SHORTLY after Joe Biden and a phalanx of European leaders gathered in Normandy last week to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings that launched the endgame in the continent’s bitterest conflict, citizens in 27 states began to vote in European parliamentary elections that were predicted to demonstrate a surge in support for precisely the kind of ideologies that purportedly perished in 1944-45.
One aspect of Operation Overlord that seldom scores a mention in current commentary is that the Soviet Union had been pleading for a second front since soon after Operation Barbarossa, when the Nazis swept across its territory three years before D-Day. There were those in Europe who relished the prospect of a combat between the USSR and Nazi Germany, and the Normandy landings were at least partly motivated by the fear that the Red Army would overrun Europe and take sole credit for Hitler’s defeat.
Soviet forces did indeed reach Berlin before their Western allies — and a brief camaraderie made way before long for the Cold War. Stalin’s regime is accurately accused of imposing its will on Eastern Europe. Somewhat more subtly, the US did the same in Western Europe. One of the CIA’s first missions was to ensure that Italy did not vote in a communist or socialist majority in its first postwar poll. Part of the effort involved incorporating Nazi operatives or collaborators into ‘democratic’ Europe’s postwar establishments.
The precursor of France’s Rassemblement National, whose gains in last week’s polls panicked Emmanuel Macron into calling a snap parliamentary election, was Front National, which was co-founded by Nazi collaborators. RN leader Marine Le Pen has been trying to cleanse the party of its fascist associations, including by distancing it from Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, some of whose leaders refuse to stop expressing their admiration for the Third Reich. Notwithstanding some recent scandals involving its international associations — kowtowing to the Kremlin, for instance, and spying for China — the AfD did better in the Euro polls than any component of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s supposedly centre-left coalition, but not as well as the Christian Democrats (CDU).
The centre holds, but it has shifted.
The CDU’s Ursula von der Leyen, who greeted the European election results by offering the assurance that the centre is holding, hopes to win a second term as European Commission president. She has lately been courting Giorgia Meloni, whose ‘post-neofascist’ Brothers of Italy came on top in another former Axis state. Meloni postures on the international stage as the acceptable face of Europe’s far right, while her government’s domestic attitudes reflect a clearer image of its perverse inclinations.
A defining feature of European politics in recent decades has been the extent to which the centre (both left and right) has sought to ‘combat’ the hard right by co-opting its ideas, notably (but not exclusively) on immigration. In many parts of Europe, for instance, economic distress is related to ageing societies and diminishing populations. But where is the party advocating better-organised immigration as a possible solution? The focus is identitarian, powered mainly by white Christian nationalism, and dedicated to excluding black and brown ethnicities. Hence the EU devotes its energies not to educating the masses but to bribing North African states to detain and brutalise the politically or economically persecuted unfortunates who aspire to a new life on the fringes of a European experiment that they don’t realise has failed.
The second round of the French election, on July 7, will precede the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics barely by a fortnight. Macron is obviously hoping that the anti-fascist voters will emerge to thwart the likelihood of an FN majority. As many commentators have indicated, though, it could mean cohabiting with the hard right for the remainder of his presidential term, and then handing over to Le Pen in 2027.
Whether or not it crossed voters’ minds, the war in Ukraine was a factor in the EU elections, with some of the far right as well as far left parties calling for accommodation with Vladimir Putin — the D-Day ceremonies also highlighted Russia’s aggression as an echo of Nazi attitudes from long ago. Without excusing Putin’s self-serving trespasses, it might have been more fruitful to focus on why Moscow might suspect the intentions of hostile neighbours.
Neither the EU’s dedication to Ukraine nor its devotion to Israel, notwithstanding the latter’s genocidal tendencies, is likely to shift much in the near future, but the future of the anyhow inadequate European Green Deal is in doubt. Add a second Trump administration to the equation, and humanity’s short-term future shifts from gloom to doom, regardless of anything Putin or Xi Jinping might be plotting.
Published in Dawn, June 12th, 2024