What exactly were the voters telling us?
In an economically trying time, the parties of the left traditionally do best. The European Parliament election has taken significant swings to the right, what’s going on? Centre-right parties such as the Dutch PVV and extremists like the British BNP and French National Front, these are parties which wish to abolish minimum wage laws, cut benefits and clamp down on religious freedom. Why would people vote for parties which would make an economic crisis even worse?
The answer is that they didn’t, at least not knowingly. The right is traditionally populist, they will say what the people want to hear. So they run on campaigns of limiting immigration, wanting people to believe that immigrants are taking their jobs (truth is the average immigrant creates jobs by virtue of making the economy larger), this fits in nicely with the anti-patriotic nationalist views of these parties.
However, the right in Europe has long been marginalised. We can all remember what the Nazis did, their direct descendants such as the British BNP and French National Front had to wait until the bad feelings towards them subsided a little. This allowed a lot of other right-leaning groups who weren’t as extremist to pop up.
Hence the votes were fragmented among all these populist parties clambering over themselves to tell the people what they want to hear while hiding their true intentions.
The message from the voters was, then “We don’t understand politics anymore”, people who don’t understand how tremendously bad these parties would be are the ones who’re most easily taken in by their carefully researched populist messages.
It’s politics of the lowest common denominator.