Alexander Bowen is an MPP-MIA student at SciencesPo Paris and St Gallen specialising in public health, and a Next Generation Centre fellow at the Adam Smith Institute.
Though The Guardian declared a month after Brexit that it would not be leaving Europe, 2024’s European Parliament elections mark Europe declaring that it is leaving The Guardian. As things stand, the parties of the Europe of Guardianista dreams are in free-fall.
The Greens – who made such large gains in 2019 – are now being dually bludgeoned by the impact on inflation and energy prices triggered by Covid-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The collapse has gone so far that one recent projection has their vote share halving to 6 per cent.Another suggests they could return to the same number of MEPs they had in 1999 when proportional representation was first introduced to the European Parliament – or an even worse result, on a bad day.
Having a lead candidate who, whilst beloved by FBPE types, cheered on the closure of Germany’s nuclear power plants during the middle of an energy price crisis is hardly helping. Luxury beliefs like shutting down clean nuclear plants are, it turns out, rather less popular when gas is no longer cheap.
Germany’s Greens, who led the way in Europe last time and who supply a third of all Europe’s Green MEPs, could yet be squeezed into fourth-place being overtaken by both the Alternative for Germany (though stunted by a major spying scandal and the formation of a new left-conservative party) and the Social Democratic Party (themselves on track for their worst performance ever).
More broadly, the Socialists & Democrats Group led by Nicolas Schmit – Luxembourg’s answer to Sir Keir Starmer KC, and the incumbent European Commissioner for Jobs and Social Rights – are in for a kicking too. Polls have them on track for the worst result in their history with 134 of the 720 seats (18.6 per cent or so). The New Statesman’s op-ed following Europe’s last election on the ‘quiet rebirth of the centre-left’ certainly has some questions to answer, most notably if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Even Portugal, which had been held up in the same magazine as the forefront of the social democratic comeback is expected to return a large right-wing majority as the libertarian-right Liberal Initiative and right-populist Chega boom. This is all on the tail of having recently turfed out the senior most social democratic government in Europe – with young people in particular leading Portugal’s right-ward drift.
France and Italy have much the same story. In both countries the entire left combined will be lucky to clock in much more than a quarter of the vote with Meloni’s Brothers of Italy expected to go from 6 per cent to 26 per cent and in France the parties of the non Macronist-right likely to win half the vote.
Macron is expected to take a beating too and could be pushed into the most dangerous position in French elections – third place. That potential beating will only further hamper the liberal Renew Europe Group in the European Parliament which is increasingly fracturing along a new dividing line: whether to cooperate with the non-traditional right or not. In the Netherlands and Sweden that answer has been a clear yes, with both the Dutch VVD and Swedish Liberals facing expulsion from the group at Macron’s instruction because of it.
All this is to say, is that the European Union Britain left looks nothing like the Union that now exists. For the first time in the history of the contemporary European Parliament, the parties of the right (the EPP, ECR, I&D, and ragtag unaffiliated national parties like Orban’s Fidesz and now the AfD), are projected to have a majority.
The FBPE vision of the European Union, that of a large NGO, a sort of Save the Children with a customs union, that has come into increasing conflict with reality, may well find its death knell in 2024.
Already, the European Commission has negotiated a half-dozen agreements to speed up deportations and externalise migration processing with 19 governments demanding even more ‘offshore processing agreements’ (the step just below a European Rwanda plan).
Ursula von der Leyen, the current President of the European Commission, who is almost certain to be re-elected, is campaigning on more of these deals, trebling the size of Europe’s controversial border force, and conditioning third-country trade deals with the EU on cooperation with deportation. Her own Christian Democratic Union has explicitly announced its support for a Rwanda-Plan for Germany.
This offers Britain a golden opportunity for an EU-UK relationship reset, with more cooperation on the issues that matter to Britain. A new migration deal with the EU should be the first thing on the cards with Britain embracing cooperation on downstream action on migration in the Mediterranean to prevent upstream channel crossings. Helping fund and equip Frontex, Europe’s border force, in exchange for the kind of return to the last safe country arrangement Ireland believes exists between it and the UK would be a good pragmatic solution to the channel crisis.
Unfortunately, Rishi Sunak, the man perhaps best placed to deliver smart cooperation, seems likely to be turfed out of office on the 4th of July as Britain inverts Europe in turning left not right.
He’s already successfully negotiated a pragmatic solution to Northern Ireland with the Windsor Framework, and built a strong working relationship with Italy’s Prime Minister, who has herself catapulted controlling migration onto Europe’s agenda. Britain and Italy’s co-funding of a new voluntary returns facility on the EU’s Tunisian periphery and trilateral talks with Albania that have proven hugely successful, could, if played well, be the start of a new policy program.
A coalition of the willing working in and outside of the EU, and through the new European Political Community (that meets just 2 weeks after the election), is ripe for assembly. Austria’s Christian-Democratic Chancellor is already there, having endorsed Britain’s approach, and Denmark’s Social Democratic Prime Minister is in much the same position. Add in the other 16 states that have endorsed offshore processing, and considering the political change that is already happening in France and Germany, real momentum is possible here.
Nevertheless, in this election, Sunak shouldn’t be afraid to talk about it. In many ways re-engaging with Europe on migration is an ideal talking point – what could be oversimplified as ‘migration red meat for the red wall, and EU red meat for the blue wall’.
There’s another advantage for Sunak here too, creating a dividing line in Labour. Whilst Starmer, Reeves, and the rest of the Blairite milieu, could be bounced into supporting it by the realities of government, much of their activist base and their crankiest backbenchers are likely to be aghast at the prospect.
A policy that could work, appeal to voters, and divide the opposition? Well, there’s a lot to be said for it.