Key Takeaways from the European Election

In a weekend Twitter thread I did a deep dive on the results from the European elections: big turnout, gains for the Liberals and Greens, losses for the establishment left and right, and less power for European parties on the right. Support for the European project held, but the governing coalition will now be broader and more complicated, with the Liberals and Greens having much more influence than before.  ew voices and new politics will emerge now in Europe. 

One group who will not have more influence is the European far right.  Overall the center-right/far right parties saw their representation in the European Parliament drop from 49.5% to 46.7%. The three far right parties went from 21% to 23%, gains that were less than anticipated, and became only a bit more of a smaller and less powerful right-of-center pie.  Even in the UK it appears those voting for Remain outpolled those voting for Brexit, though things remain closely divided there. 

Loss of ground for the center-right/rfar right, and gains for Liberals and Greens, feels similar to what we are seeing here in the US. The GOP got beaten badly here in 2018, and Donald Trump is the weakest incumbent at this point in his Presidency in the history of polling - with no near peer.  President Trump would lose to Joe Biden by a large margin if the election were held today.  In the Democratic Party, we are seeing a huge rise in the import of countering climate change, and Dem voters hold very “liberal” views on immigration and trade, supporting free trade and opposing the President’s tariffs by wide margins.  Importantly, in Europe you did not see the rise of a far left to counter the rise of the far right – the party which gained the most ground was the Liberals, a centrist pro-EU alliance.  The far-left alliance actually lost ground in Europe, perhaps tracking the decline of the Labour Party in the UK and Bernie Sanders here in the US. 

As NDN has been arguing for months, the response of the center-left to the rise of a radical and dangerous far right politics here in the US has been something that feels far more like pragmatism than anything else. It's how we won the House back in 2018, how Pelosi is leading today, and in our own 2020 field, the politician most associated with that politics holds a commanding lead.  It isn't that the rise of AOC and are allies isn't important - it is.  But is our take that their influence and the Democratic Party's leftward drift has been exaggerated.  Consider that the Justice Democrats, her group, won only 7 of its 67 races in 2018; and that 40 of the 59 new House Democrats have joined the New Democrat Coalition, a group long associated with pro-market, pro-trade "liberal" politics. 

If your basic analysis is the radicalization of the other party has become dangerous, it would stand to reason you would be wary of embracing extremism in your own party. 

I would also posit the rise of the “Greens” here and in Europe is a pragmatic response, long overdue perhaps, to a serious global challenge and threat.  Fascinating to see the response to the perceived threat of Trumpism/Orbanism/Putinism to be a pro-globalist pragmatism and one working to hasten the arrival of a post-carbon world – both of these impulses seem very much in line with what is needed now, and ones that should worry the GOP about next year.