Uniting Europe’s far-right: Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders join forces to bring down Brussels
Anna Sonny, 15 November 2013
Their names don’t fit together as comfortably as Europe’s former famous duo ‘Merkozy’ – but far-right leaders Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders are joining forces to take down ‘the monster of Brussels’ from within. The leaders of France’s National Front and the Dutch Freedom party are building up alliances under the political grouping the European Alliance for Freedom, in time for the European Parliament elections next May.
United by a fervent desire to preserve national sovereignty and identity, the two leaders have confirmed support from the Belgian Vlaams Belang, Austria’s Freedom party and the Swedish Democrats. At the moment, euroscepticism in the European Parliament is largely represented by the Ukip-dominated Europe of Freedom and Democracy party and 31 independent MEPs, including Nick Griffin of the BNP. European Parliament Rules of Procedure state that at least 25 MEPs from seven countries are needed to form a party group. While the European Alliance for Freedom is currently made up of individuals rather than political parties, it looks set to meet this standard for the elections.
As euroscepticism rises, so voter turnout for the European elections declines – average turnout across the EU was almost 62% back in 1979 but has fallen to 43% in the most recent elections (2009). The European Commission has just launched a new information campaign explaining the complex inner workings of the European Parliament to the public in a desperate attempt to improve voting numbers. It could be that this alliance of eurosceptics will improve the turnout in an atmosphere of rising antipathy towards the EU – but not in the way the Commission is hoping for.
While Le Pen and Wilders are united on anti-EU and immigration policy, they stand divided over issues such as gay rights, Israel and socioeconomic policy. Inner conflicts have halted previous attempts to form far-right alliances at the European level – ideological differences remain between European nationalist groups and the duo have ruled out working with overtly racist parties such as Greece’s Golden Dawn. Nigel Farage, whose party Ukip is expected to do quite well at the polls next year, has so far refused to co-operate with Le Pen, on the grounds that her party is anti-Semitic.
As we saw earlier this year with the Tories, it can be hard enough trying to find common ground in your own party sometimes, especially with an issue as divisive as the EU. But the European project requires teaming up politically – will Europe’s eurosceptics actually manage to forge a political union at the European level in their joint venture to undo it?
It does not follow from the example that all empires or nations will last for the same time. It is just, guess what, an example whose purpose is to show the characteristics of something. Just as one might say this is a chair and it has lasted twenty years, there is no implication from the statement that all chairs will be of the same age.
The durability of empires has become ever more fragile as history has progressed and fifty years for a modern empire is a good age. The EU empire, in all its forms from the European Coal and Steel Community (formed 1951) onwards, is now well past its half century and is ripe for dissolution.
It does not matter whether the domestic politics of Eurosceptic parties do not agree. All that matters is their commitment to removing their countries from the EU and, possibly, working for the collapse of the EU as a means to that end. Strange bedfellows may lay comfortably together provided they understand how much of the bedclothes each may safely have.
The EU is fated to fail. The longest lived empires in history, the Roman and the Ottoman, lasted approximately six hundred years; the Jews, a people long without a land and scattered to the four winds, are un-obliterated after two millennia of persecution. Moral: empires fall, but nations survive – perhaps the single most important lesson of history.
Nations survive defeat, enslavement and centuries of oppressions. Empires may mutate as the Russian did from Tsarist to Soviet, but they cannot withstand successful conquest. Then they always die and stay dead.
Why are nations so stubbornly durable in contrast with empires? The answer is simple: an empire is a political construct, but a nation is an expression of Man’s nature. Where empires are held together by force or conscious self-interest, nations just exist, organic constructs which evolve out of Man’s innate tendency to associate in discrete, clearly bounded groups.
Read more at http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/nations-and-empires/
Surely how well they sit together does matter. By your logic, the EU has about another 550 years left to fulfil its doom to failure?