Populists, nationalists to test strength in European vote

The last time elections for the European Parliament were held, the vote was dismissed by many as a sleepy, low-stakes affair.

Five years ago, Brexit wasn’t even a blip on the horizon. Populist and extreme-right parties were mainly political sideshows. The pillars of the postwar order — NATO, the European Union — were weathering occasional family squabbles but hardly riven by existential threats. And the trans-Atlantic relationship hadn’t been turned on its head by an impetuous U.S. president who speaks far more harshly of traditional European allies than he does of tyrants such as North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

This time around, it’s an entirely different landscape. When four-day balloting for the European Union’s legislative body begins Thursday, starting with votes in Britain and the Netherlands, mainstream parties that have held sway for decades face an unprecedented insurgency by anti-establishment movements.

With more than 425 million Europeans across 28 countries eligible to vote in the contest for 751 parliamentary seats, outright victory for national-populist movements is considered unlikely. But most analysts say that’s beside the point.

“The populists don’t need to win in order to be perceived as making significant gains,” said Thomas Wright, the director of the Brookings Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe. “They can deprive anyone else of a majority and complicate government afterward.”

Another factor in the populists’ favor: Turnout in the European Parliament vote tends to be relatively low, a boon for movements

with a fired-up base and a laser focus on a few specific issues, such as migration or skepticism toward the EU.

The European Parliament is sometimes thought of as largely symbolic, but lawmakers, who are based in the French city of Strasbourg and in Brussels, wield budgetary powers and have an essential say in matters such as trade deals.

Preelection drama of a more farcical variety came in Britain, which would not even have taken part in this vote had it left the European Union as scheduled at the end of March. The divisive head of the new Brexit party, Nigel Farage, was hit with a milkshake during a campaign stop in the northern English city of Newcastle on Monday, and then overheard angrily berating his security detail.

The bumpy road to Brexit illustrates a European paradox: Many of the politicians who have offered the most vigorous and vociferous opposition to the European Union during the parliamentary campaign are not looking to emulate Britain and move to leave the bloc. Rather, they hope to reshape it in their own image, working from within.

Those far-right figures include France’s Marine Le Pen, who has rebranded

her National Front as the National Rally. She once called for dissolution of the EU but now says it should be overhauled to give individual member states more power.

In another paradox, public opinion polls consistently suggest that immigration is not the top concern for most European voters. But in this campaign, it’s been a dominant issue, if not the predominant one.

An especially noisy display of anti-immigrant sentiment came five days before the start of the vote, when Le Pen and about a dozen other nationalist-populist leaders from across Europe gathered for a triumphal preelection rally in Milan, Italy.

Led by Italy’s hard-line deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, the group denounced “out-of-control” immigration — even though numbers of migrants arriving in Europe have dropped off dramatically since 2015, which saw a surge in arrivals from war-torn Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

In very different ways, both the mainstream parties and the insurgents cast themselves as defenders of Europe. But they disagree on what that means.

TOLGA AKMEN/AFP-GETTY Liberal Democrats party activists hold “Stop Brexit” leaflets Wednesday in London as they canvas for their party’s candidates in the forthcoming European elections.