The writer is founder and chief executive of the research and advisory group Counterpoint
Voters across Europe seem increasingly disinclined to show loyalty to political parties. French president Emmanuel Macron is merely the latest politician to feel the sharp end of this hyper-volatility.
After an electoral cycle that managed to combine high drama and near-total ennui, culminating in June’s legislative elections, Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National now has 89 seats in France’s National Assembly.
Alongside them is a rickety leftwing coalition encompassing everything from Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s vociferously uncooperative far left La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) to a handful of lonely social democrats, via a few Greens and Communists. The mainstream right Les Républicains are weakened, while centrist parties aligned with the president have 250 seats, some way short of an absolute majority.
All of which points to a second reality: voters are not just changing their minds more often, they are also happily scattering across the political spectrum. Or voting with their feet.
This phenomenon is discernible across Europe, with the exception of Poland, where polarisation rules (not unlike in the US), and Hungary, where polarisation has given way to authoritarianism.
In Italy, for example, the brief domination (and unlikely alliance) of the far-right League and the anti-establishment Five Star Movement seems to be giving way to a re-splintering, making it even harder for prime minister Mario Draghi to herd the cats of his government of national unity. We see a similar pattern in Denmark, where three new parties ran for election in 2019.
Even Germany’s traditionally staid politics of coalition have given way to what is an uneasy tripartite partnership between Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats, the Greens and the economically liberal and fiscally conservative Free Democrats.
The politics of the late 20th century saw a set of dynamics driven by unanimous agreement over growth, with increasingly indistinguishable parties converging on the centre. Globalisation imbued politics with a kind of centripetal quality as parties signed up to an apparently irresistible consensus.
But, for a number of years now, voters have been signalling their suspicion of this consensus. Today, myriad parties dot the European political landscape again, from the far left to the far right.
Mirroring dwindling public enthusiasm for globalisation in many European countries, attitudes toward trade are being reshaped by both domestic developments and foreign policy concerns — specifically, the relationship with China (and ensuing pressures from the US) and the war in Ukraine.
At the EU level, the shift is palpable. The EU’s RePowerEU plan — which offers access to subsidies and increased public funding for gas, renewables and related infrastructure — is one instance of the bloc’s move toward a Europe-wide embracing of the tools of sovereignty. The European Commission says that “by acting as a Union, Europe can phase out its dependency on Russian fossil fuels faster”.
What the commission terms “important projects of common European interest” — “large-scale cross-border projects of significant benefit to the EU economy” — are another instance of this. They shape the EU’s competition strategy and its industry through state aid, and long predate the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Last, various environmental, social and governance measures, aimed at China and Russia, are ways of securing supply chains while engaging in what is known euphemistically as “friend-shoring”. Import bans on goods involving forced labour and sanctions for human rights offences are the final weapon in the EU’s arsenal.
Taken together these measures represent a deep and lasting transformation of the bloc’s trade practices, regardless of what happens with sanctions related to the war in Ukraine. The commission’s 2019 ruling against the Alstom-Siemens merger in the name of “serious competition concerns” is inconceivable today.
While a thousand flowers have bloomed on the party-political spectrum, the European trade landscape is looking increasingly like a dense and disciplined French topiary — and few voices in the EU are being raised against the new conventional wisdom.
Given the shattering return of bread-and-butter (or rather, light-and-heat) issues in European politics, we could be approaching the high point of fragmentation — followed by more polarisation.
Source: Economy - ft.com
