Revenge of the Euro-elites

Last December, the Romanian Supreme Court took the unprecedented step of cancelling a presidential election, after the first round of voting gave a clear lead to an outsider, anti-establishment (and incredibly oddball) candidate. This week, Romania’s appeals court upheld that decision.

Strikingly, this brazenly anti-democratic power grab elicited barely a shrug from the European Union or from Europe’s national leaders. Those who are usually so keen to pose as defenders of democracy and guardians of the liberal order have remained silent. In fact, I dare say the Euro-elites looked on not so much with horror at Romania’s turn against democracy, but with nodding approval.

After all, while no other EU country has gone quite as far as Romania in actually annulling elections that deliver the ‘wrong’ result, the bureaucrats in Brussels and establishment parties across Europe have found plenty of other ways to undermine democracy over the past year or so. Rattled by the rise of populism, and their authority rotting from within, Europe’s supposedly ‘sensible’, self-described ‘centrist’ leaders have resorted to ever-more authoritarian means to keep their grip on power.

In Germany, senior ministers in the SPD government mused openly last year about potentially banning the right-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which is currently beating all three governing parties in the polls ahead of February’s snap federal elections. The AfD is also being surveilled by the German secret service. In the event that the AfD does win an election, as it did last year in the eastern state of Thuringia, the mainstream parties will still keep it out of power by refusing to join it in coalition. This cordon sanitaire strategy ensures that AfD voters’ wishes will effectively be voided, regardless of how well their party performs.

All across Europe, it seems that whoever wins elections, establishment technocrats always end up in power. In France, this summer’s snap legislative elections delivered huge gains for Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s hard-left La France Insoumise and Marine Le Pen’s hard-right National Rally, depriving President Macron’s centrists of a path to a parliamentary majority. Yet the president responded to this mass public rejection of his government by appointing two successive prime ministers in his own technocratic, centrist mould. In the Netherlands, despite the decisive victory of hard-right firebrand Geert Wilders in 2023, the government that came to power last year was led by Dick Schoof, a former civil servant and head of the secret service. A study published in 2023 found that the proportion of ‘technocratic’ or ‘apolitical’ government ministers in Europe surged by 50 per cent between 2000 and 2020, with technocrats usually occupying the most important offices, like prime minister and finance minister.

Perhaps the most insidious attacks on democracy have been at the EU level. Ahead of May’s European Parliament elections, a raft of new EU laws came into force, including the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Media Freedom Act and the Artificial Intelligence Act, handing vast new powers to Brussels to regulate online speech. Elon Musk, owner of X, alleges that the EU offered him a ‘secret deal’. Apparently, if he agreed to censor content as Brussels decreed, and keep quiet about it, officials would turn a blind eye to any other potential rule breaches by X, possibly saving it millions in fines. He claims that the other major platforms agreed to this quid pro quo. (Although the EU denies there have been any such deals, the fact that social-media firms work secretly with governments to influence elections is a well-documented phenomenon.)

The aim of the EU’s new empire of censorship is to limit the reach and campaigning of Europe’s insurgent populist parties. Brussels accuses these groups of spreading ‘disinformation’ and ‘hate’, and insists they must therefore be censored. Of course, the EU elites do not admit that they are engaged in an authoritarian assault on free speech and democracy. Quite the opposite. They claim that censorship is necessary to defend democracy and freedom from those they have cast as the ‘real’ authoritarian threat – the populist parties. This is pure EU doublespeak.

Now, it is undoubtedly true that many European populist parties have far-right, even fascistic pasts – and have fielded some very dodgy candidates in the present, too. Italy’s right-populist PM, Georgia Meloni, leads the Brothers of Italy, which has its roots in the Italian Social Movement, founded by admirers of Benito Mussolini. In France, National Rally, formerly the National Front, was founded by Marine Le Pen’s late father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a notorious anti-Semite and Holocaust denier (who died this week). The AfD may not have a fascist history, having only been founded in 2013, but some of its leading figures seem weirdly preoccupied with relativising Germany’s historical crimes.

The reason these parties keep gaining in popularity is not because the voting public has suddenly turned ‘far right’. On the contrary. It is partly because they are starting to get their acts together, expelling problem members and suspending dodgy candidates in a clear effort to look more respectable (how sincere this clean-up act may be is another debate). An even bigger driver is that the failures of Europe’s political establishment are now so legion and so obvious that people are increasingly prepared to take a punt on outsiders – even oddballs. All too often, the populists are the only parties that are willing to challenge a dismal status quo head-on.

The Euro-establishment knows its grip on power is waning. And so, like a wounded animal, it is gnashing and wailing more violently than ever. The threat to European democracy this year will come not from the populists, but from an elite desperate to crush them.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on Twitter: @FraserMyers.