Alain Delors wrote:Elf wrote:I don't quite feel repulsed by Hard Euroscepticism. The EU despises liberal democracy. But perhaps a smaller EU with France, Germany and the Benelux could do - just like a Nordic Union would probably work due similar economies, history, cultural values etc.
I try to keep an eye on continental politics, even though my German is Pferdescheisse, generally speaking.
But one starts noticing a big trend to the hard right when Ernst Jünger is being referred to as some kind of ideological role model. -.-
I've been hearing interesting stuff from people with insights I know, about a possible ECR-EFDD (excluding M5S) merge post-Brexit... Though perhaps it's a bit of wishful thinking on behalf of my contacts.
The problem with the EU seems to be its absolute indifference towards the cultural roots that underpin the freedoms we have traditionally enjoyed in Europe, preferring to frame them as deriving from universal values not dependent on any particular demographic and historical conditions whatsoever. That is a rather worrying tendency. I'm not sure if a smaller EU would work that well - the French often seem closer to the PIIGS than Germany policy-wise, even though Germany itself is drifting leftwards. Belgians and Luxembourgians are arch-federalists. The few good impulses in the current EU debate come from the Dutch and the Nordics (economically) as well as the Austrians (subsidiarity-wise) and (with reservations) the Visegrad states (culturally).
Regarding hard Euroscepticism, I'm still on the fence with regards to how far criticism of the EU should go, as the economic benefit particularly to Germany is immense and because of the obvious fact that it did play a major role in bringing peace to the continent. On the other hand, I fear we're going to pay up bigly once Merkel caves in to Macron's transfer union demands. Refugee quotas and the recent announcement of the Commission's intention to police 'fake news' during the next election do not lift my spirits either.
With regards to the EFDD-ECR merger you may be right, I was in Brussels a while ago and I've overheard it a couple times. It will be hard to accomodate the tensions that would result from such a merger though, so that the result of the merger could be short-lived, leading to even more disunity on the right and leaving only the ENF group which many consider beyond the pale.
Apparently the SD managed to get Daniel Hannan and the Dutch Forum for Democracy as well as the Danish People's Party and the Finns party (no real surprises there since they belong to the same group in the Nordic Council
) to a conference in Brussels recently. Somewhat bizarrely however, the Latvian ECR-member party might present a problem since they're apparently identitarians, which the SD considers fascist, and the Polish government party have received a lot of attention in Sweden in a way a Swedish political party might not wanna be associated with.
The SD MEP:s are an interesting blend, one is quite smart, and one is absolutely terrible. The first one is Peter "Nalle" ("Teddy") Lundgren, a former socialist who've I've had discussions with IRL and who've worked hard to improve conditions for truck drivers in the EU, even got an EU prize for it (quite a feat for someone representing the EFDD of all groups). The other one is a woman who seemed to have been randomly selected (in Sweden, most politicians don't have any academic degree, because they mostly start their career around the time when others go to University) and hired some kind of extremist as her secretary... how awkward. But I've received assurances from high places that the SD won't even contemplate joining ENF, the most likely end result is one or two groups with members from the ECR and the EFDD. Which is understandable, if only from a strategic viewpoint and not a moral one. Interestingly, the leader of Vlaams Belang has apparently done podcasts with infamous Swedish neo-nazis, so it'd be hard to explain going into a coalition with those guys while being an "anti-racist centrist party"...
I've sometimes wondered if there's a cultural split here between the "anti-establishment" parties of the North and the South/East. The former might view themselves as guardians of the Enlightenment and the later being more about authoritarian ethnic nationalism and opposition to those same values. In Germany I guess there might be a split between the enlightened Prussian heritage and people like Röpke (who've I read) to the south, who might be more oriented towards "organic democracy" and that kind of thing. One would think that PVV would rather belong to the first group. But I guess Geert does his anti-Islam thing a bit too much and with a lack of nuance (like, whatever we might think of Islam's history and ideology, we're gonna need to cooperate with some Muslims to tackle radical Islam and topple Muslim Brotherhood associates as self-proclaimed representatives of European Muslims, etc).
SD started out hard right (if anyone's interested, I felt
this clip on the subject was balanced) but has reformed itself with inspiration chiefly from the Danish People's Party, and explicitly condemns ethnic nationalism. The history has relevance though, and while some like the AfD might (for whatever reason) feel that they need to prove how right-wing they are, the exact opposite may be true with regards to others like the SD. Perhaps the SD:s ban on Ernst Jünger might seem "overkill" to many Germans for example, although using him as an ideological foundation (and not like a piece of art) is probably correctly interpreted as anti-liberal democracy.