Get ready for an epic battle over the EU’s heart and soul
So caught up is the UK within its own seemingly never-ending Brexit melodrama that we might be forgiven for forgetting that today’s European elections are only the start of a pan-European voting process that comprises the largest transnational electoral experience in the world.
For a period of four days, over 400m voters will have the opportunity to cast ballots to provide a steer for Europe’s future direction.
While European Parliament elections have never occasioned a stirring in the loins of voters, suffering from ever lower turnout even as the Parliament’s powers have been strengthened, they do offer a quinquennial test of opinion of where the continent is politically heading.
Read more: Brexit party set to destroy Tories with 37 per cent of EU elections vote
The picture likely to be painted is not a pretty one.
Leaving aside the dissonance created by the UK’s forced participation in a set of elections it voted to remove itself from a full three years ago, Brussels is likely to reap the whirlwind of populism and nationalism that has swept the bloc since the last cross-European poll.
In 2014, the traditional European parliamentary group powerhouses – the centre right European People’s Party (EPP) and the centre left Party of European Socialists (PSE) – together won a majority.
But five years on, the memory of the Eurozone crisis that had encouraged support for comforting political options has receded.
In its place is the altogether more volatile atmosphere resulting from the sociological fallout from Europe’s migration crisis and the ongoing transformation of once thriving industrial heartlands through economic dislocation.
The EPP and PSE will still top the polls. But they will no longer be able to dictate a parliamentary majority, and confirm their choice of spitzenkandidat – the “lead candidate” of the winning group, who is given pole position in the horse-trading that occurs post-election – in the race for European Commission president.
Instead, twin demons stalk the European landscape.
The most obvious of these is the rise of the populists.
Whether from right or left, national election results in country after country across the EU have confirmed that there is a real and growing appetite for the kinds of parties which – depending on your viewpoint – speak truth to power and offer radical solutions, or are resurrecting the ugly ghosts of Europe’s past that were believed to have been expunged for good.
Parties like Italy’s League and the Five Star Movement, Germany’s Alternative for Germany, France’s National Rally and Left Party, and Spain’s Vox and Podemos may have little in common across the political divide. But one aspect they share is a view of traditional EU goals and bureaucracy ranging from deep scepticism to outright hostility.
With up to 25 per cent of the European Parliament’s seats projected to fall to such parties, the next legislative session is likely to be a rowdy one. The issues favoured by politicians like Matteo Salvini, Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orban will be debated in the EU halls of power, and the stances they support may well set Europe’s mood music.
This is not idle speculation. The tightening of Europe’s external barriers to migration that has occurred over the past couple of years, for example, has been a direct response to the electoral success of parties opposed to immigration across the EU.
With migration continuing to lead opinion surveys across Europe as the most important issue for voters, this trend of the populist tail wagging the EU dog is only likely to increase.
Nor is radicalism within the EU simply a problem of the extremes. For the “radical centre” as embodied by Emmanuel Macron poses a different but still significant challenge for a Eurocracy accustomed to acting by stealth to achieve its objectives.
Macron is contesting his first European elections. If Europe’s populists represent the cry for “less Europe” in national affairs, then the French President stands for the polar opposite.
His European campaign has been unashamedly federalist in nature, and he has made it clear that the electoral gains his broader parliamentary grouping – the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats in Europe – will make should be translated into European institutions pressing openly for further integration.
With Angela Merkel’s retirement as German Chancellor drawing ever closer, the next European session is Macron’s moment to shine. But it will also set his vision for Europe on a collision course with that of the Salvinis of this world.
The stage is set for a potentially explosive showdown, where the very future of the project of “ever closer union” may be cast into doubt.
It is unclear how the EU we have known to date and which the UK is still part of will adapt in the face of the centrifugal forces threatening to rend it asunder.
Europe’s leaders will need to choose their path wisely. One false turn, and the chaos of Brexit will seem like a little local difficulty in comparison to the next crisis that may envelope them.