European elections: the wolf at the door

From one end of Europe to another, people watch as changes which they have not willed, not voted for, and do not want, alter their lives. The skyline of their more prosperous cities mutates, sprouting steel towers where once there were parks and pubs, while in their poorer towns rubbish drifts along shuttered high streets. The countryside is eroded by suburbanisation, and otherwise seems divided between a zone of chemicalised agriculture and clusters of homes for the rich.

Things that had seemed permanent are suddenly not there. Great firms, in which countries once took a justified pride, disappear or are re-badged as subsidiaries of foreign corporations. Once-famous institutions are privatised, given new names, diminished from what they were. New people arrive, uninvited, speaking different languages, or with different religions. They too are unhappy as factories and offices close, and their sons and daughters cannot get jobs or anywhere to live. Even states themselves buckle, threatening to implode or divide. Citizens, if that title means anything any more, can be forgiven if they raise their arms to heaven and say: "Who asked for this?" This is our continent today, but, give or take some details, it was also our continent yesterday and the day before that. When Europe has not been ravaged by war, it has been periodically racked by discontent, undermined by anger, biliously full of complaint, and fertile ground for populist parties of the right or left.

In the more distant past there was no fully formed transnational structure like the EU to attract populist ire. But the situation described today in our survey of the insurgent parties which, in country after country, seem likely to prosper in the European polls, soon decanting into the European assembly a large contingent of anti-European MEPs, is not in essence a new one. "New" parties are not new in Europe. Remember, over the years, Oswald Mosley, Pierre Poujade, and Jörg Haider, examples which suggest that today's populism is less malign than yesterday's. For one thing, as Jon Henley points out in our special report, these parties are disparate to the point where it is to be doubted that they can work together in the assembly. Some are absolutely against the EU, some want to reform rather than to abolish it or to leave it. One or two are repellently neo-fascist, others have repudiated, more or less convincingly, their far-right origins, others still come from the left of the political spectrum.

Mainstream politicians like to suggest that while they struggle with the heavy burden of applying necessary but painful policies of austerity, co-operation with big business, and maintenance of the European Union, the populist parties are waltzing off with their votes. The truth is more complex. People do not like what is happening to their countries and to their continent. Established politicians tend to evade or fend off these anxieties rather than to respond to them clearly and directly. Fringe politicians play another game, offering simple, and simple-minded, policies like ending immigration or declaring open war on corporations. Fudge on the one hand, high dudgeon on the other. The result can all too easily be a deterioration in the way in which politics are discussed, a loss of nuance, realism, and intelligence.

Yet it is possible to be optimistic about what the populist wave means. It is a corrective and a warning. The penetration of European and national institutions by a business class which pays itself too much, ignores the social cost of its ventures, and feeds inequality, has gone too far. The stripping down of the welfare state ought to be reversed. The vandalisation of our cities and countryside should be halted. The growth of the precariat is a scandal. The starving of education and the arts is a disaster. The homogenisation of Europe's culture, of its food, its fields, its cities, and its shopping streets, is indeed a nightmare. It shouldn't be the French National Front pointing these things out. They belong in the centre ground of politics, not on its fringes.