A look at the 2014 european elections results

As expected UKIP topped the polls in the European elections over the weekend in the UK Eurrosceptic and far-right parties have seized ground in elections to the European parliament, in what France's PM called a "political earthquake". UK Independence Party and French National Front both performed strongly. The three big centrist blocs all lost seats, though still hold the majority. The outcome means a greater say for those who want to cut back the EU's powers, or abolish it completely. UK PM David Cameron said the public was "disillusioned" with the EU. Mr Cameron said their message was "received and understood". French President Francois Hollande has called an urgent meeting of his cabinet, as Prime Minister Manuel Valls promised tax cuts a day after the results which he described as "a shock, an earthquake". Chancellor Angela Merkel - whose party topped the poll in Germany - described the far right victories as "remarkable and regrettable" and said the best response was to boost economic growth and jobs. Jose Manuel Barroso, outgoing president of the European Commission, stressed that the pro-EU blocs still had "a very solid and workable majority". He said a "truly democratic debate" was needed to address the concerns of those who did not vote, or "voted in protest". • ance National Front storm to victory - 25%, 24 seats; Centre-right UMP 21%; President Hollande's Socialists a poor third with 14% - lowest ever EP score • Britain Eurosceptic UKIP in first place, with 27%, Conservatives on 24% and Labour about 25%, Greens beating Lib Dems • Germany Angela Merkel wins another election - 35% for her Christian Union, 27% for the centre-left SPD. Eurosceptic AfD score strong 7% • Greece Partial results show far-left Syriza on 26%, PM Antonis Samaras' New Democracy on 23%. Far-right Golden Dawn set to get three MEPs, with 9%. Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras has asked the Greek president to call early national elections. supporters will be pleased that election turnout was slightly higher, at 43.1%, according to provisional European Parliament figures. at would be the first time turnout had not fallen since the previous election - but would only be an improvement of 0.1%. "The people have spoken loud and clear," a triumphant Marine Le Pen told cheering supporters at National Front (FN) party headquarters in Paris. "They no longer want to be led by those outside our borders, by EU commissioners and technocrats who are unelected. They want to be protected from globalisation and take back the reins of their destiny." Provisional results suggested the FN could win 25 European Parliament seats - a stunning increase on its three in 2009. spite the huge gains for anti-EU parties and those that wish to reduce the power of the EU, it is unlikely that the European Parliament will adopt a fundamentally different approach. The main centre-right and left groupings still hold the majority of seats between them. Add in the Liberals and the Greens and parliament is overwhelmingly pro-EU. In that sense if the main groups in the parliament choose to ignore those who didn't vote for them last night, they can. National politicians however, can't afford to ignore them. That's where this election is likely to really shake things up. This will have an impact not just on domestic politics, but on the national leaders when they meet in Brussels at the European Council - where their job is to shape the direction of the EU. Will this lead to a new direction and a shae up of the EU ?? only time will tell. All that is true is that we are heading into a new possibly unstable and turbulent period in European politics.

Can fascism make a comeback?

Yes it can I’d argue and it already is in some parts of the world in places like the Ukraine and Greece for example there are significant forces building and more worryingly growing all the time. When I was a member of the socialist party combating fascism was not a priority we were always told the capitalists would only use a fascist koo as last resort and the working class will have many chances’ to take power well before it comes to fascism. What they did not tell us was that fascism could make a comeback well before that and indeed right under our noses’. For me it appears as though the old centre ground centre left and centre right are in crisis and are finding their votes and popular support in collapse right across Europe. The centre left in particular is facing a big decline as ice outlined in previous posts on this blog this is no more confirmed than France's president Holland this week seeing his poll ratings sink to their lowest ever for any French president of all time. This is quite an achievement considering the dross they have produced down the years. Fascism can find a hold in times of fear and desperation in the downtrodden middle class's but also the working class too. Fascism was always considered a middle class movement those who have been disenchanted but this misses the point fascism can cover multiple classes in its mass popular support it is a tempting appeal when things are heading quickly down. Fascism in its traditional sense opposes communism but this is the traditional understanding we have fascism in the future and even today will and do look very different to what we understand it to have been in the past. Things do not repeat themselves in history but can take parts of the past with them. I think we may see the rise again of a mass movement against corruption on a European scale and even more so in here in the UK with the likes of UKIP appealing to those who are fed up with the current political elite even though many of their leading figures are hardly too far out of touch of the political establishment themselves. IN a piece in the guardian last November "In the years since the global banking crisis in 2007, commentators across the political spectrum have confidently predicted not only the imminent collapse of the euro – but sooner or later an unavoidable implosion of the European Union itself. None of this has come to pass. But the "European Project", launched after the devastation of the Second World War, now faces the most serious threat in its history. That threat was chillingly prefigured last november in the launch of a pan-European alliance of far-right parties, led by the French National Front and the Dutch Party of Liberty headed by Geert Wilders, and vowing to slay "the monster in Brussels".. Of course, the growth in support for far-right populist, anti-European, anti-immigrant parties has been force-fed by the worst world recession since at least the 1930s and possibly since before 1914. Mass unemployment and falling living standards in the euro-area and the wider EU made worse by the crazy and self-defeating austerity obsession of European leaders has opened the door to the revival of the far right. Parties that skulked in the shadows for decades after 1945, playing down their sympathies with fascism and Nazism are now re-emerging having given themselves a PR facelift. Marine Le Pen, leader of the French NF, plays down the antisemitic record of her party... The Dutch far-right leader has ploughed a slightly different furrow – mobilising fear and hostility not against Jews but rather Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands. Like Marine Le Pen, Wilders obsessively focuses on the alleged cosmopolitan threat to national identity from the European Union. It is a chorus echoed in other European countries by the Danish People's party, the Finns party and the Flemish Vlaams Belang among others. For now, the French and Dutch populists are carefully keeping their distance from openly neo-Nazi parties such as Golden Dawn – whose paramilitary Sturmabteilung – have terrorised refugees and immigrants in Greece, and the swaggering Hungarian Jobbik, who terrorise the Roma minority. For now, our own Ukip is tactically keeping its distance from the new European far-right alliance while whispering a similar story about "east European immigrants". Ridiculous comparisons have been drawn by some commentators between the rise of the populist far right and the growth of the radical left – notably the Syriza party in Greece, which has pushed for a reverse of austerity crisis policies, both in Greece and throughout Europe. In fact, Syriza represents the main challenge to Golden Dawn's offensive. Moreover, while the Italian Northern League may be drawn to the far-right alliance, the bulk of the semi-anarchist followers of the comedian Beppe Grillo in the Italian parliament are anti-fascist and unlikely to take the same path. According to some pollsters – the far right might win as many as a third of all the seats in the European parliament after the European elections this May. That would still leave the centre parties – Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and Liberals – with many more members. But for the European parliament to form a credible majority all of these parties might well be forced much closer together than is good for them or good for European democracy. It could threaten eventual paralysis of the European parliament itself. Such a situation would be unsettlingly reminiscent of 1936, when the centre and the left – notably in France – temporarily halted the swing to fascism but formed an unprincipled and ineffective coalition. Its collapse on the eve of the Second World War accelerated the advent of Phillippe Petain's Nazi collaborating regime. History does not normally repeat itself in an automatic fashion. But it would be foolish to take the risk. More worrying than the growth of the far right are the temporising gestures to the racists and anti-immigrants now coming from mainstream Tory and even Liberal Democrat politicians and from some of the new "Blue Labour" ideologues. The warning from the likes of David Blunkett that hostility to Roma immigrants might lead to a popular "explosion" is worryingly reminiscent of Enoch Powell style rhetoric. An effective antidote to the growth of far-right populism requires that the European left is capable of articulating and following through on a comprehensive alternative to economic stagnation, an ever-widening income and wealth gap, the degradation of our social standards, civil liberties and democratic rights and the mindless drift to a global arming catastrophe. But to succeed that alternative has to be fought for at European as well as national and local levels, and to be delivered will require more, not less, European integration." So to conclude fascism is back in some shape or form and can grow further still if allowedto. Our job must be to oppose it wherever it raises its ugly head. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/15/far-right-rise-european-marine-le-pen-geert-wilders

Fighting fascism wherever it tries to rear its ugly head

Just last week there was a horrific killing of a French anti fascist. An 18-year-old student activist Clement Meric was murdered in Paris in broad daylight, on 5 June, by neo-fascist skinheads. This must be answered by mass mobilisation to halt attempts by the far right to raise its head. Comments from BlockBuster (Anti-racist youth organisation in Belgium) In recent months there have been big parades and demonstrations in France against gay marriage. The reactionary right has made it clear that it is still a mobilising force. Le Pen’s National Front, trying to exploit the growing discontent at the disastrous policies of President François Hollande in the past year, has made more gains at a time when all economic prospects are very gloomy. More violent far-right groups feel encouraged by these developments and some fascist activists dare to go a step further. The young anti-fascist, Clement Meric, has become one of their victims. On June 5, in central Paris, Clement was brutally assaulted by a group of skinheads and left for dead. The main person accused of the deadly assault was known as a member of the ‘Jeunesses Nationalistes Revolutionaires’ (JNR), an organisation led by Serge Ayoub. He is a notorious French fascist who has also repeatedly come to Belgium to assist the activities of far-right groups like ‘Nation’. Ayoub first tried to deny that the killers were activists from the JNR, but then adopted a different tone: the young leftists had supposedly begun the fight. However, Serge Ayoub’s JNR is no innocent association. Ayoub himself is nicknamed ‘Batskin’ because he likes to use a baseball bat in confrontations with political opponents. The group tries to combine violent right-wing extremism with attempts at expressing some ‘social’ arguments. As with other similar groups, their social aspect remains pure rhetoric, while the racism and acts of violence prevail. The Greek ‘Golden Dawn’ is no different; their activities are not directed against those responsible for the crisis, the major shareholders, bankers and other Greek capitalists, but against the victims of this crisis who have another colour of skin or political opinion. The death of the young French anti-fascist has led to protests and demonstrations in several cities and towns in France and internationally. On Thursday there was a large demonstration of “mourning and anger” in Paris. The Establishment politicians have argued that they are in favour of a ban on neo-Nazi groups that “damage the Republic”. Obviously we are not in favour of providing neo-Nazis with a clear field to practise their activities, but in order to stop them, simple bans will not be sufficient. An active response from the labour movement is needed. To stop violent neo-fascist groups gaining confidence, mass mobilisation and anti-fascist resistance are needed. The violence of these groups is not supported by broader layers of the population. Answering their meetings and protests through much larger mobilisations would make neo-fascist activities difficult to organise and would stymie their violent political offensive. We need to oppose, in a systematic way, mobilisations that reinforce divisions in our class, such as homophobic and racist protests. We need to accompany opposing the far right by building a political response that takes up the common interests of working people and poor families. The crisis of capitalism and the pro-establishment parties, with their austerity policies, are creating a greater breeding ground for racism and division in society, and violent groups are stepping in to whip up reaction. A real answer to racism and fascism and the extreme right is not possible if it remains within the framework of the capitalist system which breeds these forces. We can only rely on our own strength! We must build on a trade union and political level a united struggle against racism and fascism, and lay the foundations for a mass force that fights for an end to the rotten system of capitalism. That is the challenge for the anti-fascists and the labour movement as a whole.