“Tea Party” Right Surges in Euroskeptic European Elections
Has the US exported its Tea Party dissatisfaction with distant Washington, including DC’s coast-based single-minded mega media, a seemingly unified GOP and Democratic Establishment Party, deference to the United Nations, and loss of local identity and autonomy?
Half of the globe seems to want big empire-based control, while the other half is heading the other way: toward less big government and greater emphasis on heritage and identity. This past week saw a resurgence of the European right with the victories of Marine Le Pen in France and Nigel Farage in Britain: “In a European Union bitterly riven by economic and financial crises, high unemployment, and anemic economies, populist parties—which trade on finger-pointing at everything from the euro currency and EU regulations to migrants and Islam—at the very least claimed bragging rights.”
Also on the right, Geert Wilders of Holland points to the patriotic value of individual identity that is being steamrolled over by the new collective order:
You know what happened in the last decades, its that our national sovereignty in the EU collapsed, there came a European superstate, of all European elections that nobody in Holland or in Belgium or in the UK, nobody not only knows them, but nobody voted for them, and they are in charge now of almost all the law-making process in our own country. We lost our identity; we lost our national sovereignty to the EU, an institution that really a lot of people in the West don’t like so much anymore.
I have nothing against Europe, but I have a lot against the EU as an organization. We want to regain control over our own borders, over our own money, over our own budget – all rights that we have given to the bureaucrats in Brussels, and we want them back. Everybody knows that Spanish people are different from Swedish people, my own Dutch people are not the same as Portuguese – and it’s a good thing, there is not a “European” people, that doesn’t exist – I mean, several countries exist.
Wilders is typical of the “Euroskeptics” who see weakness rewarded while a perverse central planning runs amok:
A lot of things will really change; people are fed up with big fat bureaucrats in Brussels, whom nobody elected, doing the most crazy things that are not good for our country. Let me give you one example. We have, in my country, the Netherlands, but in many other western European countries, we have had raising of taxes, we have had austerity programs of billions of Euros, and we send that money to Greece, to Cyprus, to Portugal, to weaker European countries, and at the same time, people in Holland, they had less money in the pockets and we send that money abroad. People are fed up with that. With 700,000 unemployed people in the Netherlands, we don’t want more immigrants from other countries to come here. We want jobs to be there for our own people
The preferred model for politicians like Wilders is Switzerland: “I would like us to be a second Switzerland. You know the country of Switzerland – it’s in the heart of Europe, but is not a member of the EU.”
