
On the evening of May 26, Italian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini commented on the results of the European elections, “A new Europe is born.” The party he leads, the League, had just won with 34.3% of the vote. Other parties defined in Europe as “populist” also won: in Hungary, the Fidesz-KDNP alliance (Hungarian Civic Alliance and the Christian Democratic People’s Party) received 52.3% of the vote. In Poland, the PiS (Law and Justice) party won 45.4% of the vote. Sebastian Kurz’s Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) won 34.6% of the vote and the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), his ally, was awarded 17.2%, despite a recent scandal that led to the resignation of Heinz-Christian Strache, chairma of the FPO, from his post as Vice-Chancellor of Austria (the Kurtz government fell on May 27). In the United Kingdom, the Brexit Party victory — at 31.6% of the vote — was a remarkable achievement that signaled the persistent willingness of millions of Britons to leave the European Union. There, the “populist” positions — the defense of national sovereignty and European civilization, refusal of uncontrolled immigration and diktats of Brussels technocrats — gained ground.
In many European countries, however, the results of the “populists” were mixed. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally finished first, but with 23.3% of the vote: only 0.9% more than The Republic on the Move, created three years ago by Emmanuel Macron. The extreme unpopularity of the French President apparently did not cost him much. In Sweden, the Sweden Democrats received only 15.4%, or two percent less than in the 2018 Swedish general elections. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) received 11%. In Belgium, the Vlams Belang received 11.2% of the vote. In Spain, Vox, with 6.2%, had to deal with even more disappointing results. In the Netherlands, the Forum for Democracy got 10.9% and Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom, which fell to 3.5%, no longer has a seat.
The “populist wave” often mentioned in recent weeks did not overwhelm Europe. “Populist” parties will have only a little more than twenty percent of the seats in the European Parliament: enough to be heard, but not enough to exert influence.
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