RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273873/eu-elections-usher-new-era-bruce-bawer

Not only was the turnout in last week’s European Parliament elections the highest in at least 20 years; the results themselves were nothing less than spectacular. In Italy, Matteo Salvini pronounced: “A new Europe is born.” Writing in De Volkskrant, Dutch journalist Marc Peeperkorn declared that the vote tallies marked the end of the “omnipotence” in Brussels of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, a significant step forward for Green parties, and a “modest” advance for “Euroskeptic populists.”

“Modest” strikes me as a classic example of calculated mass-media understatement. In fact, to judge by the results, the main reason that millions of Europeans flocked to the polls was to tell Brussels that they’re sick of being ruled by Brussels. Almost everywhere on the continent, results for Euroskeptic parties were, at the very least, encouraging, and at most downright stunning: in France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally came in first; ditto Salvini’s Northern League in Italy and the Freedom Party in Austria (whose leader, chancellor Sebastian Kurz, has just been ousted as a result of a scandal); in Germany, Alternative for Germany finished a strong fourth place; in Sweden, the Sweden Democrats almost tied for third with the Moderates; in the Netherlands, Thierry Baudet’s fledgling Forum for Democracy secured a promising fourth. (Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party came in eighth.)  

But the biggest news of all was in Britain, where the ruling Tories dropped to fifth place and Nigel Farage’s just-founded Brexit Party topped them all, securing 28 MEPs to the Liberal Democrats’ 15, Labour’s 10, the Greens’ 7, and the Conservatives’ 3. It was the first time in British history that so new a party had won such a sensational victory. Brexit will now have the largest delegation of any party in the European Parliament. It triumphed even in cities that had voted to remain in the EU in the 2016 referendum, suggesting that former Remainers, perhaps in reaction to Brussels’ arrogant response to Brexit, have changed their mind about the EU – and/or that Remainers, despite their views on EU membership, resent their Tory-led Parliament’s failure to carry out the electorate’s clearly stated will.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/understanding-the-results-of-the-european-parliamentary-elections/

The legacy parties continued to decline and the populist right advanced only so far. Now, the pro-EU left, which gained ground, may grow more assertive.

Sunday’s results in the European Parliament elections are like a clever modernist painting, apparently formal, abstract, and meaningless, which as you move back from it, looks increasingly like a busy city street with cars, taxis, buses, and people going quite clearly in their different directions. You can even guess where some of the drivers will end up. Similarly, if you step back and glance at the election returns with, as yet, not a great deal of exit-polling data on which to base deeper judgments, you will probably reach these preliminary conclusions:

1) The mainstream parties of the center-Left and center-Right (or so-called legacy parties) continue a decline that has now been going on, at different speeds in different countries, for several decades. Italy’s Christian Democrats fell apart in the 1990s; its post-Communist socialists more recently; Berlusconi’s once-dominant Forza Italia fell into single figures this time; and the socialists are still struggling, at 22 percent. In this election, Italy’s insurgent populist partners — the League and the Five Star Movement — got 51 percent of the total vote between them, and they’re not getting a divorce. It was a less happy story in Germany where the two main parties in the “Grand Coalition” — Angela Merkel’s CDU-CSU and the Social Democrats — both lost ground compared with their performance in 2014, scoring only 45 percent jointly when they would once have been in the high seventies. France’s traditional parties of government almost disappeared from the results, all scoring in single figures. And so on. The most dramatic collapse of the centrist parties was in Britain, where the governing Tories fell to below 10 percent. But that story will get fuller treatment elsewhere.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/germanys-bare-headed-brouhaha/

The outcry over remarks made on Saturday by the German government’s first-ever anti-Semitism commissioner, Felix Klein, is peculiar. If Klein were not truthful about his assessment that Jews who wear their kippot [skullcaps] in public in Germany these days are at risk, he would be doing a disservice to his post.

Nor did his comment about anti-Semitism in Germany “showing its ugly face more openly” emerge in a vacuum. No, his mentioning that calling someone a Jew is once again being used as an insult—even in schools with no Jewish students—followed and was reflective of a worrisome report released last Tuesday by the German Interior Ministry. According to the report, anti-Semitic hate crimes rose by nearly 20 percent in 2018 from the previous year, and the number of physical attacks against Jews in 2018 had increased to 69 from 37 in 2017.

Admitting that his opinion on the matter had “unfortunately changed compared with what it used to be,” Klein also acknowledged that strategies for combating the phenomenon would have to be forged.

Klein was immediately called to task by Jewish leaders at home and abroad. In a Facebook post on Sunday—in German, English and Hebrew—Berlin’s chief rabbi, Yehuda Teichtal, wrote: “The combating of anti-Semitism is a top priority so it is appreciated that this is being addressed by top representatives of the government. At the same time, the KIPA [sic] is a clear symbol of Jewish identity and should be worn with PRIDE. Of course all the necessary security precautions need to be taken, at the same time, hiding our identity was never the solution, we should be always be PROUD of who we are. AM ISRAEL CHAI [the people of Israel live].”