As the EU moves right, how long can Labour remain remainer?

It was Matt, the Daily Telegraph cartoonist, who most accurately captured the significance of the European Union elections, showing his classic British bungalow-dwelling couple commenting: “If the EU moves any further to the right Nigel Farage will want to rejoin it.” In fact, the more realistic corollary to that hypothesis is: how long can Labour maintain its aspiration to rejoin a Union that is rapidly moving far to the right of Keir Starmer’s leftist comfort zone?

How much does Starmer have in common with Jordan Bardella, the likely post-election prime minister of France? Would Angela Rayner want to go shopping with Marine Le Pen? Or even Giorgia Meloni? Would all those lefty Labour MPs who think England fans singing the “Ten German Bombers” song is the most disgraceful attack on civilisation in the post-War years feel comfortable sitting in the European parliament alongside a large AfD contingent?

The usual media spinners, well prepared by the pre-election opinion polls, have been going through their predictable routine, emphasising that Ursula von der Leyen’s EPP grouping is still the largest in the EU parliament, there has not been a “far-right” tsunami, nothing to see here, move along, please. In the limited sense that the “centrist” EPP remains the largest bloc, there is some truth in that; but even factoring that into the overall situation, it is clear that, in reality, things have changed enormously.

For the impact of this election has been most seismic where it matters – at the national level – where the right-wing surge wreaked havoc. With only one-third of the vote counted, Emmanuel Macron suspended the French parliament and called a general election. Next door in Belgium, the prime minister, Alexander De Croo, was consoled ineffectually as he wept openly, watching his party gain less than seven per cent of the vote and come in ninth place, before handing his resignation to the king, in an election which, for the first time, broke the socialist stranglehold on Wallonia.

In Germany, the AfD beat Chancellor Scholz’s SPD down into third place, in the worst result in its history. In Austria, the Freedom Party came top of the poll (will a visit to Vienna be high on your list of priorities in government, Sir Keir?). Even in many of the countries where the parties that the media denominate “far-right” – meaning that they entertain views that, 10 years ago, were commonplace in suburban tennis clubs and every other forum of conservative opinion before the advent of the woke terror – failed to make substantial gains, socialism was swept into the dustbin of history (e.g. in Greece, where leftist Syriza was at 16.8 per cent and the socialists on 12.4 per cent).

There was much clutching at the straw of Poland, where Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition narrowly beat the Law and Justice Party. However, since the margin of victory was 0.9 per cent, it is difficult to construe that as a leftist landslide.

There was one spectacular revolution in political fortunes on a massive scale: the humiliating rout of the Greens. Europe’s eco-loons fared very well in 2019, winning a record number of seats, during the last delusive year when middle-class luxury opinions were at their most self-indulgent (“I agree with Greta”), before the pandemic delivered a dose of harsh reality to the public.

Things were very different this time. In France, the Greens slumped from 13 seats to five, in Germany from 21 to 13. The cost of the net zero scam has impinged upon the European electorate, which has as little time for heat pumps, electric cars and all the other impositions of eco-fascism as its British counterparts. Yet Starmer’s Labour has nailed its colours to the mast on net zero, which is good, because it will accelerate the electorate’s alienation from The Party We Love, from 5 July onwards, as all the hatred and loathing currently directed at the Tories finds a new target during phase two of Nigel Farage’s five-year plan.

Ominously for Starmer and despite the continuing predominance of Ursula von der Leyen and the EPP, the one point on which all commentators agree is that the new parliament in Brussels is set to derail net zero. If that happens, it will leave Starmer in Britain, a country that contributes less than one per cent of greenhouse gases, compared to China’s 28 per cent, looking like the central figure in a Bateman cartoon: The Man Who Beggared His Country For No Gain. The electorate, which never cared for Labour even as it used it to destroy the Tories, having by then tasted blood, will be ready to sink its fangs into the jugular of a heat-pump and electric-car dictator.

The most important result of the EU elections was the outcome in France, where Emmanuel Macron created a sensation by calling a general election. The obvious conclusion to be drawn was that he had caught the snap election bug from Rishi Sunak, but that would be a mistaken interpretation. In reality, Macron, alerted by the polls to the likely outcome of the European vote, planned this move well in advance.

Although, like Sunak, he excluded his cabinet colleagues from knowledge of his intentions, there was one close collaborator in whom he confided: Ursula von der Leyen. The German newspaper Bild has revealed that, during a secret meeting of the CDU (Christian Democrat) party, Ursula von der Leyen told her colleagues she had had a discussion with Emmanuel Macron, in advance, about his plan to dissolve the French National Assembly. This most Euro-fanatic French president shared his private political strategy with the president of the European Commission, but not with his democratically elected compatriots.

As with Sunak, this is another of Baldrick’s cunning plans. Macron’s aim was, in the first place, to catch Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party off guard with his surprise announcement (that worked well for Sunak). He has deluded himself into believing that a national election is a very different situation from an EU election, so that his Renaissance party might perform better (good luck with that, Emmanuel, considering your party is a rootless, ad hoc grouping of opportunists, while the French electorate hates your guts).

However, even this supreme narcissist accepts that the National Rally might come out on top and Marine Le Pen’s deputy, Jordan Bardella, become prime minister. Bardella is aged 28, has never held office before, might not have an overall majority and would be faced by many intractable problems, mostly of Macron’s making, under the scrutiny of the most difficult electorate in Europe to satisfy. Macron’s Machiavellian plan is to sit back comfortably in the Élysée and watch Bardella crash and burn, discrediting the National Rally and removing Le Pen from serious contention at the presidential election.

There are, however, just one or two possible obstacles to that scenario. The first is that Marine Le Pen is surrounded by some extremely competent advisers who are better chess players than Emmanuel Macron and who have already anticipated all the pitfalls into which he aspires to lead them and have devised counter-measures. For example, in one scenario, before taking office Bardella would demand a national referendum on immigration. If Macron were to accept that condition, it is unlikely his private tête-á-têtes with Ursula von der Leyen would continue.

An immigration referendum in France would provoke demands for the same in the 26 other EU member states (and even in offshore Britain). The outcome, as these elections have shown, would be a foregone conclusion. Yet if Macron refused to sanction a plebiscite, he would be exposed as a president who distrusted his own people and wished to deny them a voice. That is just one of the weapons in the National Rally’s armoury and it is a safe bet that Macron will come to regret his decision to tangle with the Le Pen camp and destabilise parliamentary politics in the process.

Imagine how even the canvassing of an immigration referendum in France would dismay (classic British understatement there) Keir Starmer and the Labour Party. Yet it is more than likely that Labour will spend much of its five years in office being embarrassed and worse by the new-look European Union. Lowering the voting age to 16 is one of Labour’s projects: that has already happened in Europe and the teenage electors responded by 16 per cent of them casting their first ever vote for parties denominated “far-right” in the Labour playbook.

This is the delayed consequence of Angela Merkel inviting a million immigrants into Europe. The rightwards swing of the European electorate is not an emotional spasm, like the flirtation with the Greens in 2019: it is the grim result of a demographic crisis caused and perpetuated by blinkered and entitled, but utterly incompetent, politicians who have neither the wit nor the will to repair the situation. For that reason, voters will not change their minds or revert to legacy parties at future elections, European and national. On the contrary, this trend will gain ground in the face of the obduracy of the globalist elites, creatures of the WEF and United Nations.

So, as its member states and, inevitably if reluctantly, the EU institutions themselves turn into a crucible of anti-immigration and anti-net zero sentiment, how could Keir Starmer credibly advocate closer institutional ties or even reintegration with the EU? Indeed, with an expected massive majority, there is every possibility that a perceived “far-right” EU could engender a rebirth of the old leftist, Bennite Euroscepticism that once dominated Labour’s posture towards Brussels.

The bottom line is simple and graphic: can anyone imagine Keir Starmer and Marine Le Pen as political bedfellows? The answer to that undemanding question provokes a further question: as the EU swings right, how long can Labour remain Remainer? 

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