Green Party Performance is the Key Takeaway from European Parliament Elections

It's the last takeaway of the five listed in "European Parliament Elections: 5 Biggest Takeaways" by Steven Erlanger and Megan Specia, but I think it's the most important story coming out of the elections for the European Parliament:

The Green Party had broad — and surprising — success.

The Green Party made gains across Europe, from Germany to Portugal and across the Nordic countries, based on early figures, with some analysts framing the rising support as a “green wave” of voters. Climate change, a surge of young voters and anger at existing policies seem to be behind it all, leaders of the movement say. 

Bas Eickhout, a Dutch member of the European Parliament and a Green candidate for the European Commission presidency, thanked voters Sunday night as results poured in. The Greens, he said, were “very clearly asking for change, asking for change for a new Europe, a Europe that is fighting climate change, a Europe that is looking for a green transition in a socially just way.”

In Germany, the rise of the Green party, which secured more than 20 percent of that country’s vote, is being seen as the big story of the election. The center-left Social Democrats suffered their worst defeat in decades, with many voters on the left, particularly young people, turning instead to the Greens.

The Green Party also saw a surge in Ireland, where it previously held no seats, at the expense of Prime Minister Leo Varadkar’s Fine Gael, particularly in its supposed stronghold in the capital, Dublin. In Britain, where Brexit dominated the agenda, the Greens gained a record seven seats.

Turnout was at a 20-year high. The ultranationalists made gains but nothing in proportion to the amount of attention that has been lavished on them by the mainstream media. The preferred narrative in the mainstream media is of a global populist tsunami drowning the poor rational folk clinging to the neoliberal center. The abandonment of the center-left nominally socialist parties in favor of the Greens is usually barely mentioned; and when it is, it is whispered at the margins of the story. At least Erlanger and Specia included it as a takeaway.

One can't help but reach the conclusion that the Greens are now the established number two party in the wealthiest country in Europe. The Greens came in second in Germany with 20.5%, compared to 15.8% for the Social Democratic Party.

In France, the Greens won 13.5% of the vote and came in third behind Le Pen's National Rally and Macron's En Marche!, out-polling the collapsed center-left and center-right parties.

An old Green myself, I am not terribly confident that the party can crack the neoliberal consensus. Greens are for the most part not revolutionary. They will most likely welcome neoliberal rats as they scurrying off their sinking ships. But at least the robust showing of the Greens proves that neoliberal ships are in fact sinking.

A Silver Lining in Britain's European Parliament Elections

Those polls from a couple weeks back showing the Conservative Party placing fifth in elections for the European Parliament proved to be accurate. According to Stephen Castle in "Nigel Farage’s Populist Brexit Party Wins Big in European Parliament Elections":

With many of the votes counted, the Brexit Party was ahead with 31.5 percent of the vote. The Liberal Democrats were second with 20.5 percent, followed by Labour with 14.1 percent and the Greens with 12.1 percent. The Conservatives pushed into fifth position with 9.1 percent of the votes.

The Conservative Party’s dire performance will increase pressure on those campaigning to succeed Mrs. May to take a hard-line approach to Brexit that could result in the country leaving the European Union without any agreement.

At first glance the results do appear to favor a crash-out. On the other hand, if the Tories end up selecting a Leave ultra, then the opposition in parliament could coalesce to torpedo the government, triggering new elections. May's particular zombie genius was to fudge, dither and burn the clock; it's going to be hard, I would imagine, for whomever ends up as the new prime minister to replicate that.

New elections, as Nigel Farage boasts, would not likely lead to a Brexit Party as a member of a governing coalition. Look at the vote totals. Evening assuming the 9.1% Tory vote is all Leave, that means the Brexiters are at a little less than 41%. Add the Remain vote together (the assumption here is that Labour can be categorized entirely as anti-Brexit) and you get almost 47%. Not a majority, but significantly larger than Leave. There is a possibility that Labour could form a new government.

Finally, the Demise of Zombie May

Wonderful news to begin the holiday weekend: Two Fridays from now, June 7, Theresa May will resign her role as leader of the Conservative Party. The following week the process to select her replacement will begin formally, with her successor in place before parliament's recess at the end of July.

In all the sententious write-ups of May's departure there's precious little about what actually triggered it. A pre-resignation story from yesterday by Benjamin Mueller (see "Britons Pause to Vote in an Election Many Did Not Want") leads one to believe that Tory backbenchers had marshaled the votes to rewrite the 1922 Committee rules, paving the way to topple the zombie prime minister with a new no-confidence vote:

But Mrs. May’s undoing seemed more a matter of timing and choreography than anything else. She will meet on Friday with Graham Brady, who leads the committee of Mrs. May’s Conservative backbench lawmakers. He is holding onto secret ballots from some of those lawmakers that could allow the party to change its rules and try to unseat Mrs. May almost immediately.

The event that put some pep in the 1922 Committee step is yesterday's election to the European Parliament. The Tories are predicted to be headed for another catastrophic rout; this coming on the heels of the disastrous local elections of May 2. Apparently the foul odor of the zombie prime minister finally proved to be too much.

In fact, the zombie May is a perfect personification of the reigning, tottering neoliberal world order. Caught between rising demands for a return to social democracy on one side and an establishment drift to neo-fascism and ultra-nationalism on the other, mainstream leadership chooses to fudge, dither and run out the clock, hoping that the dialectic of history somehow reverses course. That's why Theresa May's predicament has been worthy of attention, particularly since her shockingly poor showing in the June 2017 general election: how long can leadership deny the obvious? In May's case, the answer is two years. Her minority government was a joke to begin with.

Boris Johnson will be no improvement, assuming he will be the new prime minister. Nothing will have changed, other than support for crash-out will have gained momentum. So we're right back to crash-out or a snap general election. Since all Brexit decisions are guided by the Tory avoidance of a general election, odds at this point are on a crash-out.

European Parliament Elections this Week. Brexit Party Looks to Topple May

Once-every-five-years European Parliament elections are to be held this week. For a soporific write-up, see Steven Erlanger's "European Elections Will Gauge the Power of Populism." Erlanger's assignment is to inflate the Salvini-Orban-Le Pen bogeyman, a wrathful specter designed to keep the good folk penned in on the dystopic neoliberal reservation, something that Erlanger fails to do when he acknowledges that the anti-EU populists are slated to win at most 180 seats in a parliament that seats 751: "Opinion polls suggest that populist parties could win up to 180 seats in European Parliament, enough to create serious delays and difficulties."

One anti-EU party expected to top the polls is Nigel's Farage's new Brexit Party, which, as Robert Stevens writes in his excellent "Conservative Party implodes over Brexit crisis as May agrees to stand down next month":

The crisis of rule in Britain and the meltdown of the Tories will be exacerbated by the expected victory of the newly formed Brexit Party in next week’s European elections. A victory for the Brexit Party, set up by former UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, will further polarise divisions within the main parties. The vast majority of Farage’s support comes from disillusioned Tory voters and is particularly strong among older generations.

According to opinion polls, the Brexit Party is set to win by taking anything up to 34 percent of the vote and could possibly score higher than both the Tories and Labour combined. There are even estimates that the Tories may only poll in single figures and finish sixth overall—which would be the worst national election result in their history.

Farage's Brexit Party has seemingly accomplished something that none of the other UK parties and their various factions have been able to do -- topple the zombie prime minister Theresa May. Last week it was announced that after a fourth vote in parliament on her Brexit plan in June she would make way for the Conservative Party to select her replacement, a process that will gobble up the newspapers this summer. Jeremy Corbyn responded to the news by pulling Labour out of the Brexit negotiations with the Tories:

The moves by the Conservative Party to replace May prompted a letter from Corbyn to May on Friday morning. Corbyn wrote, “I believe the talks between us about finding a compromise agreement on leaving the European Union have now gone as far as they can … The increasing weakness and instability of your government means there cannot be confidence in securing whatever might be agreed between us.”

It's hard to believe that May is in fact on her way out. If true, it is a cause for celebration. We've been here before though, and the zombie prime minister always manages to plod on.

What would that take now? The Tories would have to over-perform this week and the Brexit Party would have to crater at the polls; Labour, too. Then possibly May could fudge her replacement until after the new October 31 crash-out deadline.