The results of the European parliamentary elections are in.
As expected, they represent a repudiation of the centre-left politics that have governed Europe for the past generation. The dominant Christian Democrats of the European People’s Party (EPP), the right-leaning “soft” Eurosceptics of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and the nationalists of Identity and Democracy (ID) all added seats. The big losers, meanwhile, were not only the liberal centrists of Renew but also – and above all – the Greens.
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It is too early to say what this will mean for the future direction of the EU, except in very broad terms. As Green influence over the EU wanes, there will be less political capital to spend on climate insanity. The EPP, who have been terrible collaborators in abominations like the Green Deal, will probably be forced to seek more support from the parties to their right instead. There may be some shift in momentum, but I am pessimistic that we will see any great change from this election alone. The EU is by design well-insulated from the popular will, and the great centre-right villain of the past decades, the EPP, has only grown in strength.
But that is less than half the story. The EU parliamentary elections are not only about the EU; they are also an informal referendum on national politics, and here the seemingly minor shifts in party representation have had astounding consequences. In France, the National Rally party of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella bested Manuel Macron’s Renaissance party by 31.4 percent to 14.6 percent. In response, Macron has announced new elections and dissolved the National Assembly. In Belgium, where they hold elections for national and regional parliaments alongside the European election, Prime Minister Alexander De Croo has resigned in the face of strong gains by the New Flemish Alliance and Vlaams Belang.
We will not get new elections in Germany, but what is happening here is no less dramatic. The three parties of the coalition government barely cracked 30% in Sunday’s vote, with the Social Democratic Party posting their worst results in history, and the Greens down a full 8.6 percentage points compared to their 2019 showing. It is a stinging repudiation of the traffic light coalition. Alternative für Deutschland, despite an endless string of media smears and manufactured scandals, came in at 15.9%, the second-strongest party in the Federal Republic behind the centre-right CDU – and by far the strongest party in the East.
There are four points to make about these elections and their significance for Germany:
1. The Scholz Government have been Humiliated
As the election results rolled in and Macron announced new elections, the German Chancellor maintained a deafening silence. It took him a full day to acknowledge the defeat.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz first commented on his party’s performance on Monday evening. … “The election result were bad for all three governing parties,” he said.
“No one is well advised to simply go back to business as usual,” said Scholz. “At the same time, however, it is also important that we do our work to ensure that our country becomes modern and moves forward.”
Wolfram Weimer sums it up as follows:
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With this European election, voters have … issued the coalition government a death certificate. For months, the polls have shown that this government is the most unpopular in history … Now the Germans have dramatically deprived their leaders of legitimacy. Any normal government would draw the consequences and signal to the population: “We have understood.” … In France, President Emmanuel Macron is demonstrating in a particularly consistent way what this can mean with his decision to call a new election.
Scholz does not appear to have this courage. In fact, the Chancellor is apparently planning the opposite. Despite the result, which has been dubbed a ‘debacle’, a ‘lesson’ or a ‘disaster’, he appears unimpressed … In plain language: the Chancellor will not take responsibility, and he hopes to muddle through and sit out the crisis.
Whether he can do that is far from certain. His junior coalition partner, the liberal FDP, will use the election results as a reason to increase their intransigence in the ongoing budget negotiations for 2025. Being in government has been a disaster for the liberals, and they face a serious chance of disappearing from the German Bundestag entirely in next year’s elections as they continue to bleed voters. Thus, as Weimer writes, “the budget dispute represents for them an opportunity for heroic resistance and even a last-ditch way out of the coalition.” It may be in their interests of the FDP to bring down the government rather than continue to associate themselves with this catastrophe.
Weimer further notes that the SPD have lost 40% of their voters between 2021 and today, and that in the coming elections in Brandenburg, Thüringen and Saxony they will be humiliated yet again. It is not beyond question, for example, that the SPD will fail to meet the 5% threshold and disappear from one or more eastern state parliaments entirely. The internal pressure on Scholz is only growing, in other words, and nothing would be more in keeping with the history of the social democrats than for his own party to bring him down before the voters get their chance.
