After Vote, a Rubicon Moment for E.U.?

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/30/world/europe/after-vote-a-rubicon-moment-for-eu.html

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LONDON — It has been a heady time, these past few days, for those who like to ponder whether there is such a thing as a one-size-fits-all election, whether democracy, in other words, is indivisible.

There was, first off, the presidential vote in Egypt, a ballot built on the premise that the outcome — the election of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi — was a foregone conclusion. That came just after the election in Ukraine tested the notion that suffrage need not be completely universal if part of the populace is locked in insurgency.

Then, combining the two — a foregone conclusion in the teeth of a full-blown civil war — Syrian expatriates began voting Wednesday in advance of a ballot inside the ravaged country on June 3 designed to give President Bashar al-Assad a third seven-year term and, in the eyes of his supporters, legitimacy to dictate the future.

Then, there was Europe.

For four days, voters in the 28 member states of the European Union cast ballots for the European Parliament. And here, too, the upshot was a kind of insurgency, endorsing the claims of populist, anti-immigrant groups in France and Britain in particular to speak for an increasingly muscular minority seeking to detonate some of the pillars of the European project.

It was one of many paradoxes that anti-European groups like the National Front in France and the U.K. Independence Party in Britain chose a European institution, the bloc’s 751-seat Parliament, as their Trojan horse to assail the union from within. Both parties emerged triumphant, pushing the ruling elites into third place.

It was a moment to begin wondering whether the demise of one of Europe’s most venerated aspirations — “ever closer union” in a great and wealthy fusion of nations free of internal frontiers — had also taken a big step closer to being a foregone conclusion.

Of course, the vote was not a perfect mirror of national elections. People often use the European poll to lambaste the elite, particularly at times of joblessness and uncertainty, like now, when social divisions seem to widen and the desire to find a culprit takes on greater urgency. Outsiders are the most obvious: asylum seekers from the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan; job seekers from newer, less prosperous members of the European Union.

Voter participation, in any event, was a mere 43 percent on average, and lower in some places, notably Slovakia, where only 13 percent turned out. (The turnout was low in Egypt, too, sending its own message of unvoiced opposition.) The populist surge did not dent the dominance of mainstream parties in the European Parliament or dislodge national governments. But it did put them on notice that to win back disaffected voters, they are under pressure to move to the right and hone their Euro-skeptic credentials. For Britons, that raised the stakes on future membership in the European Union.

Days after the European election — apparently by coincidence — the French riot police evicted hundreds of migrants from a gritty makeshift camp of tents and tarps at Calais on the coast across the Channel from Britain.

The images told their own story: A man from far away peered from a shelter made of plastic sheeting, looking out on a world that wanted him gone; officers in riot gear rummaged through abandoned bivouacs to root out stragglers.

On the same day, a survey in Britain suggested that racial prejudice had increased since 2001 after seeming to be in “inexorable decline,” and many of those who admitted feeling bias against other ethnicities also wanted curbs on immigration.

Europe’s vote may have stirred darker and more toxic elements that will be hard to remove from what Europeans like to see as their particularly benign blend of prosperity and tolerance. Was this their Rubicon moment?

“I have a dreadful feeling in my bones,” the historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote in The Guardian, “that future historians may write of the May 2014 elections: ‘This was the wake-up call from which Europe failed to wake up.”’