The 5-yearly elections to the European Parliament are
awaited on 20-25 May, not exactly in pregnant anticipation by the EU
electorate. Turnout in Europe overall is about 43% - though an even lower 34%
in the UK – and falling. As well as choosing their Euro-members, this time
round the voters are also choosing the President of the European Commission,
though the likely winners, Jean-Claude Juncker, conservative and terminally dull
erstwhile premier of Luxembourg or Martin Schulz, boring and bearded socialist
from Germany, are hardly going to quicken the pulses of the people. Yet in the
UK, in France and in Greece the Euro-elections will have some significance on
the future direction taken by their national governments.
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| Juncker |
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| Schulz |
In the UK the show has already opened. Euro-fanatic Deputy
Prime Minister and Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg rashly challenged populist UKIP
leader Nigel Farage to two debates on Europe. Farage knocked spots off Clegg
both times, whose feeble defence of the indefensible European system showed a
typical fat-cat contempt for EU citizens and their concerns. Farage has been a
Euro-member for some years and has in the past been gloriously rude to Belgian
Council President Herman van Rompuy (“you have the charisma of a damp rag”) and
knows which popular buttons to push. Farage affects a matey man-of-the-people persona, for whom his pint of black and
tan at the pub, accompanied by a pickled egg and a packet of pork scratchings
are his proud British birth right whatever Brussels’ ‘elf ‘n’ safety squads may
have to say. Yet he strikingly articulates UK fears and disappointments over
Europe and has every prospect of harvesting an anti-Europe landslide at the May
election, certainly out-voting the Tories and perhaps even Labour.
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| Farage thrashes Clegg |
The political complexion of the 71 UK representatives in the
751-strong European Parliament will not make much difference to that cataleptic
pro-European body, loyally rubber-stamping the constant power-grabbing effusions
from the Commission. The Brussels gravy-train will totter on over the groans of
agony from her jobless and deflated citizens particularly in Southern and
Eastern Europe. David Cameron will, if UKIP have the success I predict, face a
very tricky period within the Tory party. The Eurosceptics are well known, John
Redwood, Bill Cash, Lords Lamont and Lawson et
al but influential David Davis has now pressed for exit and reliable cabinet
ministers Michael Gove and Philip Hammond have already expressed misgivings.
Cameron has set out a leisurely time-table – nothing before the 2015 election,
then a renegotiation seeking the repatriation of powers and other reforms,
followed by an In/Out referendum probably in 2017 with Cameron campaigning to
stay In. Public opinion is rallying strongly to the Eurosceptic cause and
Cameron is surely too smart to ignore it. The situation calls for inspired and
convincing political leadership: if he is not up to this challenge Cameron
could lose his premiership.
Farage has done his country a great service by galvanising
the European debate but I fancy the May 2014 elections will be his apogee. UKIP
is an undisciplined if genuinely democratic party and it will fade badly in the
2015 general election. I guess Farage himself, probably contesting Folkestone,
will be the only UKIP member. In earlier days he would have been elevated to
the peerage.
France and Greece are totally different cases. Marine Le
Pen’s Front National has been cleaned
up somewhat but it is has basically a racist agenda, currently agitating for
the removal of halal and kosher school meals and insisting that
the serving of pork is in keeping with French secular traditions and
schoolchildren need to recognise that. It is anti-immigrant (but then even the
new Prime Minister Manuel Valls once called for the deportation of all Romany
people) and seeks to protect French commerce and French privileges. At local
elections the FN won several town halls but it is a very distant third party.
Such success as it achieves is largely a protest at the disconnection of
politicians from the people and the revelation of corruption in high places.
The wet performance of President Francois Hollande adds to the disillusionment. The French are fed up with the way the world
is going and especially by the widening gulf between the mega-rich and ordinary
folk. This phenomenon has loud echoes in the UK and the US where the gulf is
visibly obscene. The currents of revolutionary convulsion are stirring, with
the EU seen as complicit in this toxic underside of globalisation – its
unfairness and lack of social conscience. Politicians need urgently to apply
their minds to this problem.
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| FN's Marine Le Pen |
Greece remains Europe’s basket case with all the above
problems, only worse. Despite its leaders being incarcerated without trial, the
overtly fascist Golden Dawn seems to be polling well and will win seats in
Europe. Many more seats will go to shambolic Left-wing SYRIZA (about 29%) and
the only relatively “clean” party. SYRIZA wants Greece to stay within the EU
but opposes Eurozone deflation and austerity policies which have hit Greece
hard. The incumbent conservative party, New Democracy, in coalition with the
rapidly disintegrating leftist PASOK, fear the success of both SYRIZA and
Golden Dawn and the effect it might have on their own cosy lives.
The Athens scandal this week revolves around supposedly
confidential discussions between Golden Dawn MP, currently on bail, Ilias
Kasidiaris, and Takis Baltakos, secretary-general of New Democracy and a close
crony of Premier Antonis Samaras. Unknown to Baltakos these conversations were
being secretly filmed and from what has been broadcast it seems that Baltakos
admitted the criminal gang charges against Golden Dawn were trumped up, that
Samaras had discussed the case with the high court judges and that it was all a
manoeuvre to pinch support from Golden Dawn and return it to New Democracy. On
publication of the tape, Baltakos resigned, protesting he was working alone, as
a double agent, and there was no truth in what he said. It is in short the
usual unsavoury Greek soup. Kasidiaris is not the most elegant of company, a
33-year-old tattooed body builder, notorious for repeatedly slapping a
left-wing lady MP on prime-time TV, a demagogic speaker photographed in shorts
on a bed lovingly caressing his AK-47 automatic rifle; Kasidiaris says he has
more tapes so expect further shock-horror revelations! In any event, Greece is
in turmoil and the European elections will for sure change the personality of
its representatives.
Undemocratic parties are on the rise in Europe, the
tentacles of corruption are everywhere and the EU institutions themselves have
long suffered a “democratic deficit”. Is this really the kind of organisation
of which the UK should remain a member?
SMD
8.04.14
Text Copyright ©Sidney Donald 2014
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