Populist parties are uniting to oust the elites at EU elections in May

This Wednesday, 9 January, another brick will be cemented into the wall of resistance to the crumbling Brussels despotism when Italy’s deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini is due to meet Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) in Warsaw. Matters of mutual interest will be discussed, but pre-eminent among them will be further progress in forging a “freedom front” to contest the European elections in May.

That was the term used when Salvini met Marine Le Pen for similar discussions. The growing number of EU member states that oppose ambitions for further integration, uncontrolled immigration and a globalist-liberal worldview are forging a loose but formidable alliance aimed at overthrowing the old order in Brussels. In May, for the first time, the entitled nomenklatura of the European Union will face a cohesive and united assault from conservative forces that have the tide of history with them.

This is happening at a time when, in the domestic politics of EU member states, the legacy parties of the left and so-called “centre-right” are being massively rejected by their electorates. In 2017 Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat Party recorded its worst result since 1949; recently her Bavarian allies had their lowest vote since 1950. The AfD is the official opposition in Germany and Merkel, the former Empress of Europe, is now a lame duck chancellor, still quacking dementedly about the need for nations to surrender their sovereignty when the current of public opinion is running strongly in the opposite direction.

The significant feature of the coordinated attack on Brussels building up in advance of the May elections is that it is being spearheaded by so-called populist parties that, so far from being excluded fringe factions, are already in government. Fidesz in Hungary, Law and Justice in Poland, Salvini’s Lega in Italy, the Freedom Party in Austria – these are all strong forces in European government.

Yet yesterday’s men in Brussels – the thuggish Martin Selmayr, the emotional and overtired Jean-Claude Juncker who could write an academic paper on the varieties of parquet floors in the banqueting halls of Europe, the Ken Dodd tribute act that is Guy Verhofstadt – continue to entertain the delusion that the despised “populist” movement is somehow a temporary, maverick phenomenon, when it is the irresistibly advancing future of Europe.

Populism is not just threatening to take power: it is already in power in significant EU member states and now it has Strasbourg and Brussels in its cross-hairs. Almost every month more sand runs out of one half of the hourglass into the other. For three months every attempt at forming a coalition government in Sweden while excluding the Sweden Democrats has failed; by the time of May’s EU elections they may be in government in Stockholm.

In Spain, the recent electoral success of the Vox party was sensational, not just because of the figures but because of the venue: Andalusia, a province so intransigently leftist that for generations it rejected Communism as too right-wing and clung to Anarchism. Now it has turned to Vox and stunned commentators are asking in bewilderment: why? It would never occur to those impeccably politically correct globalists to ask if it might be connected with the spectacle of Muslim migrants from North Africa, turned away by Salvini’s Italy, arriving unannounced on the beaches of southern Spain.

For decades it has been a given among the European (and North American) elites that governments can do anything they want, regardless of the interests or wishes of their electorates. This happy state of unaccountability was achieved by the simple device of creating a “progressive consensus”, in Gordon Brown’s terminology, so that a variety of political parties camouflaged a single liberal agenda. The mug punters had a choice of voting Labour, Liberal Democrat or Conservative, but regardless of which permutation prevailed electorally, they would still get uncontrolled immigration.

Then along came UKIP and suddenly the arrogant mantra of Tory grandees regarding their disillusioned supporters – “They have nowhere else to go” – was obsolete. The same process has occurred across Europe. The politicians who rode a gravy train while irresponsibly and radically altering the demography of the societies they misgoverned are about to be held to account. Their transparent and pathetic attempts to demonize the forces of “populism” – formerly known as democracy – have been laughed to scorn by many voters.

Totally unelected Eurocrats denounce as “authoritarian” a prime minister such as Viktor Orban, who has won three successive super-majorities at general elections and submits contentious legislation to consultation by the electorate in regular mini-referenda. He has kept Hungary for Hungarians, built a fence to exclude illegal immigrants and successfully regenerated his country. In 2015 a total of 177,135 so-called asylum seekers, migrants, arrived in Hungary – obviously having traversed other safe countries en route; in 2017 the figure was 3,397. In 2015 Hungary, a nation of 9.6 million people, was entered by 441,515 illegal migrants; today the figure is negligible.

Yet EU leaders who denounce Orban wring their hands and profess bafflement over how to stem illegal immigration. The truth is they encourage it, partly to provide their corporate cronies with cheap labour, partly out of loathing for traditional Christian Europe. Poland has similarly been pilloried by Brussels for its long overdue dismantling of the self-perpetuating system of Communist judges, a time-bomb left over from Jaruzelski’s Round Table ploy in the last days of Red rule, to provide a lifeboat for Party apparatchiks.

Brussels has unerringly provoked Europe’s electorates in every area that concerns them: fiscal policy, sovereignty, demography, religion, culture. Now it is appalled that the despised helots are rising up. The insurgency is likely to gain further traction between now and May’s elections. The French domestic situation suggests a landslide for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. Even Brexit will play a part: countries which, at the moment, have no intention of leaving the European Union, have found it disquieting to witness how Brussels treats a state that decides to depart.

At present, the insurgent populist parties do not seek to leave or dissolve the EU; their first objective is to reform it. In that they will inevitably fail and the euro currency, sooner rather than later, will dissolve it. Until very recently the consensus among commentators was that the “freedom front” of populist parties would gain a maximum of one-third of the seats at Strasbourg in May. That would give it considerable power, at least of obstruction of Macron-style integrationist nonsense.

Lately, however, particularly in the light of the ludicrous Jupiter Macron’s humiliation in France, some commentators, for the first time, have begun to canvass the possibility of a populist landslide giving the insurgency an actual majority in the European Parliament and the power to drain the Brussels swamp and end the rule of Juncker and his cronies. That is, on the face of it, a fairly unlikely eventuality at this election. But so were Brexit, Trump and Salvini.