his immersion in water, awakening him through this baptism to a virtuous life in Christ as a godly English monarch.
Through the surprising medium of this first recorded English bath, the divided and conflicted English kingdom of a millennium ago opens up to us.
Simon Trafford, Lecturer in Medieval History, School of Advanced Study, University of London
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Earlier this spring, the European Parliament voted to overhaul its immigration policy to more evenly distribute responsibility among member states for managing the arrival of migrants and asylum-seekers.
Clearly, the EU’s dominant parties hear the footsteps of the anti-immigrant, populist right-wing parties, which are expected to make significant inroads in the EU Parliament elections June 6-9, 2024, and seek to reduce their appeal with stricter limits to those permitted to settle in Europe.
The idea of recapturing voters by appearing tough on immigration is attractive to established parties, but, as scholars of comparative politics and political behavior, we believe that this strategy won’t return many votes.
While it is commonly held that the electoral success of far-right parties is due to a backlash against newcomers, all this focus on immigration obscures another potent force behind this trend: emigration, or the movement of people out of a region or country.
In a recently published study, our research team found a relationship between out-migration from counties and an increase in votes for populist radical right parties in 28 European countries during the mid-2010s.
Out-migration follows a familiar trend across the globe. As countries transition to postindustrial economies, younger generations leave the countryside and small towns for larger metropolitan areas seeking better educational and career opportunities. This phenomenon is especially prevalent in Spain, which has lost 28% of its rural population in the past 50 years. Facing similar declines, Italy recently resorted to paying people to move to its emptying villages.
Counties across the United States are also witnessing precipitous population loss due to a combination of low fertility and out-migration.
But while many people are aware of the economic ramifications this population flight creates, its impact on voters has been explored far less.
The case of Sweden illustrates how out-migration can benefit radical right populists. From 2000 to 2020, the country’s immigrant population increased from 11% to nearly 20%. During this time, over half of all Swedish municipalities experienced population decline as people moved to the country’s major cities of Stockholm, Malmö and Gothenburg.
Long dominated by centrist and center-left politics, Sweden is also witnessing a remarkable partisan shift.
The country’s oldest and largest party, the Social Democratic Party, has seen a gradual decline in popularity. Meanwhile, the populist, anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats, once considered a fringe group with a fascist past, have made significant gains and now hold a fifth of the seats in the national Parliament.
As a result, the country is now governed by a center-right minority coalition that depends on the support of the radical right populists.
While immigration is a key political issue for the Sweden Democrats, our research found growing support for the party in areas relatively unaffected by immigration. In fact, looking at elections over two decades, we found that it was in municipalities that lost population that the radical right was able to score big gains.
What’s more, local immigration was much less of a factor behind this success compared with local out-migration. Tracking five election cycles, we found a persistent gain of half a percentage point in vote share for the Sweden Democrats for every 1% loss in local population – a significant pace over the long term.
Two key forces explain these dynamics. First, as many studies have shown, the people who move from the periphery to urban areas are more likely to lean left. With their departure, the remaining pool of voters naturally contains a greater proportion of conservatives than before. But composition of the electorate is only part of the story.
The political leanings of voters in depopulating regions also changed, from center-left to populist right. Here, emigration played a key role. As communities lose more and more of their working-age population, they experience a decline in public services – due both to dwindling numbers and a shrinking tax base. As a result, schools and hospitals are shuttered, public transportation is cut and local businesses close.
Along with these quality-of-life declines, living in a place that so many people choose to leave generates a sense of status loss among those who stay. Our interviews with Social Democratic Party leaders revealed how local mayors felt they had to contend with a “collective depression.”
One mayor noted: “We like it here. But then someone comes from the outside and says that you’re a failure if you live here … so we are struggling against the public perception of what constitutes a successful individual. We constantly have to work on the psychology of the municipality’s inhabitants.”
Meanwhile, disillusionment with established parties provides fertile ground for radical right parties to exploit.
While centrist politicians may feel compelled to adopt anti-immigrant stances in response, copying the rhetoric of radical right parties risks alienating their base.
Further, we believe cracking down on immigration is likely to prove an ineffective political strategy in the long run. The Sweden Democrats’ success in depopulating regions is in part a protest against the political establishment.
But once in office, and without clear solutions to the local economic and quality-of-life declines that emigration has set in motion, party officials will likely face the same voter discontent fueling their current success.
Ironically, the forces that have increased the appeal of the far right’s anti-immigrant ideologies – falling birth rates, labor shortages and a lack of new businesses and services – are most feasibly addressed by increasing immigration.
By following the right’s lead to tighten borders, parties closer to the center may condemn industrialized nations to a political doom loop.
Instead, centrist parties may find it pays more dividends to focus attention on addressing the root causes of population decline and restoring public services in peripheral areas.
There are some examples of this already happening. During recent years, Swedish governments have introduced and gradually expanded a national support system for local commercial services, such as grocery stores, in vulnerable and remote locations. In 2021, Spain announced a US$11.9 billion plan aimed at addressing the lack of 5G telephone connectivity and technologically smart cities in rural areas.
Meanwhile, the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development is putting over $100 billion toward efforts to support rural areas in its 2021-2027 budget.
Such moves may counter a somewhat paradoxical trend that has seen fiercely anti-immigrant parties gaining ground in places least affected by immigration.
Either way, as parties in Europe and the U.S. prepare for crucial elections this year, understanding the complex interplay of demographic shifts and political dynamics is critical. As is acknowledging that emigration, often overshadowed by immigration rhetoric, is a key factor shaping the rise of the radical right.
Rafaela Dancygier, Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University and David Laitin, James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science, Stanford University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Nigel Farage, a U.K. politician known for his populist anti-European Union rhetoric, endless media appearances and close friendship with Donald Trump’s MAGA Republicans, received an unwelcome treat while out on the U.K. election trail on June 4, 2024: a milkshake, directed at his face.
I am an anthropologist who studies popular democracy and has written on how pelting as a show of collective grievance has lost neither its significance nor its frequency.
Throwing things and pelting as a form of popular politics is an ancient and enduring way for the masses to express their dissatisfaction with authority and the status quo.
The Roman emperor Vespasian is one of history’s early known targets of protest pelting. According to accounts, in 63 CE, ordinary Romans, frustrated by food shortages, attacked Vespasian with turnips. Similarly, Emperor Nero reportedly faced the ire of dissatisfied citizens, who pelted him with onions in the Colosseum.
Much later, Bram Stoker – the Irish author of the 1897 novel Dracula and a long-time theater manager – quipped that as criticism goes, being pelted with eggs amounted to a positive review compared to having bricks thrown at you.
But throwing eggs can be injurious, too – just ask the U.K. protester who in 2001 dared to throw one at then-Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott. Prescott, a former boxer in the merchant navy, responded with a neat left jab to the jaw and a scuffle ensued.
Milkshakes have taken over from eggs in more recent years as the protestor’s projectile of choice – and for Farage, this wasn’t his first dousing. In 2019, an anti-Brexit protester emptied a milkshake on the right-wing politician. In a video of the incident, you can hear one of Farage’s entourage muttering, “Ah, not again!”
And in the U.K., it isn’t just politicians – British royals, too, are acquainted with the tradition.
After King Charles inherited the British throne in 2022, raw eggs were thrown his way twice in one month, including at a public appearance where he unveiled a statue of his mother, the late Queen Elizabeth II. The assailant on that occasion was hauled away shouting, “This country was built on the blood of slaves” and “Not my king.”
Queen Elizabeth II, who died on Sept. 8, 2022, was a victim of egg-throwing herself more than once, and with more accurate results. During a 1986 trip to New Zealand, one egg hit the queen’s coat, and egg yolk trickled down her pink dress. Another egg splattered on the car’s windshield, according to media reports.
Britain’s King Charles reacts after an egg was thrown in his direction as he arrived for a ceremony where the sovereign is traditionally welcomed to the city, in York on Nov. 9, 2022.
James Glossop/Pool Photo via AP
Pelting may be seen as the act of a hero or a villain – one example might be Muntadhar Al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President George W. Bush – but the act remains a performance of popular defiance.
Pelting connects the person pelting with their enemy through a physical object. Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin described something similar when discussing the medieval carnival and the “carnivalesque.”
The end of a bad show, an 1883 satirical cartoon depicting outrage over political corruption and incompetence.
Joseph Keppler Puck/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
While those throwing the objects often see retribution, be it through arrest or punishment, to see the projectiles as weapons of the weak misses the point.
The ritualized aspect of pelting doesn’t diminish its enjoyment, and the carnal element reminds us that even in today’s popular democracies, “the people” still may resort to physical protests to signal grievances to those who wield power.
To targets such as Farage, it can be an annoyance, an embarrassment and an additional trip to the dry cleaners. But to those who wield the milkshake, it can be a moment to shake up the establishment, so to speak.
Nusrat S. Chowdhury, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Amherst College
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
