Nationalists did well in recent EU elections. Matthew Partridge reports
Nationalist and right-wing parties won major gains in last week’s European elections, says Bruno Waterfield in The Times. They punished France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Olaf Scholz, “badly weakening” and even “humiliating” the two leaders “who were at the heart of running the EU”. Indeed, Macron’s results were so bad that it prompted him to make the “unprecedented” move of calling snap parliamentary elections (see page 4). Similarly, Scholz’s SPD party came third, behind the centre-right CDU and the hard-right AfD – its “poorest result in a nationwide election since reunification”. Elsewhere, there was “a continuing consolidation, and overall gains for eurosceptics and hard-right parties”.
Stinging rebuke
European voters in Germany and France clearly delivered a “stinging rebuke” to the incumbents, says The Economist. However, the broader hard-right takeover of the EU predicted by some does not appear to have happened. The new parliament will “lean further to the right”, but the wider shift to nationalist parties failed to materialise in many countries. In Holland, Geert Wilders, for example, the “hard-right firebrand” who won the most votes in national elections in November, “lost to centrist adversaries”, while the far-right nationalist Vlaams Belang party failed to top the polls in Belgium.
Further evidence that this was a “vote against incompetent mainstream parties that promise much but deliver little”, rather than a “pro-right surge across Europe”, comes from the fact that socialists won the largest share of the vote in Malta, Romania and Sweden, says The Telegraph. This has helped the centre-left retain its position as the parliament’s second-largest group, albeit as a far weaker player than in the 1990s. Overall, the far-right bloc seems to have increased its number of seats
