The results of the European Parliamentary Elections are rolling in, and the pundits are scrambling around for a narrative to fit the facts.
There have been a number of eye-catching shocks. Both in the UK and France, once-minor parties—UKIP and Front National—have polled the largest figures. Elsewhere, the main established parties have also done badly.
What has driven these surprising results? The search is on for a banal and unthreatening explanation, and these are not too hard to find. In Southern Europe the most blatantly anti-austerity parties, like SYRIZA in Greece, have done well. Elsewhere it’s a question of Euro-scepticism, a sense of creeping disquiet with an institution that seems to have “misread the signs” and must do more to “address the concerns” of “ordinary voters” and so on. Elsewhere, some on the Right are trying to make the case that Europa is finally awakening from her slumber and that a true sea change is underway.
The sad truth, however, is that even with these results, “far-right” parties are still a minority in the European parliament, and that most of these so-called “far-right” parties are anything but far-right or radical. They are more like candidates for coöption than harbingers of a new dawn.
UKIP for example is essentially more in favour of reducing White immigration into Britain than in stopping immigration per se. As for the Front National, their great idea is to assimilate people to a French centralist culture based on deculturalized, negative propositions, like ‘freedom,’ ‘individualism,’ ‘self-definition,’ and not wearing bits of cloth around one’s head. Hardly the acid needed to dissolve the influx of Islam.
As usual the main narratives applied to the facts show various kinds of wishful thinking, and as such are invalid.
The best narrative I can find to explain what has happened is that politics itself has changed and that we have moved away from stable, traditional mass movement politics. As Siryako Akda argued in a recent article at Alternative Right, this mirrors changes in the way that warfare is waged:
In the case of British political parties there has been both a precipitous fall in membership and also a drop in involvement by actual members. The Labour Party’s peak membership was in 1997 when it had 405,000 members. It is now less than half this. In the 1950s the Conservative Party actually had around three million members. It is now reported to have around 134,000 members, most of whom are inactive outside of signing a cheque for annual membership fees.
This steep decline echoes the awkward fact that these parties have moved away from their core groups and identitarian base. This is one of the explanations for the success of UKIP: a sump for disaffected Tories alienated by a party that must appeal outside its identitarian base to have any chance at power.
The Labour Party is fast becoming the party of immigrants, as we see from the results in London, the only part of the country where the UKIP surge was held in check. But this ‘love affair’ between immigrants and Labour is made of cobwebs and fairy dust, as revealed by the shenanigans in Tower Hamlets, a London Borough where a Bangladeshi politician expelled from the Labour Party for connections to Islamic extremism managed to get elected mayor on an independent ticket in local elections that took place on the same day as the Euro elections.
This is what democracy looks like today.
With the parties having less political troops and less motivated ones, the way in which elections are fought depends increasingly on PR spin, media connections, and the social mood of voters.
This creates a volatile political environment in which parties like UKIP and Front National can rise up suddenly, if they mind their political Ps and Qs. But it also means that such challenges lack real political substance and sustainability, and may evaporate just as quickly as they arose. Voters now seem to be caught between the poles of apathy and fickle resentment: hardly the necessary cocktail of emotions for Europe to rise to its salvation.
Also published at Theden
There have been a number of eye-catching shocks. Both in the UK and France, once-minor parties—UKIP and Front National—have polled the largest figures. Elsewhere, the main established parties have also done badly.
What has driven these surprising results? The search is on for a banal and unthreatening explanation, and these are not too hard to find. In Southern Europe the most blatantly anti-austerity parties, like SYRIZA in Greece, have done well. Elsewhere it’s a question of Euro-scepticism, a sense of creeping disquiet with an institution that seems to have “misread the signs” and must do more to “address the concerns” of “ordinary voters” and so on. Elsewhere, some on the Right are trying to make the case that Europa is finally awakening from her slumber and that a true sea change is underway.
The sad truth, however, is that even with these results, “far-right” parties are still a minority in the European parliament, and that most of these so-called “far-right” parties are anything but far-right or radical. They are more like candidates for coöption than harbingers of a new dawn.
UKIP for example is essentially more in favour of reducing White immigration into Britain than in stopping immigration per se. As for the Front National, their great idea is to assimilate people to a French centralist culture based on deculturalized, negative propositions, like ‘freedom,’ ‘individualism,’ ‘self-definition,’ and not wearing bits of cloth around one’s head. Hardly the acid needed to dissolve the influx of Islam.
As usual the main narratives applied to the facts show various kinds of wishful thinking, and as such are invalid.
The best narrative I can find to explain what has happened is that politics itself has changed and that we have moved away from stable, traditional mass movement politics. As Siryako Akda argued in a recent article at Alternative Right, this mirrors changes in the way that warfare is waged:
"If we are to believe in the 4th Generation Warfare paradigm, large groups of people are no longer necessary to carry out war. These days, financial warfare, cyber espionage/ intelligence, the media (both mainstream and alternative), the surveillance state, the subtle influence of NGO’s, and soft power in general are now more important tools for acquiring power, especially with regard to those state institutions, which define modern society."Past political parties were mass movements, and the numbers counted, with members doing the grunt work of door-to-door canvassing and other mundane tasks connected to campaigning.
In the case of British political parties there has been both a precipitous fall in membership and also a drop in involvement by actual members. The Labour Party’s peak membership was in 1997 when it had 405,000 members. It is now less than half this. In the 1950s the Conservative Party actually had around three million members. It is now reported to have around 134,000 members, most of whom are inactive outside of signing a cheque for annual membership fees.
This steep decline echoes the awkward fact that these parties have moved away from their core groups and identitarian base. This is one of the explanations for the success of UKIP: a sump for disaffected Tories alienated by a party that must appeal outside its identitarian base to have any chance at power.
The Labour Party is fast becoming the party of immigrants, as we see from the results in London, the only part of the country where the UKIP surge was held in check. But this ‘love affair’ between immigrants and Labour is made of cobwebs and fairy dust, as revealed by the shenanigans in Tower Hamlets, a London Borough where a Bangladeshi politician expelled from the Labour Party for connections to Islamic extremism managed to get elected mayor on an independent ticket in local elections that took place on the same day as the Euro elections.
This is what democracy looks like today.
With the parties having less political troops and less motivated ones, the way in which elections are fought depends increasingly on PR spin, media connections, and the social mood of voters.
This creates a volatile political environment in which parties like UKIP and Front National can rise up suddenly, if they mind their political Ps and Qs. But it also means that such challenges lack real political substance and sustainability, and may evaporate just as quickly as they arose. Voters now seem to be caught between the poles of apathy and fickle resentment: hardly the necessary cocktail of emotions for Europe to rise to its salvation.
Also published at Theden
