Europe these days is anything but the land of staid political optimism, though lattes and croissants have retained their usual qualities and roads remain largely pothole-free (at least in the northern part of the Continent). The Greeks continue to careen towards a fiscal abyss while everyone in Brussels seems unwilling to consider that if Greece wants to pull itself out of its current economic hole it may actually need to leave the euro. The slight problem in the current round of “Greek talks” is the Greek public, which with each passing month seems less and less convinced about the overall direction of the country and increasingly fed up with the seemingly never-ending “things are looking up, just stay the course” talk emanating from the mouths of the Eurocrats. Somehow the best arguments about the wisdom of Europe’s elites continue to crash and burn in the face of disgruntled citizenry. Ain’t democracy a pain?
On a different note, but in a similar vein, the electorate in other corners of Europe has also blown off some steam, and I am not talking here of the staid German Bürger who are about to lose it if they have to foot another bill for keeping the leaking EU ship afloat. As of late, in two different corners of Europe, the electorate made the heads of polling firms spin, with the results in both elections strongly suggesting that pollsters should promptly turn in the keys to their offices and move on to other, less stressful occupations. In the UK the sweep by the Conservatives, which sent Labour’s Ed Miliband packing, belied all earlier projections and presented Germany with the most difficult dilemma to date on how to accommodate British demands to overhaul the EU treaty. The British Prime Minister’s planned series of meetings with Europe’s leaders in the run-up to the June summit promises to usher in a few turbulent weeks, as Cameron can now indeed claim that he has secured a popular mandate to change Britain’s relationship with the EU. It is also likely that he will push to hold the referendum in the UK sooner than the originally planned end of 2017, with referendum legislation potentially ready in early 2016.
The fight over the actual limits of the “treaty change” sought by Britain will likely prove to be the defining moment for the EU political project. Berlin has already indicated that it does not want any significant changes. And yet for Britain to be able to manage its immigrant labor force according to its own national rules, for example, the rest of the European Union’s members will have to make substantial concessions. Even more explosive is the possibility that Britain would demand the return of more power to national parliaments when it comes to EU legislation. And so the stakes are high. Berlin is already signaling that it plans to dig in, lest the British Conservatives’ victory begin the process of reversing some of Brussels’s most prized claims over the past two decades.
And finally, Poland’s presidential election results turned out to be one of the most unpredictable political races on the Continent. At the beginning of the campaign, when the 65 percent projected vote for Bronislaw Komorowski, Poland’s incumbent President, seemed insurmountable, the conversation in Warsaw was mainly about whether there would even be a run-off. The pundits gave only a small chance to his contender, Andrzej Duda, supported by the main opposition party Law and Justice. The rest of the field looked like fodder for a late-night standup routine, with a slew of relatively unknown candidates expected to poll in single digits. All of those additional candidates proved irrelevant except one—Pawel Kukiz, a rock ’n’ roll musician who became a firebrand public tribune arguing for political reform and railing against the party system and corruption. This was perhaps Poland’s “Ross Perot moment,” not only shocking the political establishment and commentariat by giving challenger Andrzej Duda a slim win over President Bronislaw Komorowski (34.76 percent vs. 33.77 percent, respectively), but also, most importantly, giving the Kukiz anti-establishment movement 20.8 percent of the vote—enough to make for a third major party in Poland (should he manage between now and the fall parliamentary elections to put an organization in place). Regardless of what happens in Poland’s second presidential round in two weeks, the voters have delivered a shock to the system, once again reminding politicians that they may be the tail that wags the dog after all.
Over the past decade much ink has been spilled on the European Union’s “democracy deficit” and the increasingly routine “symbolic politics” that stand in for Europe’s democratic processes. Amidst continued pessimism about the EU’s economic future, it is refreshing to watch voters assert themselves. And despite official hand-wringing in Brussels and in various capitals, Europe will be better off for it.
