The Crisis Of The European Centre

Hope or Hopium?

I know what you’re thinking, this article is pure hopium and I probably just fancy Giorgia Meloni. There’s certainly some truth to the latter but the validity of the former needs some careful consideration. To say that I’ve become ‘‘Blackpilled’’ on electoral politics would be a severe understatement. Indeed, readers and listeners who’ve only recently discovered my online musings could be forgiven for thinking that I simply wasn’t interested in elections and party politics at all.

It wasn’t always that way.

In 2002 I was drinking in a small Belgian cafe late in the evening when news came in that Le Pen senior had caused an earthquake in the French election by making it into the final run-off against Jacques Chirac. This was Jean Marie Le Pen who responded to economic arguments for mass migration by saying he’d prefer to see French people eating dry bread than become strangers on their own soil. For my younger self it wasn’t so much backing the ‘‘Far Right’’ but assisting European civilization in correcting itself — the pendulum swinging back and stability being restored.

But the pendulum never did swing back, and normalcy wasn’t restored. And thus began the cycle of excitement and then disappointment, over and over again throughout the years. I voted for the BNP the first chance I got and watched party after party run throughout the continent on reducing immigration or ‘‘Islamification’’ to no avail. The centre remained unbreakable and monolithic.

The National Front in France have been almost gaining power for half of my life now.

A few weeks ago the Swedish Democrats surged in the polls and I could no longer even bring myself to care, and anyway, what can one realistically expect from Sweden?

Slowly, steadily, the cynicism crept in. If you don’t get your hopes up you won’t have to cope with the defeats. It’s a fix, and the Americans would bomb us anyway if a genuine Nationalist party began enacting Nationalist policies in a European country, and so on.

However, my interest in the Italian election was piqued when I saw Ursula von Der Leyen threatening to give Italy the ‘‘Orban Treatment’’. Ursula von der Leyen, who is like a technocrat Stepford Wife, is of course not elected (lest we forget to slip that in there) and furthermore, she also has quite a full plate of calamities to be chewing on already. Von der Leyen claims that the EU (read globalist elites) have ‘‘tools’’ to use in the event that Italy voted the ‘‘wrong way’’.

Presumably the tools Von Der Leyen is referring to are the swathe of funding cuts now heading for Orban’s Hungary. As The Washington Post explains in their opinion piece unambiguously titled ‘‘The E.U. must punish Viktor Orban, Hungary’s authoritarian leader’’:

Despite its descent into what amounts to a Potemkin democracy, Hungary has managed until now to forestall serious disciplinary consequences from the E.U., which wields a formidable power of the purse. Now the jig is up, or nearly so. Furious that E.U. funds have been used corruptly for years to fatten the wallets of Mr. Orban’s friends and political allies — which officials in Brussels delicately refer to as “rule-of-law problems” — the European Commission is preparing to withhold some $4.6 billion in already frozen pandemic recovery funds for Hungary, an unprecedented move. Beyond that, the commission could block billions more in covid-19 relief money by the end of the year, as well as a six-year, 22-billion-euro package intended mainly to modernize Hungary’s antiquated infrastructure.

Well I guess that’s checkmate for Viktor Orban then, at least it isn’t as if he has a major nation nearby who is on the cusp of open conflict with the EU he could turn to.

Unlike Hungary, Italy is a core nation of the European Union so presumably now that they’ve also voted the wrong way, they too can be brought to heel via impoverishing the population.

Not that it really matters of course, because European populations, whether populists or nationalist or woke, are already being punished through collapsing economies, soaring energy bills and quite probably food shortages in the near future. These woes have been brought upon us by Western elites deciding that the smart play in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was to sanction ourselves(!)

No sooner had we sanctioned ourselves than our wise rulers then conjured up yet another winning move. When faced with fertilizer shortages and disrupted food supply chains — their policy was to deliberately sabotage and wreck the most productive farming industry in Europe.

The question now is whether EU elites will punish and sanction one of their own core nations rather than have Giorgia Meloni and The Brothers of Italy turn away African migrants and clear-out the gender ideology from Italian life.

Many people have been quick to point out that Meloni’s party, or the Swedish Democrats for that matter, are hardly weapons-grade ethno-nationalists and based radicals. This is of course true. But then again neither is Viktor Orban or Donald Trump. The issue is not so much that the centre is under attack from radicals on the periphery, but that the centre itself is the radical element and no policy seems too insane and no value too sacred to be censored and sanctioned.

However, the liberal centre cannot admit to its own demented nature, whether in terms of policy or the reality of Joe Biden. And so we’re fed an endless flow of convoluted rubbish as the system attempts to justify itself as in this article on Meloni in The Atlantic:

Since 2017, she has tweeted repeatedly that Italian identity is being deliberately erased by globalists such as Soros and European Union officials, who have conspired to unleash “uncontrolled mass immigration.”

The framing here is that this is crazy conspiracy talk, The Atlantic want to shock their readership with such brazen fascism.

However, just a few paragraphs down The Atlantic then helpfully explains:

A scenario in which a Meloni-led government’s rollback of civil rights might put Italy on a path to conflict with the European Union is not far-fetched. That is the situation with Hungary, which a recent European Parliament resolution said can “no longer be considered a full democracy.”

In other words, the Great Replacement isn’t happening but if you try and undo the legislation which enables it you’ll run into conflict with the supranational bodies who aren’t behind it because it isn’t happening.

More fundamentally, the liberal centre of western political life simply doesn’t offer stability anymore. America did not return to the 90’s when Biden was elected, instead the Feds were sent after MAGA middle Americans. The European Union was created to offer stability to Europeans and all we got was a loss of sovereignty and armies of Africans marching across the continent.

Indeed, all we’re really being offered by the elites now is more war, more inflation, more migrants, more woke, more gender ideology, more censorship, more anti-white hatred, more top-down technocrat planning, more climate change madness, more castrated boys and mutilated girls, more vaccines, more cold winters, more digital surveillance, more corruption, more de-bankings, more contempt for the public will, more tyrannical bureaucrats, more black women twerking, more inter-ethnic strife, more sanctions, more inflation, more lies and more hardship.

What they don’t want to confront is a painful reality, we aren’t the problem, they are. They won’t of course, they’ll double down. There will not be a move toward pragmatism wherein populists are allowed to clampdown on immigration and symbolically burn the rainbow flag, while erasing woke from public life in turn for support in geopolitical adventurism in the East.

The Biden regime did not react to Putin invading Ukraine by holding out an olive branch toward Trump’s base and the MAGA movement, he instead gave a doom-laden speech calling them terrorists and extremists. The liberal centre of western politics has lost the ability to self-correct and engage in pragmatism. As I noted n a recent article on a not unrelated topic, it’s as if they fear that even a mild concession on any issue will begin a chain-reaction of losing narrative control.

The power-structure is becoming ever-more calcified and arthritic, while at the same time having to wearily douse one fire after another. It just so happens to be that this latest and welcome brush-fire in Italy is more pleasant to look at than the others.