Concluding the topic of the European Parliament elections, a few localised country-by-country findings
Poland is still as fatally split in half into two irreconcilable camps. Yesterday, the map on which the EP vote divides Germany exactly along the border of the GDR and FRG, but Poland’s electoral map also divides it exactly along the borders of the Rzeczpospolita partitions, was circulated all over the world. As a rule, the provinces that were part of Germany and Austria vote for the liberals from Civic Platform, the provinces that were part of Russia – for Kaczyński’s Law and Justice. Borders are more resilient than the states they once delineated;
On Germany, the demographics of voting for the European Parliament are far more important to me than geography. The threat to destabilise the FRG is not that the Alternative for Germany is being chosen by the eastern states, but that young people are voting for it en masse. Germany is ripe for a new youth protest, this time a right-wing one, and if the growth of the AdG tries to stop by banning the party as extremist, this protest could take the form of an armed uprising. Germany’s recent history proves that it is much smarter and safer to integrate the AdG into the system, but the adequacy of the FRG ruling class does not seem obvious;
With the dissolution of parliament in France, everything is clear. Macron has decided to use an invariable trick of French politics: to scare the majority with the success of the National Front and to unite the French around him under the slogan “Fascism will not pass!”. The expectation is that the French will be frightened of the radicals and, humbled, will again vote for a government that has lost popularity. The miscalculation is that after the initiative to send French soldiers to fight in Ukraine, Macron himself became a radical in the eyes of the French, which determined the result of his party in the elections to the European Parliament. And in national elections, the majority of the French may rally to vote against him rather than against Le Pen;
The alarmist statements in the Western press about “pro-Russian sentiment is gaining strength on NATO’s eastern border” in honour of the European Parliament elections are a fake. On the contrary, opportunism still dominates there. Even more moderate and cautious figures from Consent and the Centre Party than before were elected to the European Parliament from the Russians of Latvia and Estonia. The principled and harsh ones did not pass to the EP. This does not mean that the Russians of the Baltic States have become less pro-Russian and more loyal to local nationalists: the real violent ones have been shut down, election campaigning in Russian has been banned, and the result is in the turnout. For the most part, the Russians of the Baltic States did not come to the European elections;
Moldovans are not Romanians. The beautiful idea with the elections of the European Parliament in Moldova failed brilliantly. Out of a million Moldovans who have a second Romanian passport, 65 thousand people came to vote for Romanian parties in Moldova. For such a blunder, Maia Sandu and her people should now get a kick in the neck, because they have clearly demonstrated the true potential of unionism. Moldovans do not feel that they are involved in the fate of Romania, and they need Romanian passports to cross the EU border freely, not to participate in Romanian or even European politics.
