Are European elections an ominous sign for Biden?

Europe is different, but also sort of the same

This week I did an interview with the LA Times about the relationship between the just-concluded European Parliament elections and the U.S. presidential election later this year. I think the resultant article came out great, but inevitably I have more to say about this than ends up getting quoted in the piece.

A lot of MAGA figures are pointing at the European elections, in which far right parties got about 20% of the seats, as evidence that their own political movement is on the up. It’s very revealing in itself that they identify themselves with European far-right parties, many of which are the intellectual and ideological descendants of fascism and Nazism. One thing you can say about MAGA is that they’ve never really been shy about telling us who they are, even if a lot of people don’t want to listen.

There are definitely some trends in European politics which are similar to trends in contemporary U.S. politics. There’s a group of voters who have become disillusioned with mainstream political parties and institutions and have been willing to embrace the far right instead. As I said for the LA Times piece, many of these are former supporters of left-wing parties who have become polarized along the lines of race and identity. They’re upset over immigration, cultural change, and the economic costs associated with inflation and deindustrialization. These types of voters exist in many Western countries, from the Upper Midwest to East Germany, to rural France.

But there are also big differences in terms of how politics is organized in the United States and Europe. Most European countries - and the European Parliament - have not just two main parties like the United States, but instead an almost confusing array of them. In the Dutch general elections which happened last year, 15 parties won seats in the legislature. In the European Parliament, there are seven “groups”, themselves coalitions of members from different nations and parties.

This produces a very different type of politics - one in which 20% matters a lot more than it does in the United States. Because coalitions have to be formed by cobbling together lots of different parties, a party winning a fifth of the votes can be decisive in making or breaking a government. More choice for voters also means that parties have a harder time ensuring loyalty. It’s relatively easy to persuade Democrats not to vote for Republicans and vice-versa, because the differences between the two parties are so great. That’s why American elections are decided by a very small number of true swing voters. By contrast, an array of different parties on the left or the right gives voters more opportunities to jump ship - meaning parties are more likely to shift their positions in response to electoral threats.

In the United States, winning 20% of the votes in a presidential election means basically nothing. Ross Perot nearly did it in 1992 without having any enduring influence on the politics of the 1990s. His main issue was opposition to NAFTA, but Bill Clinton just plowed ahead with NAFTA anyway, and four years later Perot’s support had collapsed. The two main parties are pretty much always going to be more powerful than third-party challengers and can see them off relatively easily.

The U.S. two-party system produces another strange effect which makes it very different to European multi-party systems. Because there are basically only three places to go in U.S. politics - Democratic, Republican, or irrelevance - the parties themselves become strange coalitions. In Europe, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Joe Biden would likely not be in the same party. Neither would Mitt Romney and Donald Trump. But in the U.S., they end up uneasily jammed together. Nowadays the Republican Party is a combination of business interests, cultural conservatives and those in the thrall of Trump’s cult of personality. Its supporters often don’t have a huge amount in common except that they are extremely polarized against the Democrats, and prefer their current bedfellows to a country run by the opposition.

If you placed the population of the United States in a European parliamentary system, the true far-right vote might only be 20% there as well. I suspect it would actually be somewhat higher - but anyway, it wouldn’t be 50%. But this intense two-party polarization creates a politics in which the center-right and the far-right end up in the same party, and together they have a shot at 50%. That’s extremely disturbing, because even though the party might be a coalition of far-right and center-right elements, it’s currently led by an extremely far right figure - one becoming increasingly overtly fascist in his rhetoric. His coalition of business interests, cultural conservatives and nationalists - overseen by a towering leader - is eerily reminiscent of fascism as well, and it’s a moral stain on any center-right American voter who is willing to truck with this force just to keep the Democrats out of power.

So you can’t draw a simplistic analogy between the European Parliament elections and what’s happening in the United States. They’re different systems, with different dynamics. But taken together, they’re part of a disturbing trend - and one which urgently needs to be stopped in its tracks this coming November.