The EU is at risk from extreme factions and political arrogance

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/21/eu-european-union-risk-germany-far-fight

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On a recent Monday morning in Brussels, a German diplomat just back from a weekend in Berlin is chatting to colleagues. "Can you imagine," he tells them, "my neighbours asked me whether Angela Merkel was planning to move to Brussels! She is on all her party's posters for the election campaign. She is the star of the party's TV ads. It looks to them like Merkel wants to become the next European commission president."

It is a small but telling episode, revealing what many German voters think: Germans love to see Europe as a bigger Germany, and of course Merkel is the leader they trust. Merkel's party, the Christian Democratic Union, has nominated its own candidate for the European elections, David McAllister, who is half-British. But if voters were asked what they knew of him, the general answer would be: "Isn't he the former prime minister of the state of Lower Saxony who lost his last election?"

McAllister stars neither on the party's posters nor in its TV ads. Even Jean-Claude Juncker, the official candidate of Merkel's Conservative party bloc in Europe (the European People's Party) and former PM of Luxembourg, is more or less unknown in Germany.

The reason for the focus on Merkel is simple. Many Germans feel comfortable with her because in their minds she succeeded in minimising the impact on them of the financial and currency crises. Employment in Germany is at an all-time high, the export machine is running and revenues are flowing. Germans want Merkel to keep doing what she's doing.

Having said that, the rest of the German CDU/Christian Social Union election campaign looks like a fig leaf to mask what really matters to Merkel's party: defending its power and influence in Brussels and the European institutions against the rival German Social Democratic party. At national level, the CDU and SDP govern together in a grand coalition under Chancellor Merkel. At European level a grand coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats is also likely, but the big question is, under whose leadership?

Recent polls in Germany put Martin Schulz, the German and European Socialist group candidate, in pole position to succeed José Manuel Barroso as European commission president.

Of course, Germany is only one country among 28, meaning the political composition of the new parliament and the election of the next president will depend on many other factors and voters around Europe. But as the most populous country, Germany sends the largest number of representatives – 96 seats in the next parliament. The CDU delegation alone is larger than the total number of MEPs of most member states. German MEPs also act as heads of the political group (greens, left wing), as chairs of powerful committees such as foreign affairs and environment, and a German has been president of the European parliament for the past five years.

But this time, thanks to a ruling meaning parties can take seats in parliament even if they don't pass the 3% threshold, the German Nazi party (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands) could win a mandate. A German Nazi in the European parliament, inconceivable until now, could become a reality.

It used to be unimaginable to have even German Eurosceptics elected. But the new German party Alternative für Deutschland, which wants poorer nations out of the euro, is expected to win more votes than the German Liberal partyFDP. Yet the German political establishment is downplaying the danger from the extreme right. Last week, during a campaign meeting in Trier, a young woman asked a sitting CDU MEP what he was doing to combat rightwing nationalists. She looked very surprised when the politician replied that there had always been extremists on the fringes of both right and left. There was no difference between these elections and previous ones, he said.

But polls show that the danger of extremists and Eurosceptics being elected is real. The even greater danger is that the German political establishment is not fighting for the Europe it has helped to build. The arrogance of the elite is creating space for nationalists and extremists, and if the establishment parties lose their majority in the new parliament, nobody can guarantee that the EU will survive.