Many across the globe have noted how hundreds of millions of Europeans voted in the June EU parliamentary elections. The elections resulted in a shift in support for the Right (and the Left in France). Yet the clear signal from the ballot box has had absolutely no impact on how Brussels is governed. The same leadership simply was re-instated.

The façade of active popular participation in policymaking has slipped. There is the feeling of everything being ‘on hold’. The handholds of experience -- even the notion of truth -- on which we relied are vanishing.

What occurred in Europe?

After the elections, Georgia Meloni, PM of Italy, one of the very few European leaders who had emerged from the election with strengthened poll ratings and electoral credibility, had quite reasonably expected to play some part of the broad coalition that runs Brussels.  

The EU Establishment however, chose instead, to ostracise her. “The European People’s Party garnered the votes of  “plebeians” on the Right who wanted change, then took those votes to the Left to make a deal with the left-wing élites who have a strong interest in maintaining the status quo”, Viktor Orbán explained in a long and important speech. 

“This electoral outcome has consequences for the European Union.  The ‘3Ps’ were put into play: The prohibited, the permitted and the promoted.  The EPP newcomers were enlisted in the ‘strongly promoted category’. Ursula von der Leyen with a programme similar to last time – a touch less Green but ultimately not fundamentally different – was elected” (by parliament)”

The Right was shoved outside the cordon sanitaire --  ‘beyond the pale’ in terms of being allowed to have some influence over EU politics.

Meloni had tried to change this structural roadblock -- and failed. She had miscalculated. She is not a moderate, but moderation was a tactical necessity when she became PM two years ago. Italy was a large recipient of EU money from the Covid-era recovery fund. She also inherited a large deficit. So she trimmed her sails to the wind and thought this concession would ‘normalise’ her within the EU ‘politburo’.

But her ploy was upended.

Why? Because … Ukraine.  ‘Supporting Ukraine’ has been made the ‘entry-price’ to any EU discourse. Without that, any leader, whatever their strength of mandate, is an ‘untouchable’.

How to bring change to the EU?  The voting system notoriously is structurally stitched up (see here). It is the failure of the war in Ukraine that will make change inevitable, Orbán says:

“What will happen after the war: Will a new world come into being, or will the old one continue? 

“The voters in this last election had markedly turned to the Right, but the politics stayed Left. “The consequence … is that Brussels remains under the occupation of a liberal oligarchy. This oligarchy has it in its grip”.  

“Though the elections left the Right emerged stronger” - Wolfgang Münchau writes –“ it was less united”. The two political groups led by Le Pen and Meloni have split into three”.  The key issue that divides the right is Ukraine. Meloni never wavered on Italy’s support for Ukraine, unlike Le Pen and Viktor Orbán”. 

Events on the Ukraine battlefield however are plainly signalling the approaching end to the war. Its outcome is settled, and thus Münchau notes: “the single biggest source of disagreement amongst Europe’s far-right thus will likely soon disappear. That would be a window of opportunity for the Right to unite, and to at least act as a united front of rule-breakers. Orbán has shown how this works. He uses his veto on foreign policy as a blackmail tool. If the far-right succeeds in assembling a blocking minority, it could bring the EU to a standstill, Münchau suggests. 

It is this Ukraine war that exists at the heart of the EU reality. This consequence to this reality was not readily visible earlier, but the impact of the war has now become obvious -- and central to the EU’s future path.

“Fermentation has begun”, Orbán asserts, “and we are slowly but surely moving from a pro-war European policy to a pro-peace policy. This is inevitable, because time is on the side of peace policy. Reality [too] has dawned on the Ukrainians”.  

Viktor Orbán argues that it was the onset of the Ukraine war that effectively triggered the collapse of European policy-making, with Europe giving up defending its own interests:

“All that Europe does today, is unconditionally to follow the foreign policy line of the US Democrats — even at the cost of its own self-destruction … in an act of submission”.

And secondly Orbán says, 

“Western values — which were the essence of so-called “soft power” — have become a boomerang. It has turned out that these Western values, which were thought to be universal, are demonstratively unacceptable and rejected in ever more countries around the world”.

Suddenly, the EU found itself robbed of its key asset – liberal soft power. “Western soft power has been replaced by Russian soft power, because now the key to the propagation of Western values is LGBTQ. Anyone who does not accept this is now in the “backward” category as far as the Western world is concerned”. 

Orbán then moves on to a less noticed structural change that contributed too -- to the collapse of European policymaking:

“European policy-making also collapsed with the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war - because the erstwhile core to the European power system long had been the Paris–Berlin axis, which used to be inescapable: It was the core and it was the axis. Since the war broke out, however, a different centre and a different axis of power has been established. The Berlin–Paris axis no longer exists — or if it does, it has become irrelevant and liable to be bypassed. The new power centre and axis comprises London, Warsaw, Kiev/Kyiv, the Baltics and the Scandinavians”.

 

“Changing the centre of power in Europe and bypassing the Franco–German axis is not a new idea — But importantly, it has simply been made possible by the war. The idea existed before. In fact being an old Polish plan to solve the problem of Poland being squeezed between a huge German state and a huge Russian state.  

 

“By making Poland the number one American base in Europe. (I could describe it as inviting the Americans there, between the Germans and the Russians), the Poles  have embarked on an alternative strategy that eliminated the Franco–German axis.

The end of the war, the Hungarian leader says – in combination with the global system change - a process that is coming from Asia … “is set to [make the latter] the dominant centre of the world.  And after the Ukraine war we will need a new reconciliation with Russia. This means that the European Union must surrender its ambitions as a political project, [and instead] the Union must strengthen itself as an economic project, and the Union must create itself as a defence project”.

“The Polish experiment will fail, because they do not have the resources: they will have to return to Central Europe and the Visegrád Four. So let us wait for the Polish brothers and sisters to return.

 

“The grand strategy for Hungary therefore for this coming future … must be connectivity. This means that we will not allow ourselves to be locked into only one of either of the two emerging hemispheres in the world economy; and not get involved in the war against the East. We will not join in the formation of a technological bloc opposing the East, and we will not join in the formation of a trade bloc opposing the East”. 

Münchau concludes: 

“They [the EU ruling strata] did not think this [cordon sanitaire strategy] through. One of the EU’s present tragedies is that it does not have any people at the top right with a capacity to think strategically. They are relationship people, who are most comfortable in each other’s company. It does not take a lot to defeat them, but you must know how the EU works. Meloni now does”.