U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron's tactic of pledging to claw back powers from the European Union and then hold a referendum on whether to leave or stay in the bloc has failed its first election test.
That was the general consensus in the U.K. news media this morning, after Cameron's Conservative Party was reduced to a humiliating third place in a by-election in the southern constituency of Eastleigh. The Tories were beaten not only by their coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats (who held on to the seat), but also by the UK Independence Party.
The EU referendum pledge that Cameron made in January was designed precisely to stanch the flow of right-wing Conservatives to the UKIP. This week, it failed. Already this morning, conservative commentators in newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph were saying the result proved that Cameron should hold a referendum on whether to stay in the EU immediately, rather than by 2017; crack down harder on immigration; and abandon recent policies such as legalizing gay marriage.
The result was widely interpreted, too, as a resounding victory for the Liberal Democrats who won with 32 percent of the vote, despite trailing badly in national opinion polls. The UKIP candidate got about 28 percent and the Conservative candidate 25 percent. Labour came in with less than 10 percent.
How you interpret the results depends on how you look at the numbers. One view is that midterm by-elections mean nothing -- the ruling party always does terribly because voters can send a message of protest with little consequence. That's usually and empirically ture, but as Beppe Grillo showed in Italy, politics are changing in Europe. Protest voters may really mean it this time.
More interesting than the raw figures is the change from the last results for Eastleigh, at the 2010 national election. The (pro-EU) Liberal Democrat share of the vote has fallen by 14.5 percentage points, about the same as the (euro-skeptic) Conservatives at minus 14 percentage points. This makes perfect sense to me: Both parties are running the government together and the economy is in terrible shape, so they did as badly as each other. Labour went nowhere, with an increase of 0.2 percentage point. That's a disaster for them, too, because as the main opposition party they need to be making large electoral gains if they hope to win power at the next national election.
The only clear victor was the UKIP, whose vote this week increased 24 percentage points, compared with 2010. I don't see this as a Europe issue, and if Cameron concludes that what he needs to do now is chase the UKIP's policies, he'll still lose at the next election.
That should come as no surprise. When the Ipsos Mori polling group does its monthly survey on what Britons consider the most important issue facing their country, the EU doesn't even make the top 10: In the latest, January poll only 6 percent of Britons ranked the EU as their top concern. The standout winner was the economy, at 52 percent, followed by unemployment, immigration, the National Health Service and crime.
What the by-election probably shows is that in UKIP leader Nigel Farage, the British have found their Beppe Grillo, the stand-up comedian turned politician who won a quarter of the vote in Italy's recent parliamentary election.
Farage was never a professional comedian like Grillo, but he is the nearest thing to it in the European Parliament, where he is a legislator. His party has nationalist roots that are quite different from Grillo's, but Farage seemed to understand that he drew votes from all parties and the cause of his success was the same as Grillo's: protest. He called his party's surge in Eastleigh a rejection of traditional parties and politics.
Cameron and the Tories will succeed only if voters believe the government is looking out for their interests and has found the right policies to restore prosperity to an economy that has yet to recover its size at the start of the financial crisis. The prime minister should spend all of his time worrying about whether he has the right growth and austerity policies; some time on improving immigration policies; and no time at all on showing how tough he's being on the EU -- a strategy that won't get him re-elected, but distracts from policies that might.
(Marc Champion is a member of Bloomberg View's editorial board. Follow him on Twitter.)
"All the parasites drown, sex and crimes such as accumulated dirt will submerge them up to the waist ... And the whores and politicians will look up and shout," Save us. "And I whisper," No "."
Absence of irony aside, it sounds like a speech by Grillo.Indeed, this is exactly the standard answer of Beppe Grillo at every possible offer of alliance made to his parliamentary motion.But talking about here is Rorschach with his famous prose broken, that is the character of "Watchmen," Alan Moore comics, perhaps the most well-known author of comics in the world.
It can be a mistake to laugh at fascists. Charlie Chaplin mocked Hitler and Mussolini in The Great Dictator. P.G. Wodehouse had fun with his preposterous parody of Oswald Mosley, Roderick Spode. But Nazism turned out to be no joke. Today Chaplin’s film, for all his comic genius, is embarrassing to watch, while Wodehouse lived to regret his complacency about what was brewing in Berlin.
Members of Golden Dawn sing the Greek National anthem. (Sakis Mitrolidis / AFP-Getty Images)
So when a party called “Golden Dawn”—which has something that looks a lot like a swastika as its logo— starts denying aspects of the Holocaust and heaping opprobrium on immigrants, it’s best to keep a straight face. Sure, they’re Greeks, not Germans. Sure, their party leader, Nikolaos G. Michaloliakos, is about as -charismatic as a barrel of rotten olives. But if elections were held tomorrow, these guys could become the third-largest party in the Greek Parliament.
The Greeks are the extreme case. But maybe that’s only because economically they are the extreme case. This year the Greek economy is forecast to contract by 7 percent. Unemployment is at 23 percent and youth unemployment a mind-blowing 54 percent. Under these circumstances, it would be rather remarkable if people were patiently sticking to the mainstream parties of the center-left and center-right.
Populism is the standard political response to financial crisis. In America we have seen two different variants—the right-wing populism of the Tea Party and the left-wing populism of the Occupy movement. But European populism takes more toxic forms.
Nothing was easier to predict than this: that the crisis of the euro zone would spark a nationalist backlash. Golden Dawn is not just xenophobic; it’s also Europhobic. The same thing has happened in the Netherlands: there, Geert Wilders started out by attacking Muslim immigrants (and indeed Islam itself), but has more recently added Euro-bashing to his repertoire of his Freedom Party.
This strategy was pioneered in Finland by the “True Finns,” whose leader, Timo Soini, has succeeded in pushing his country’s government to take an increasingly tough line on bailouts for (you’ve guessed it) the Greeks. Populism in the North fuels—and feeds on—populism in the South.
As I said, there is much about this neo- or crypto--fascist wave that is hard to take seriously. Can 13 percent of Italians really want to substitute the unkempt comedian Beppe Grillo, leader of the anti-European Five Star Movement, for Mario Monti, the prime minister who has pulled their country back from the brink of moral as well as financial bankruptcy? Do the supporters of the Lega Nord (Northern League) really intend to dismantle Italy and create a new rump state of Padania—not so much a banana republic as a Bolognese republic? Is talk of Catalan independence just a Barcelona bluff?
Nearly one in five French voters backed Marine Le Pen’s French National Front in last spring’s election. Le Pen has described the European Union as “a structure that I consider totalitarian, it is the European Soviet Union ... a rootless ... impotent empire.” She also denounced last year’s fiscal compact, designed to slash European budget deficits, as “anti-democratic,” “anti-economic,” and adopted “by order of Germany.”
Credit where it’s due: a few wise men warned the Europeans that creating a monetary union without any kind of fiscal integration would lead not just to economic crisis but also to conflict. They were right. Last month, at a conference on the shores of Lake Como, I heard Prime Minister Monti declare: “I do not fear controversies between governments, but I do fear difference and hate between peoples.” That hate is growing.
Yet there is one crumb of comfort. Fascism is for young men. All that marching around, beating up opponents, and giving Roman salutes gets steadily harder once you pass the age of 30. And the good news is that Europe really has passed the age of 30. To be precise, nearly a quarter—23 percent—of the population of Greece are 65 or older. For the Italians it’s even higher: 25 percent. Any Spaniard over 50 remembers what fascism was really like.
Perhaps for this reason, the new right tends to do rather poorly when people actually vote, rather than just opine to pollsters. The Dutch Freedom Party lost around a third of its seats in last month’s elections. Earlier in the year, Timo Soini tried and failed to become the Finnish president. Marine Le Pen couldn’t even win a seat for herself in the French National Assembly.
Blackshirts were bad and brownshirts were worse. But who’s honestly afraid of grayshirts?
Fascism still isn’t funny. But the more it ages, the less it scares me.
The comedian's Five star movement was the revelation of last Italian election. Its anti-establishment views and "digital democracy" methods are shared by many political movements across the EU, and they could form a common front at the European elections in 2014.
Beppe Grillo has a new objective: Europe. While Italian politics struggles to comprehend the political tsunami that has followed his election, from his home in Genoa the leader of the Five Star Movement's mind is already jetting across borders. His stated aim is to export his experience to other European countries where the key aspects of the political and economic crisis are very similar to the one in Italy. “We can't think that we've done it all and stay here in Rome. We need to push on and the target is Strasbourg in 2014, the European Parliament. Because there is a similiar need there, as in Italy and because if we find some support in Europe, the change will be far-reaching,” he tells his followers.
Ukip supporters with 'Thank you' leaflets in Eastleigh, where the party came second in the recent byelection. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
The rise of populism across western Europe and the US – especially in its radical right form – poses more fundamental questions for democrats than has been acknowledged. Whether we are talking about Ukip, Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement or the Tea Party, populists of all kinds are exposing old and hidden fault lines in democracy, and mainstream democrats need a greater alertness to the nature of the threat. Modern democracy, like a hot-air balloon untethered from the ground, is suddenly floating free and its destination is not yet known.
Italian Five Star Movement political leader Beppe Grillo
Wed Mar 27, 2013 5:22AM GMT
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By Dr. Webster G. Tarpley
The power vacuum is largely the work of the right-wing demagogue Beppe Grillo and his band of enraged petty-bourgeois novices. During the current negotiations to form a government to replace Monti and his sociopathic technocrats, Grillo’s position has been the same as that of Hitler after the German election of July 1932, when the Nazi leader, citing the fact that he controlled the largest single political party (although not an absolute majority), refused to support anyone but himself to head the next government."
By Anthony Painter 