The challenge to legitimacy in the EU

OPINION:

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Much like the United States, Europe is at a political crossroads. Will its nations continue down the destructive path of antigrowth taxation, open borders, environmental extremism and overregulation? Or will European leaders respond to their citizens and affirm the conservative agenda that voters recently mandated in the European Union parliamentary elections?

In the elections in early June — as the EU-US Forum’s polling predicted — conservative parties trounced the left in response to policies that are failing: Incentives for illegal immigration, anti-farmer initiatives, and controls on free speech. It turns out that the agenda of the left is at odds with the views of the majority of the people.

Many far-left officials from the Renew and Greens political groups were voted out, while conservative parties such as the European Conservatives and Reformists and Identity and Democracy gained seats. This was most prominent in France, Germany, Belgium and Spain — some of the biggest champions of the failed leftist shift that Brussels has taken in recent years.

The magnitude of the losses the left experienced in June is hard to overstate — the Greens lost one-quarter of their Parliament seats. Renew lost almost the same portion. The far-left Ciudadanos party in Spain was completely wiped out.

Yet as the EU forms its new government, the far left stubbornly refuses to bow to defeat, threatening the ruling coalition to keep conservative parties from being considered for a handful of significant positions.

The contemptuous disregard for the will of the voters among the ruling leftists in Brussels is also reflected in the policies they continue to push. Most recently, the ruling center-left government proposed an extension of the European Green Deal that will burden farmers even more.

This radical policy is supposed to be a response and solution to months of farmers’ protests against the EU’s current environmental dogma, which is destroying their livelihood and suffocating their industry.

Over the summer, the revolutionary movement that was born in the EU parliamentary elections continued in national elections, as the socialist parties across Europe were eviscerated one by one.

For instance, in France, the “far-right” National Rally party won twice as many seats as French President Emmanuel Macron’s ruling party. In response, Mr. Macron recklessly called for snap national elections to put a stop to the right’s momentum once and for all. The results were humbling, and in an attempt to stanch the political bleeding, he was compelled to appoint Michel Barnier of the center-right Les Republicains as prime minister.

In early September, eastern Germany held regional elections in which conservatives took home another major win as the Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, obtained its first major win in Thuringia with a plurality of 33% of the vote and reached a close second place in neighboring Saxony with 30%. These results follow Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party’s worst nationwide election in over 100 years.

Mr. Scholz refused to accept the message. His response? “Our country cannot and must not get used to this. The AfD is damaging Germany. It is weakening the economy, dividing society and ruining our country’s reputation.”

The ascendant AfD was having none of it. After being called a right-wing extremist by a journalist, an AfD leader responded: “We are the number one people’s party in Thuringia. You don’t want to classify one-third of Thuringian voters as right-wing extremists, do you?”

This past week, the conservative Freedom Party of Austria, championing a crackdown on illegal immigration, was victorious in the national elections with 27% of the national vote and the most of the other seven national parties.

Italy’s Matteo Salvini summarized the win in Austria as “a historic day in the name of change. To those who speak of the ‘far right,’ we remind you that in Vienna (as in almost all of Europe) the only extreme thing is the desire to change by putting the values of work, family and security back at the centre.”

Voters see and feel that Europe is in decline. The EU economy is scarcely larger today than it was before COVID. Brussels’ demonstrably irrational environmental agenda was implemented at the expense of affordable energy, food and everyday goods, as well as farmers and manufacturing.

As ruling parties pursue these misplaced policies and continue to ignore their basic duty to represent the people, conservatives are gaining thanks to common sense ideas aligned with a growing number of European voters.

Despite this, the arrogance of Brussels continues to cripple livelihoods and ignore what voters are making clear in elections. To retain legitimacy, the EU must recognize conservative leaders and the real concerns of European voters.

If the leaders of the European Union continue to muzzle and marginalize conservative policies and conservative representatives in Brussels, Europeans will soon view their votes as meaningless. That will erode the EU’s already shaky legitimacy and plunge the continent into chaos.

• Joe Grogan was the director of the Domestic Policy Council in the Trump administration.