Page 21 - Bloomberg Businessweek - November 19, 2018

Bloomberg Businessweek The Year Ahead 2019 Politics
Brexit fellow at the Centre for European Reform, a pro-EU

Gostyńska-Jakubowska, a Brussels-based research

policy group. “The whole election campaign will
be about what the European project is about, what
European values mean now.”
It’s not difficult to see how we got here. A
decade of crises has taken its toll on Europe’s
political certainties. First came the debt turmoil,
which pitted Greece against Germany and
engulfed the whole euro area. As that subsided,
the Continent found itself dealing with the big-
gest influx of refugees since World War II. The
2016 Brexit referendum stirred the pot further:
Suddenly the dream of throwing off the shackles
of an unwelcome supranational union wasn’t as
impossible as most assumed.
Two years later, many nationalist movements
have moved away from talking openly about the
destruction of the EU. Populist parties includ-
ing Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France
(recently renamed after decades as the National
Front) now talk about everything the EU is doing
wrong instead, from eroding national sovereignty
and identity to going soft on immigration and
being a slave to open markets and big businesses.
The Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, which 57
narrowly lost last year’s election, campaigned on
the promise of a U.K.-style referendum on mem-
bership. The Danish People’s Party, the country’s
second-biggest, wants to renegotiate its country’s
relationship with the EU, but it stops short of call-
ing for an exit.
“The extreme right is now posing as the
main defender of the welfare state, of benefits
for working-class people,” says Michael Leigh,
a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund “The extreme right is now posing as
in Brussels and former European Commission the main defender of the welfare state”
director general. “As with Brexit, it stems from
a combination of economic and identity issues.
Apart from the opportunism of radical populist
leaders, this is mainly a failure of social democ-
racy and the center-left.”
Europe’s Establishment isn’t giving up the
fight just yet. Macron’s victory in 2017 on a pro-EU
ticket, coupled with the reelection of Dutch Prime
populists across the Continent mean many analysts Minister Mark Rutte—who vanquished the Party
expect them to do well. A survey of opinion polls for Freedom’s euroskeptic, anti-Islam Geert
from across Europe carried out by Italy’s Istituto Wilders—has given mainstream parties some
Cattaneo showed that the two main alliances could heart. Despite plummeting popularity at home,
register significant losses, with the center-left win- Macron portrays himself as the leader of Europe’s
ning fewer than 20 percent of seats. Nationalists democratic bulwark. He has called for a “regroup-
seem set to gain. “It’s likely we will see populists ing” of European political bodies, creating an alli-
use the EU as a scapegoat for all the misgivings ance of “progressive” politicians to take the battle
they have about politics domestically, just as we to the energized nationalists on the May ballot.
saw in the U.K.’s EU referendum,” says Agata The European response to Brexit has been