“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”
– W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming
In the swelling volume of apocalyptic analysis regarding the future of the euro,
the European Union and Europe itself, the line above from Yeats is probably the
most-often quoted. Written in the aftermath of the World War I, the poem is
genuinely apocalyptic, as its title suggests, not in a positive, let alone
triumphalist sense, but rather the opposite.
In any event, the idea that
“the centre cannot hold” is what seems to have caught the eye, the ear and the
mind of many analysts, from a spectrum of social sciences, when they observe the
developments in Europe over the last few years. The phrase is being used
in a political context, with the terrible example of the collapse of the
political center in most European countries in interwar Europe very much in the
analysts’ minds.
Rightly so. Last weekend may mark the point at which the
center began to collapse and, if so, will be noted by historians as a turning
point in the history of modern Europe. The key development, as discussed in this
column last Friday, was the French presidential election, which kicked off a
hectic election season that will encompass Greece and Ireland, before returning
to France in June for parliamentary elections.
As everyone who follows
news reports will know, the first round of the presidential election generated a
result close to that predicted by the polls in advance: the center-right
candidate, Sarkozy, narrowly beat the center-left candidate, Hollande, with each
man garnering some 28 percent to 29%. These two will now shape up for the
final showdown in the second round on May 6. But the more dramatic outcome was
the showing of the far-right candidate, Marine le Pen, who took almost 18% of
the vote and thereby exceeded her father’s success in the 2002
election.
The headlines and commentary highlighted this “best-ever
showing” by the extreme right and the parallel weak showing of the major
parties, which managed only little better than half the votes between them.
However, as so often with instant analysis, the spotlight was too narrowly
focused and thereby missed much of importance. The following points put the
current results into better focus, by comparing the first round of the 2012
elections with the parallel round of the elections of 2007 and 2002:
• If we
combine the extreme parties into one block – because much of their platform,
especially relating to the EU, is the same – then the total extremist vote was
31% this time, compared to only 19.4% in 2007. But – and this is important and
also very interesting – the extremist showing in 2012 was actually LOWER than
that of 2002, when it reached 35.3% – far more than this year.
• The main
difference between 2012 and 2002, on the extremist side, was the poor showing of
the extreme left, whose four candidates – led by Jean-Luc Melenchon, who managed
only 11% – cobbled together 13% this year, whereas the five extreme-left
candidates in 2002 achieved a total of 16%.
• However – and this is the
surprise – even the extreme right did worse than in 2002. True, le Pen junior
surpassed le Pen senior, but in 2002 there was another extreme-right candidate,
and the total vote for him and le Pen was 19.2%, compared to 17.9% for le Pen
junior this year.
• The Greens are not included in the foregoing
“extreme-left, extreme-right” groupings, although that is obviously a matter of
opinion. But the Green vote in 2012, at 2.3%, while much higher than the 1.6% of
2007, was less than half of that recorded in 2002, when the party’s candidate
won 5.2%.
These items will suffice to show that the extremist showing,
while impressive and therefore frightening, was actually well below that of 2002
– on all fronts, left, right and Greens. In light of this broader
picture, what conclusions can and should be drawn from last week’s
voting.
A case can certainly be made that, worrying as the extremist vote
is, it has not reached 2002 levels; that the economic situation in France,
Europe and the world is far worse today than 10 years ago provides a measure of
comfort. Just as France survived the recession, riots and social unrest that
marked 2002-2005, so it can do so again.
Regular readers of this column
will know that I don’t subscribe to that soothing lullaby. The severity of
France’s own economic, demographic, social and political problems is not that
much less than those of its southern neighbors, Spain, Italy and Portugal. But
the real shocker last weekend came not from France, and not from the PIIGS, but
from Holland – a country that, until a decade ago, was perhaps the most
committed to the European vision and to making the EU and its agencies
work.
Last Saturday, Geert Wilders, leader of the far-right Party for
Freedom, led his party out of the governing coalition, thereby bringing down the
government and forcing Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s resignation on Monday. The
issue at stake was the effort to cut the Dutch budget sufficiently to meet EU
target levels, which Wilders regards as “dictates from Brussels.”
The
wider picture, therefore, is that the center is crumbling right across Europe,
not merely in basket cases such as Greece, but in the core countries of the EU,
such as France and Holland. The crisis is expressed via financial and
economic data, notably the gulf between income and expenditures. But it is
ultimately a political one, where the gulf between the elites and the general
public has become unbridgeable.
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