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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   23862 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

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So with EPP being the largest faction still, this sounds like a right-weighted version of basically the same thing?

this sounds like a right-weighted version of basically the same thing?

I'm hardly an expert on Europe, but I did just read a piece on the topic which makes an argument that this will indeed change little. From Thomas Fazi at UnHerd: "Europe’s insurgent Right won’t change anything"

Depending on where you stand politically, you might view the Right-populist surge in the European Parliament as either a grave threat to democracy, or as a striking victory for it — and a major step forward in “taking back control” from the Brussels oligarchy. But both positions would be wrong. The truth is, despite yesterday’s hysteria, compounded by Macron’s decision to dissolve parliament and call an election, the impact of these elections won’t be as significant as people fear or hope.

Consider the victors: the ECR and ID groups, who made significant gains. Both blocs are made up of various Right-populist parties who are deeply divided on several crucial strategic issues: social and economic matters, European enlargement, China, EU-US relations and, most important, Ukraine. This means that, even if they succeed in pushing the European Commission to the Right, they will struggle to turn their electoral success into political influence; on Europe’s most important challenges, it seems unlikely they will vote as a bloc. But on a more fundamental level, to assume these elections will radically alter the course of the EU’s policymaking agenda, or even threaten democracy itself, implies that the EU is a functioning parliamentary democracy. It is not.

Despite the fanfare that surrounds every European election — each one tediously described as “the most important elections in the history of the European Union” — the reality is that the European Parliament isn’t a parliament in the conventional sense of the word. That would imply the ability to initiate legislation, a power the European Parliament does not wield. This is reserved exclusively for the EU’s “executive” arm, the European Commission — the closest thing to a European “government” — which promises “neither to seek nor to take instructions from any government or from any other institution, body, office or entity”.

…

There’s also another to point to be considered. On the one hand, the fact that the European Parliament, the only democratically elected institution in the EU, exercises some oversight over the Commission’s policies, might be seen as a positive development. In this sense, the bigger presence of the Right-populist parties will certainly have an impact of the legislative process, especially on highly polarising issues such as the European Green Deal and immigration.

But on the other, this doesn’t change the fact that the European Parliament remains politically toothless. The entire legislative process — which takes places through a system of informal tripartite meetings on legislative proposals between representatives of the Parliament, the Commission, the Council — is opaque to say the least. This, as the Italian researchers Lorenzo Del Savio and Matteo Mameli have written, is exacerbated by the fact that European Parliament is “physically, psychologically and linguistically more distant from ordinary people than national ones are”, which in turn makes it more susceptible to the pressure of lobbyists and well-organised vested interests. As a result, even the most well-meaning politicians, once they get to Brussels, tend to get sucked into its bubble.

…

All this means that, while we may expect a change of direction on some issues, these elections are unlikely to solve the pressing economic, political and geopolitical problems afflicting the EU: stagnation, poverty, internal divergences, democratic disenfranchisement and, perhaps most crucially for the continent’s future, the bloc’s aggressive Nato-isation and militarisation in the context of escalating tensions with Russia. In this sense, it’s hardly surprising that around half of Europeans didn’t even bother to vote. Ultimately, the EU was built precisely to resist populist insurgencies such as this one. The sooner populists come to terms with it, the better.

So consider this a data point in favor of "basically the same thing."

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