Populists keep EU on edge as focus shifts to 2019 elections

Bloomberg

With the European Union gearing up for legislative elections in 2019, the battle between EU supporters and opponents is shaping up to be a lot like many of the contests in this summer’s soccer World Cup: back and forth, passionate and down to the wire.
Last year’s election of French President Emmanuel Macron and fourth-term victory of German Chancellor Angela Merkel put a brake on an anti-EU trend exemplified by Brexit. But just as the EU ship was steadying itself, Italy acted as a buffet by producing a populist government composed of parties far from the European mainstream.
So there’s all to play for in the European Parliament elections in May. “There will be a lot of things happening in terms of the more anti-European parties and I think they will have quite a strong percentage overall,” said Guntram Wolff, director of the Bruegel think tank in Brussels. “The question is: will these get organised and unify in one party group? If so, they could become the largest or the second-largest group in the Parliament.”
The legislative elections will be a barometer of the anti-establishment forces at play in the developed world. Those forces already brought about two watershed events in 2016, when Britons voted to leave the bloc after four decades of membership and Americans sent Donald Trump to the White House with an “America First” agenda that challenges an even longer history of US international engagement.
Political Theatre
Beyond the political theatre, the ballot has implications for how the EU is governed. In addition to passing laws along with EU national governments, the 28-nation Parliament approves the leadership of the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm. The commission proposes EU legislation on everything from auto-pollution limits to mobile-roaming fees, acts as the bloc’s antitrust authority, administers its 140 billion-euro ($160 billion) annual budget, negotiates trade accords and runs a foreign service.
A very strong showing by populist forces in the Parliament, where no faction enjoys an absolute majority, could put them in a position to complicate or even block the formation of a new commission. European parties nominate candidates for commission president and national capitals propose appointees for the rest of the leadership team, whose individual members get scrutinized by the Parliament before its vote on the whole formation.
While the twice-a-decade elections to the EU Parliament have traditionally revealed more about the direction of national politics than of European policies, next year’s vote may end up being a verdict on the bloc itself. That’s because, after a decade of debt-crisis firefighting and a three-year battle to curb refugee waves from the Middle East and Africa, the EU’s role in national life has become a central part of domestic political debates.
“Europe may be on the verge of a more trans-national form of democracy—one that is polarised around very basic pro- and anti-EU positions,” Alberto Alemanno, a professor of EU law in Paris, wrote in a June paper for Carnegie Europe evaluating the upcoming European legislative elections. The paper’s title: “Europe Up for Grabs.”
In a sign of the stakes, Steve Bannon, an architect of Trump’s election victory and his White House strategist until a year ago, has set up an organization in Europe to rally anti-EU forces. It’s called the Movement.