[Peace-discuss] Europeans Have Had Enough

[C. G. Estabrook]

Watch Europe tip left and right as voters rise in fury against the  
austerity menu that’s been bringing them to utter ruin. In Holland,  
the right-wing Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders brought down the  
governing coalition on Monday bellowing his defiance for the “Diktats  
from Brussels”, and asserting that “We must be master of our own  
house.” Labour and Christian Democrats, Holland’s major parties, are  
crumbling.

Almost certainly doomed is France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, with François  
Hollande poised to win in the second round, but Marine Le Pen’s fiery,  
anti-banker populism has reaped her deserved rewards. As Ambrose Evans  
Pritchard writes in the Daily Telegraph:

“Elected governments have already been swept away – or replaced by EU  
technocrats without a vote, indeed to prevent a vote – in every  
eurozone state where unemployment has reached double-digits: Spain  
(23.6 per cent), Greece (21 per cent), Portugal (15 per cent), Ireland  
(14.7 per cent) and Slovakia (14 per cent).The political carnage has  
been striking. Ireland’s Fianna Fail, creator of the Irish free state,  
has lost every seat in Dublin. Greece’s Panhellenic Socialist Movement  
(PASOK) – torch-bearers of Greek democracy since the Colonels – has  
fallen to 14 per cent in the polls and faces ruin next month.

“The results are in: the hard-Left and hard-Right are on the rampage  
across Euroland…. France’s Marine Le Pen presents herself as a  
latterday Jeanne d’Arc, openly comparing France’s pro-EU camp with the  
Burgundians who plotted ‘English Annexation’ in the 1430s – or indeed  
‘Les Collabos’ who bought peace after 1940. ‘Let us break the chains  
of the French people. Bring on the French Spring,’ she tells Front  
National rallies.

“The mood feels different from past episodes of irritation with EU  
aggrandisement, whether the ‘No’ votes against the European  
Constitution in 2005 or the Irish ‘No’ to Lisbon and Nice, or the  
Scandinavian ‘Nej’ votes against the euro. Mme Le Pen has gone to the  
heart of the matter, asserting that monetary union cannot be fudged,  
that it is incompatible with the French nation state. She has won 18  
per cent of the vote campaigning to pull France out of the euro and  
smash the whole project. Unlike her father – who never seriously  
expected to be president – she has a realistic chance of peeling off  
enough Gaulliste votes to emerge as paramount leader of the French  
Right.”

What will Chancellor Angela Merkel do as the pan-European mutiny  
against austerity rises? With her ally Sarkozy in all likelihood soon  
gone, it’s Germany that’s looking isolated. Will François Hollande be  
up to the task of forcing a change of step for Europe, and Keynesian  
reflation? I wish I had confidence in the man, but I don’t. Another  
limp social democrat with the muscle of a three-day old hake...

--Alexander Cockburn