Europe’s political waters are muddied as never before. Power in many of the EU’s 27 member states has become increasingly fragmented
From America to India and Japan, voters in democracies the world over will recognise such polarising partisanship. Often there is too much of it. Europe now has too little. Its political waters are muddied as never before. Power in many of the’s 27 member states has become increasingly fragmented. Beyond left and right, centrist liberals now vie for office, as do greens, on top of populists on either fringe of the spectrum.
Even then, decision-making could be tortuous: being right-wing in Poland is not quite the same thing as being right-wing in Portugal, and national interest can divide more than ideology unites. Nonetheless, when deals had to be struck, for instance on how to bail out Greece, a common intellectual framework existed. You might not have liked Europe’s fiscally rigid ways, say, but you understood where they came from.leaders met regularly .
If there is a convincing narrative of what is going on in European politics, Charlemagne has yet to hear of it. The centre-right is not the force it once was, but nor is it completely doused: Kyriakos Mitsotakis triumphed in Greece last weekend, and the right is odds-on favourite to win in Spain on July 23rd as well as in Germany in 2025, displacing left-led governments in both cases.
Could elections for the European Parliament in a year’s time provide a sense of the political direction in which Europe is heading? Probably not. There also, two parties used to dominate: the centre-right and centre-left . Now they control, respectively, a quarter and a fifth of the seats: not enough for a majority. Both are likely to lose ground next June.
But politics cannot be suspended for ever. If Europe is to feel like a single polity, as its proponents advocate, citizens must grasp what they are signing up for. Right now they do not. The Punch-and-Judy politics of two-party states has its drawbacks, but the clarity that emerges from such elections is enviable. America will go to the polls in 2024, and emerge with a government either of the right or left.
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