Skip to main content

Home/ Geopolitics Weekly/ Group items tagged Poul Nyrup Rasmussen

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Pedro Gonçalves

Defiant or in denial? Champions of EU progress stopped in their tracks | World news | T... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...centre-left-european-elections

EU Europe European Parliament Poul Nyrup Rasmussen Far right

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 09 Jun 09 - Cached
  • The morning after the night before, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen was either defiant or in denial. The veteran Danish centre-leftist and former prime minister heads the PES, or Party of European Socialists, that groups all the mainstream social democratic movements of the EU."To those who announce a profound crisis in European socialism", he declared yesterday, "I say no."
  • "Our voters stayed away. They simply didn't see the relevance of these elections. They did not see the political choices at European level ... we had a European alternative, but it was not visible enough."
  • "This is a meltdown for the centre-left," said Professor Simon Hix of the London School of Economics, who has been running an EU-wide poll-tracking project for the election. Hugo Brady of the Centre for European Reform said: "There is a structural crisis for the centre-left, whether they are unpopular incumbents or in opposition. They have been routed."
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Given voter anxiety and anger at the misdemeanours of bankers, rising joblessness, failing mortgages and a worsening economic crisis, there were expectations that voters would lash out at incumbent governments, blaming them. This would have disproportionately hit the centre-right parties dominating the countries of the EU, the European parliament, and the political appointees running the European commission. It did happen to a small degree. But centre-left governments in power in Britain, Spain, Portugal, Hungary and Austria suffered much bigger losses – the Hungarian socialists, the Austrian social democrats and Gordon Brown's Labour slumping to historic lows.
  • And there was no refuge in opposition. French, Italian and Polish social democrats were thrashed. The two social democratic parties that are junior coalition partners in the Netherlands and Germany also returned their worst ever results.
  • "The centre-right won the election, but it [their vote] did not really go up," said Hix. "It's the centre-left that has gone down, in government or in opposition."
  • Wherever the centre-left collapsed, the extreme right frequently scored its most spectacular gains – in Hungary, Austria, the Netherlands and Britain. But pro-EU left liberals and Greens also did well.Hix's analysis is that the poor working-class white vote is going from social democrats to the anti-immigrant extreme right in the Netherlands, Britain or Austria, while middle-class liberals and public sector workers who used also to vote centre-left are turning to the Greens.
  • "It's a timebomb for the left. The white under-class is really feeling the pinch. They are the first to lose their jobs. The rhetoric from the extremists is frightening, but it sounds reasonable to them."
  • The usual labels can also be misleading. A summit of European leaders next week in Brussels, for example, will see Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy challenging Brown to agree to tighter regulation of Europe's financial markets. Brown will resist, to defend the City of London from EU intrusiveness. The mainstream centre-right leaders of Europe are often to the left of British Labour prime ministers.
1 - 1 of 1
Showing 20▼ items per page