Something stirs in mainland Europe
SOMETHING very weird is happening to voting patterns across the Channel. For years we have been told that there was the Centre-Right (usually called the Christian Democrats or Conservatives). And there was the Centre-Left, the Social Democrats, mildly left-wing, but nothing like Jeremy Corbyn.
These few blocs apart there were the extremists, but they were tiny and had to include anyone even mildly hostile to the EU. But the old certainties are falling apart. The idea that anyone sceptical of the EU and its Brussels-based iron-fist government must be extreme Right and thus obviously repugnant simply does not apply any more. Voters fed up with the EU are moving from both wings towards the centre and frightening the bejasus out of the well-ensconced mandarins in their cossetted Brussels lifestyle.
In Germany the Alternative für Deutschland mob (anti no-cap immigration and Brussels rule) just gets bigger and bigger and the screams “You’re all Fascists” doesn’t work any more because those are no more than a fraction of them. The rest are just fed up with the way they are being treated by the high and mighty.
WE HAVE just seen France being ripped apart by the Yellow Vests, apparently protesting fuelprice hikes but actually much more. Anti-EU-ism is growing there too and it has nothing to do with Adolf. In Spain the new Vox party is surging – it is rightwing but anti-EU. Left-wing Podemos is also anti-Brussels.
In Italy, La Liga is well to the Right and fiercely EU-hostile, but the Five Star Movement is of the Left but also against EU-rule. All these rapid-growth new parties are different in some ways but have one common denominator – mass-movement discontent on a range of fronts, but especially with the EU. Far from being the only ones to say so, aren’t we Brits just the first?