Ever since the Russian seizure of Crimea and the gyrations that accompanied the narrowly averted Grexit, the European Union has been journeying along a reverse loop of history, punctuated by increasingly insular and disjointed national politics, and ever more resounding—if ever more futile—elite appeals to pan-European solidarity on economic and migration issues. At one level, the immediate cause of Europe’s current malaise is not hard to identify: the overlapping crises of the war in Ukraine, the financial meltdown in Greece, the waves of MENA migration into Europe, and a keen public awareness that the escalation of jihadi terrorism post-Paris is here to stay. All of these are shaking the EU’s political institutions, straining its finances, and deepening anxiety about what comes next.
But there is another factor at play, one that reflects more than the sum total of these crises: the accelerating surge of public disenchantment with the governing elites across the EU. Europe’s new right-wing politics does not fit neatly into a liberal vs. illiberal dichotomy; rather, it signals a potentially enduring change in public sentiment that could reorder the core tenets of the European project. A mistrust of current elites in Europe is fast becoming a driver of EU politics. This is about more than a shift towards illiberalism, as the media has largely characterized it; rather, this is increasingly about a growing public skepticism about the elites’ ability to find solutions to EU-wide problems.
Europe may be on the threshold of a deeper and potentially enduring political shift, with a new-type of national mass politics rooted in populist angst. Conservative political movements, as well as right and far-right political parties, have been surging, not just among smaller or midsize states like Switzerland, Sweden, Hungary, and Poland but increasingly in the EU’s core. In France, the National Front recently polled at close to 30 percent of the national vote in regional elections, even though it ultimately failed to win control in any of the contested regions. In Germany, recent polling by Der Spiegel shows an unsettled people who have grown mistrustful of elite policies, especially on immigration; 84 percent of the respondents fear that “lasting changes” will come to Germany in the wake of the wave of refugees entering the country, and they are increasingly convinced that their concerns are not being addressed by the federal government.
To be sure, complaining about “Eurocrats” and “Brussels’s latte-sipping establishment” has been a sport practiced by the EU’s demos for decades. The difference today is that it has now birthed a wave of increasingly angry populism intermingled with deeper questions of national identity and the limits of the EU’s bureaucratic supra-national authority. The surge of national identity politics is especially important after the Paris attacks and also in light of the potentially transformative electoral timetable in 2017 in key EU states: Both Germany and France have elections, while the outcome of the upcoming referendum in the United Kingdom will be a powerful gauge of the country’s public mood. This rightward shift is visible across Europe. From Denmark to Poland, election after election, the right has dominated. Today only about a third of the EU’s population is led by a center-left head of government or state.
The European Union has been from its inception an elite-driven project, and the manifest breakdown of an implicit deal contained in EU membership between Europe’s elites and its peoples poses a genuine risk to its future. Today the European public is increasingly convinced that the elites have not only mismanaged some of the key crises facing the continent (the refugee crisis to begin with being but the most recent and potent case), but also that the people in the countries most adversely impacted, whether one is speaking of the Eurozone crisis or mass migration, have lost the ability to shape their future and have national politicians who are either unaccountable or powerless. At a minimum, the growing sense that the elites are failing to provide a baseline measure of security and economic stability is breeding a rebellion that goes deeper than garden variety frustrations with democracy. In the near future we are likely to see a reshuffling of national parliaments on a scale not seen in decades.
It is ironic indeed that, inside the European Union, an institution that has at its root the legacy of the Second World War and accompanying mantras of “never again,” the woes today are not the result of failure to avoid another war but in elite mishandling of the challenges facing Europe in times of relative peace and prosperity. Growing Euroskepticism and the rise of the nationalist right in Europe are less about the “return of history” and more about a loss of confidence in the elites’ ability to build a better future.