The ballot boxes don't fail, the answers fail
The United Kingdom has had six prime ministers in the last ten years. That is, since David Cameron's failure with his Brexit referendum defeat, the country has settled into political instability that has been liquidating leaderships and majorities. Today, the Labour leader Keir Starmer is a deeply unpopular prime minister, questioned by his own party and by the electorate, for not having lived up to the leadership that his colleagues demanded nor to the expectations of improving living standards that the British needed. Starmer inherited a country fractured by Brexit, which never fully recovered from the 2008 financial crisis, and which today faces again the risk of recession due to the consequences of the war in Iran. 79% of British adults declare themselves concerned about the rising cost of living compared to the previous month, and especially about the rising price of food. In this context, the electoral victory of Nigel Farage's Reform UK in the local elections on May 7 has been explained as the victory of resentment, and the British press has begun to analyze the supposed "ungovernability" of the country. But the crisis that the United Kingdom is experiencing is not exceptional. It is the portrait of a fragility that runs through Europe. The agonizing end of macronism is the clearest example.
Analyst Mark Leonard assures that the greatest danger, in this era of disorder, is that traditional parties end up becoming representatives of a statu quo that does not work. Leonard says that "too often they try to fight the far right by simply presenting themselves as adults who understand the mechanics of complicated issues and institutions, and warning that populists only want to blow it all up". It is not just a political crisis, we are facing a crisis of results; of discontent that is expressed at the polls and mobilized by opposition; a malaise exploited by some and underestimated by others. Meanwhile, the far right, with different contexts but a shared illiberal model of nativism and exclusion, has been occupying electoral spaces and reshaping the European agenda.
Next year, four of the five largest EU countries will have general elections: France, Italy, Spain, and Poland. Le Penism leads the voting intention of the French. The PSOE had yet to process the Andalusian defeat when the scandal exploded due to the indictment of former president Zapatero. In Poland, the far-right opposition parties, Law and Justice (PiS) and Confederation, have begun a smear campaign against the Tusk government through the calling of local referendums which, last Sunday, inflicted a symbolic setback on the liberal mayor of Krakow, Aleksander Miszalski, from whom they demand dismissal. For her part, Giorgia Meloni, who has managed to consolidate the second-longest-serving government of the republican era in Italy and stable support in polls around 30%, has suffered some political setbacks in recent weeks, starting with the rift in her relationship with Donald Trump.
Populist right-wingers continue to be a powerful force across Europe, but – despite results and polls – there are timid and uneven signs that things might be changing. As seen in Italy and Hungary, it is easier to campaign against a broken system than to fix it. While Reform UK grows from the opposition, Viktor Orbán has tasted the electoral limits of 16 years of power and of bending laws to build a system tailored to the interests of his party, Fidesz. Fragmentation is also growing. Discontent with the status quo is widespread, but it is not necessarily expressed in a single direction. Jean-Luc Mélenchon knows this very well, as do even the traditional parties that managed to survive in the main French cities, such as Paris and Marseille, in the last local elections.
The North American political scientist Larry Bartels, author of the book Democracy Erodes From Within, explains that the real crisis does not stem from an increasingly populist public, but from political leaders who exploit or mismanage the chronic vulnerabilities of democracy. According to Bartels, the problem is not that Europeans trust their politicians or their Parliaments less than two decades ago, nor that they have lost enthusiasm for European integration, which acts as a safety net in times of global turbulence. In fact, this political scientist, a professor at Vanderbilt University, assures that anti-immigration sentiment has decreased, and that the "modest" results of the populist right are explained by several factors: on the one hand, by the success of the leaders, more or less charismatic, of these political forces; but also by the failures of conventional parties, and by the noise and disorder of an increasingly polarized media space.
