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Established Parties Rocked by Anti-Europe Vote Populists’ Rise in Europe Vote Shakes Leaders
(about 11 hours later)
LONDON — Members of the European political elite expressed alarm on Monday over the strong showing in European Parliament elections by nationalist and anti-immigrant parties skeptical about European integration, a development described by the French prime minister as an “earthquake.” BRUSSELS — An angry eruption of populist insurgency in the elections for the European Parliament rippled across the Continent on Monday, unnerving the political establishment and calling into question the very institutions and assumptions at the heart of Europe’s post-World War II order.
In France, Britain and elsewhere, anti-immigrant parties opposed to the influence of the European Union emerged in the lead. In France, the National Front won 26 percent of the vote to defeat both the governing Socialists and the Union for a Popular Movement, the center-right party of former President Nicolas Sarkozy. In Britain, the triumph of the U.K. Independence Party, or UKIP, which won 28 percent of the vote, represented the first time since 1910 that a nationwide vote had not been won by either the Conservatives or Labour. Four days of balloting across 28 countries elected scores of rebellious outsiders, including a clutch of xenophobes, racists and even neo-Nazis. In Britain, Denmark, France and Greece, insurgent forces from the far right and, in Greece’s case, also from the radical left stunned the established political parties.
“The people’s army of UKIP have spoken tonight and delivered just about the most extraordinary result that has been seen in British politics for 100 years,” said Nigel Farage, UKIP’s leader. President François Hollande of France, whose Socialist Party finished third, far behind the far-right National Front, addressed his nation on television from the Élysée Palace on Monday evening, giving a mournful review of an election that he said had displayed the public’s “distrust of Europe and of government parties.” He added: “The European elections have delivered their truth, and it is painful.”
Official results released overnight showed that populist parties strongly opposed to the European Union also trounced establishment forces in Denmark and Greece and did well in Austria and Sweden. The results, a stark challenge to champions of greater European integration, left mainstream political leaders stunned. The newcomers did not win enough seats to dominate the assembly, which approves European Union-wide legislation and elects the commissioners who act as the union’s executive branch. Centrist parties will retain control of the body even if all the newcomers vote as a bloc, and it is not clear how closely they will ally with one another.
The radical left-wing Syriza coalition in Greece beat the party of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, while Golden Dawn, a neo-Nazi outfit that the Greek authorities have tried in vain to outlaw, also picked up seats, bringing Holocaust-deniers and belligerent xenophobes into the European Parliament. But the insurgents’ success has nonetheless upended a once-immutable belief, laid out in the 1957 Treaty of Rome, that Europe is moving, fitfully but inevitably, toward “ever closer union.”
With the political landscape redrawn across Europe, some politicians, notably Nick Clegg, the British deputy prime minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats, the junior coalition partner, faced calls from their own party members to quit. The Liberal Democrats finished fifth in Britain and lost nearly all their seats at the European Parliament. It also threatened to redraw the domestic political landscape in several core members of the 28-nation bloc, putting pressure on mainstream parties, particularly in Britain and France, to reshape their policies to recover lost ground.
In Spain, the two main parties failed for the first time to get a combined 50 percent of the votes. Such was the upheaval that Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, the leader of the Socialist Party, announced on Monday that he would step down after failing to capitalize on Spain’s economic woes and record unemployment to beat the governing Popular Party. One area of particular pressure is immigration, an issue that, according to French voter surveys, galvanized support for the far right even more than economic concerns over unemployment, now at around 10.5 percent for the union as a whole. The far-right parties put strident anti-foreigner rhetoric at the heart of their campaigns, and held up European integration as a threat to national identity.
The Socialists apparently lost votes to other left-leaning parties, as well as to new groups led by Podemos, or We Can, a movement that was formed only a few months ago to oppose austerity cuts and demand fairer wage distribution. “Things will never be quite the same again,” said Nigel Farage, leader of the U.K. Independence Party, or UKIP, a group that wants Britain to pull out of the European Union. It won 28 percent of the vote in Britain, far ahead of the Conservative, Labour or Liberal Democrat parties, making it the first insurgent party in modern British history to come out on top in a nationwide election.
Traditional parties sought to depict the ballot as a protest vote inspired by deep alienation among voters repelled by what they consider to be out-of-touch political elites at home and an arrogant European Union bureaucracy spreading its influence with no democratic mandate. Mr. Farage mocked the leaders of Britain’s three mainstream parties as “goldfish that have been tipped out of their bowl onto the floor and are gasping for air.”
In Paris, the victory by the National Front, led by Marine Le Pen, prompted Manuel Valls, the French prime minister, to acknowledge: “It’s an earthquake.” But assertions by Mr. Farage that the European Union had suffered a fatal blow are overblown, according to Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform, a British research group. “Cats have nine lives, and the E.U. has already had seven or eight,” Mr. Grant said.
“We are in a crisis of confidence,” Mr. Valls added. “Our country has for a long time been in an identity crisis, a crisis about France’s place in Europe, Europe’s place in our country.” European integration, he noted, has hit severe turbulence in the past, notably when French and Dutch voters rejected a proposed constitution in 2004, and then when a Greek debt crisis that started in 2008 looked as if it might destroy Europe’s common currency.
President François Hollande of France called an emergency meeting of senior ministers after his Socialist Party finished a remote third. Even so, the scale of support for the populists sent tremors through the political establishment across Europe. The National Front and UKIP each won about a quarter of the vote in their home nations, and far-right parties did well in Austria, Denmark, Sweden and Hungary, where the deeply anti-Semitic Jobbik party finished second.
The rise of the right had been widely forecast, but it nonetheless sent shock waves. In Germany, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier expressed dismay over the French result and the fact that the extremist, anti-immigrant National Democratic Party of Germany, or N.P.D., which won 1 percent of the vote, had secured a seat. “It’s an earthquake,” said France’s prime minister, Manuel Valls. “We are in a crisis of confidence. Our country has for a long time been in an identity crisis, a crisis about France’s pace in Europe, Europe’s place in our country.”
“In some countries it won’t be as bad as had been feared, for example in the Netherlands, but France’s National Front is a severe signal, and it horrifies me that the N.P.D. from Germany will be represented in the Parliament,” Mr. Steinmeier said, according to Agence France-Presse. Mr. Hollande called an emergency meeting of his senior ministers on Monday to take stock of the results.
In the German vote, traditional parties were clear winners, but a new Euroskeptic party, the Alternative for Germany, also took 7 percent of the vote, news reports said. The leader of the Socialists in Spain, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, went further, saying he would step down after failing to capitalize on his country’s economic woes and record unemployment to beat the governing Popular Party. For the first time since the country returned to democracy in the 1970s, the two principal conservative and socialist parties failed to get more than half the total vote between them.
José Manuel Barroso, the departing president of the European Commission, the executive branch of the 28-nation European Union, issued a statement on Monday urging a “truly democratic debate” to meet the concerns of “those who voted in protest or did not vote.” In Germany, where a group that has been called neo-fascist won a European Parliament seat for the first time, Chancellor Angela Merkel called the strong showing of populists and rightists “remarkable, and also regrettable.”
European Parliament ballots often do not reflect voting patterns in national elections, which favor traditional parties. But in Britain, Mr. Farage, the U.K. Independence Party leader, depicted his triumph on Sunday as the harbinger of greater prominence in next year’s national elections, saying that his followers could hold the balance of power if neither the Conservatives nor Labour win an outright majority. Though they are a diverse and often cantankerous group, Europe’s populists are generally united in opposition to immigrants and the European Union.
“We will go on next year to a general election with a targeting strategy and I promise you this: You haven’t heard the last of us,” he said. In France, exit polls suggested that anger over immigration played a larger role than economic worries in the far-right National Front’s upswing. Similarly, in Greece, Golden Dawn, a stridently anti-foreigner, neo-Nazi party, won seats in the European Parliament for the first time.
In Poland, the political establishment was rocked by the surprisingly strong showing for Janusz Korwin-Mikke, 71, a far-right populist, whose New Right party won about 7.6 percent of the vote, according to exit polls, which would yield four seats in the European Parliament. But many disgruntled Greeks turned to the left instead: Syriza, a coalition of radical leftists, pulled ahead of the governing center-right New Democracy party by mining public anger at austerity measures demanded by the European Union in return for bailout money.
The number of seats representing each of the 28 nations of the European Union at the Parliament is allocated according to population. Not all the news was bad for Europe’s boosters. The Party for Freedom, a fiercely anti-European Union group, fared poorly in the Netherlands. In Italy, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and his mainstream Democratic Party received over 40 percent of the vote, more than any other Italian party has won since 1958. The result was taken by analysts as a mandate for him to carry through an economic overhaul.
Mr. Korwin-Mikke advocates cutting taxes, and has said that there is little evidence that Hitler knew about the Holocaust. He has also expressed deeply misogynistic views, and says that he wants to turn the European Parliament building into a brothel. For leading European Jews, though, the far-right surge stirred deep alarm, coming a day after a deadly attack at the Jewish Museum in Brussels.
It was the first time Mr. Korwin-Mikke had won a seat at an election since 1991, when he was elected to the Polish Parliament and served for two years. This time, analysts said, his message had resonated with young people who had embraced voting for him as a protest against the status quo. “These two events are connected, and connected very closely,” said Moshe Kantor, the president of the European Jewish Congress. “The European Union is supposed to be the bulwark against the rise of racism and intolerance, but it has become the catalyst for the justification of its citizens to vote for extremists and racists.”
A similar pattern of defiance emerged in Greece, where official results, based on a 20 percent sample of the national vote, showed the leftist Syriza ahead of the conservative New Democracy, which heads the coalition, by a 3.9 percentage point difference. High rates of youth unemployment and governments’ inaction against extremists have “created a lost population of the young generation,” Mr. Kantor said.
In what promised to be the biggest surprise, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn was seen as clinching third place with 9.3 percent of the vote. But political analysts said the stability of the coalition government did not seem to be threatened immediately. Other than Jobbik in Hungary and Golden Dawn in Greece, most of the populist groups that did well in the election show no sign of veering into fascism. The Danish People’s Party regularly purges its ranks of extremists.
But the outcome of the election “is not just a blip but a sign of something far more serious,” said Sarah Isal, president of the European Network Against Racism, a Brussels-based group.
Economic pain in the wake of Europe’s grinding debt crisis and recession, she said, “has certainly made it easier for extreme groups to spread their message,” but a bigger reason for their appeal was a “general climate of intolerance and xenophobia.”
Ms. Isal said the results did not mean that Europe was retreating to the 1930s, when fascist groups came to dominate politics in much of Europe. “Europe is today very different, not least because of the European Union,” she said.
Extremist groups have been part of Europe’s political landscape for years, popping up and fading away and re-emerging in another form, according to Corina Stratulat, a senior analyst at the European Policy Center, a research organization in Brussels. Their existence, she said, is “part of the pathological normalcy for European politics,” but “it doesn’t mean that the radicals of today are the radicals of tomorrow, or that their message will always be the same.”
Critics say the European Union’s distant and often unintelligible workings have contributed to voters’ disenchantment with the political mainstream.
“Europe has grown far too far apart from its citizens,” Sigmar Gabriel, the Social Democratic vice chancellor in Ms. Merkel’s governing coalition, told reporters in Berlin on Monday.
José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, acknowledged that Brussels had an image problem. “The perception of the common person in the street is that they can no longer control what is going on,” Mr. Barroso said on Monday at a conference organized by the European Central Bank in Sintra, Portugal. “The man in the street believes those guys are there, and they don’t care about us.”