Marginal no More

Liubomir Topaloff

Liubomir Topaloff is associate professor of politics at Meiji Univer-sity, Tokyo. His most recent book is Political Parties and Euroscepticism (2012).

In a healthy and vibrant democracy, political parties lose elections.1 Keeping that in mind, we may say that the relatively poor performance of “mainstream” parties and the strong showing by their “Euroskeptic” rivals in the 22–25 May 2014 elections for the 751-seat European Parlia-ment (EP) added up to a triumph for democracy. Indeed, the balloting may be the clearest sign yet of the irreversible democratization of Euro-pean politics—a dynamic that is chipping away at the European Union’s “democratic deficit.”

First instituted in 1979, the balloting to elect the EP is the world’s second-largest free exercise of the franchise: Voters in each of the EU’s 28 member states vote by proportional representation, and only Indian federal elections involve a bigger electorate. As such, EP elections must count as momentous events, not just for the EU and its members, but for the entire democratic world. In 2014, however, this democratic success came at a high price.

Already, politicians and analysts are comparing the Euroskeptics’surge to the rise of Nazism or (if greater rhetorical re-straint is being shown) to a natural disaster. When Marine Le Pen’s National Front (FN) came in first among all French parties with 25 percent of the vote, Socialist premier Manuel Valls called it an “earth-quake.”2 The leader of Britain’s Euroskeptic UK Independence Party (UKIP), Nigel Farage, himself had used similar terms—albeit in a tone far happier than the one that Manuel Valls would soon employ—to de-scribe his own expectations on election eve. Like the FN in France, the UKIP came in first among all its country’s parties with 26.8 percent of the vote. And just as French voters left President François Hollande’s ruling Socialist Party (PS) battered in third place, their British coun-

Journal of Democracy Volume 25, Number 4 October 2014© 2014 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press

Euroskepticism Arrives

77Liubomir Topaloff

terparts punished Prime Minister David Cameron’s ruling Tories with a similarly dismal showing.

Euroskeptics also came out on top in Denmark, where the Danish People’s Party (DF) led all others with 26.6 percent. In Greece, the left-populist Syriza coalition gained 26.6 percent while the extreme-rightist Golden Dawn and the ultraleftist Communist Party of Greece (KKE) took 15.5 percent between them. In Sweden, the radical right-wing Swedish Democrats (SD) won almost 10 percent; in Hungary, the extremists of Jobbik won 14.7 percent, good enough for second place behind the rul-ing Fidesz party (51.5 percent). Surveying these results, prominent Eu-ropean politicians issued gloomy statements about the future of the EU and the “European project.” Outgoing EP president Martin Schulz spoke of “a bad day for the European Union.”3 Henri Malosse, the head of the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC), predicted that “this may be the last European election if Europe does not change.”4

Euroskepticism’s victory, however, was not an “earthquake” or even a “landslide.” And it was surely—most media commentators to the con-trary notwithstanding—anything but a “surprise.” It is best understood as having signaled the arrival of a parochial assortment of populists, radicals, and extremists grouped into an array of protest-oriented, anti-establishment parties. In the new EP, the number of MEPs who may be counted as Euroskeptics (the term is vague and ill defined) is around 132. Even if this mishmash of populists, radicals, Europhobes, antiglo-balizers, racists, and xenophobes stretching from the far right to the far left is treated as a solid and coherent bloc—which it is not—it still com-prises only a little more than a sixth of the EP. While the Euroskeptics’ seat total has certainly gone up from the 73 seats that they won in 2009, a 132-seat number is far short of the 250 seats of which some had been warning. The latest European elections were not earthshaking, and they may even come to be remembered as the elections that prompted a pro-cess of EU “healing.”

However that may be, the 2014 EP balloting almost certainly will go down in history as the moment when many Euroskeptic parties joined the mainstream of European politics. What will be the consequences for domestic and European politics, for competition between (and within) parties, and for the Euroskeptic parties themselves? And how can we explain the rise of Euroskepticism, linking it to not only to current crises but to longer-term historical developments?

For some Euroskeptic parties, this transition to mainstream politics was, to be sure, long in the making. The most prominent case in point may be that of France’s FN. Arguably, the Front has been a serious force in French politics since the early 1990s if not before, having risen to prominence in the 1980s under Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen (b. 1928). In 2002, the elder Le Pen created the biggest splash of his career when he made it into the presidential runoff against incum-

78 Journal of Democracy

Name Seats Won Vote Share (%)EPPGroup of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats)

221 29.43%

S&DGroup of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament

191 25.43%

ECREuropean Conservatives and Reformists 70 9.32%

ALDEAlliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe 67 8.92%

GUE/NGLEuropean United Left/Nordic Green Left 52 6.92%

Greens/EFAThe Greens/European Free Alliance 50 6.66%

EFDDEurope of freedom and direct democracy Group 48 6.39%

NINon-attached Members – Members not belonging to any political group

52 6.92%

TOTAL SEATS 751 100%

Source: http://www.results-elections2014.eu/en/country-results-hu-2014.html

Table 1—2014 european parliamenTary elecTions resulTs

The current total of 751 seats is allocated among member states according to population size, with a modest degree of dispropor-tionality favoring smaller states. Germany has the most seats with 96, while Cyprus, Estonia, Luxembourg, and Malta have the fewest with 6 each. Although each member state has a degree of freedom in setting its election rules, all must use some form of proportional representation. After Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are elected, they can form transnational political groups that are entitled to receive funding, guaranteed committee seats, and other benefits. To achieve this status, a group must be composed of at least 25 members representing at least 7 states. Members who do not belong to such a group are labeled non-attached (NI, from the French non-inscrit).

As Table 1 below shows, the EP continues to be dominated by the two largest European political families, the Christian Democratic EPP with 221 seats and the Socialist S&D with 191. Between them, these mainstream center-right and center-left parties hold a clear majority in the EP. If one adds in the Liberals (ALDE), with 67 seats, and the Greens (Greens/EFA), with 50, more than two-thirds of the members belong to groups that harbor few Euroskeptics.

represenTaTion in The european parliamenT

79Liubomir Topaloff

bent Jacques Chirac, confirming the FN’s vast and rapid expansion of its voter base. In 2012, Marine Le Pen finished third in the presidential balloting, but won even more votes than her father had.5

Since the mid-1980s, the FN has averaged about 10 percent of the EP vote in France, while regularly winning around 11 percent in National Assembly elections. In March 2014, the Front produced its best show-ing so far in municipal elections when it won control of eleven towns across the country, surpassing the four it won in the mid-1990s. As this record suggests, the FN has been something other than a marginal party for the past twenty years. Yet the other parties and the French political establishment insist on treating the FN as marginal, and therein lies the crux of Marine Le Pen’s current struggle.

Clearly, it is how the FN is perceived and not how it performs that matters more. Although the 46-year-old Marine Le Pen has been known to say things about matters of race and immigration that are even more extreme than her father’s comments—in 2010, she compared Mus-lims praying in the streets around mosques to the Nazi occupation of France—her appeal to women (across Europe, extremist parties have voter bases that are about 70 percent male) and her ability to manage a “strange bedfellows” coalition of various disaffected social groups have propelled her and her party to new levels of electoral support and politi-cal prominence.

For a quarter-century and more, the FN has been a significant pres-ence in French political life, but the mainstream parties refuse to treat it like “one of us.” It is too extremist, anti-Semitic, anti-Islamic, xeno-phobic, and racist to be “coalitionable.” Jean-Marie Le Pen seemed not to mind this, and comfortably enjoyed his fringe predominance. Only recently, he stirred yet another controversy by making a pun about ovens in the course of dismissing a Jewish critic.6

Meanwhile, attempting to follow the UKIP example, the new FN leadership has been working to “undemonize” the Front. During a No-vember 2011 visit to New York, Marine Le Pen was photographed smil-ing together with Israel’s UN ambassador, and a short time later she sent a senior deputy to visit the Jewish state. Such efforts hark back to steps that the late Jörg Haider of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) took in early 2000, when his Euroskeptic party finished a surprising third (with 27 percent of the vote) in Austria’s October 1999 general elections. Al-though the last-minute efforts did not help Haider in breaking the cor-don sanitaire that the EU had drawn around the FPÖ, in the end his party was able to join the mainstream (center-right) Austrian’s People Party in a coalition government after Haider himself resigned from the FPÖ leadership and took a lower-profile post.

In the FN’s case, leaders began taking strategic steps before a compa-rable victory in national parliamentary elections. If these steps succeed in moderating its image—making it seem more worried about globaliza-

80 Journal of Democracy

tion than immigration, for example—and if the FN’s electoral results remain strong, the mainstream parties will no longer be able to margin-alize it.

Across the Channel, Nigel Farage’s UKIP is more populist than ex-tremist, making its rise less troubling than that of the FN or other Euro-skeptic parties with a penchant for xenophobia. The UKIP consciously moderates its rhetoric and focuses on making the case for Britain’s exit from the EU. This makes UKIP coalitionable, in stark contrast to the Euroskeptic and blatantly racist British National Party (BNP). Unlike the FN, however, the UKIP has so far failed to make a dent in domestic elections. Although it has done incrementally better from cycle to cycle, the UKIP has yet to win a single seat in the British Parliament. Yet per-haps this too is about to change. Over the last three EP elections (includ-ing 2014), the UKIP has averaged just under 20 percent of the vote. Its staggering 26.8 percent in the 2014 EP voting proves that it is hardly a marginal party anymore, and the Tories can no longer pretend that it is.

Other good candidates to move from marginal to mainstream status include Greece’s left-wing Syriza, the True Finns (third place with 19 percent in the 2011 Finnish parliamentary elections and 12 percent in the 2014 EP voting), and the leftist Five Stars Movement founded by the Italian comic Beppe Grillo.

The Election’s Impact

To say that the emotional reaction to Euroskepticism’s rise has been overblown is not to say that this rise will be without consequences for both particular countries and Europe as a whole. Euroskeptics are gain-ing wider media and public exposure, and their voices are growing loud-er and harder to ignore. They are bound to set off ripples, especially among disillusioned segments of voters across the continent. By form-ing groups in the EP, Euroskeptics will be able to claim EU subsidies as well as seats on various parliamentary committees. They will also have a chance to frame and publicize their positions on issues such as the future of European integration, a banking union, immigration, common foreign and security policies, and the like.

Euroskeptics also stand to gain at the national level. Across Europe, voters uniformly seem to be against business as usual: They feel wearied by the lameness of the current European political elite and want to hear new voices. These are feelings to which Euroskeptic parties should be able to appeal in upcoming local and national elections. The savvier Euroskeptics will also be absorbing the lesson that voters want opposi-tion to European integration to be couched in subtler and more tolerant tones, with less hatred and more focus on practical issues. The True Finns, Italy’s Five Star Movement, the UKIP, Syriza, and the Alliance for Germany (AfD) fit this mold, even if the FN does not.

81Liubomir Topaloff

There is no indisputable boundary dividing Euroskeptic from main-stream parties, and scholars and other observers often disagree about who deserves the label. In Table 2 I have listed all the parties I would classify as Euroskeptic, including both extremist and more tolerant ones. This list, however, does not include mainstream parties (such as Britain’s Tories) that contain within their ranks significant Euroskeptic tendencies and factions.

The political dynamic between pro-European and Euroskeptic par-ties works on two levels. On one level, Euroskeptic parties must vie with their “kin-parties” for much the same bandwidth on the opinion spectrum. As the smaller “insurgent” force, a Euroskeptic party will typically gravitate toward an “outbidding” strategy, especially if it is already located farther from the center than its larger ideological cousin and rival, which also happens to be in power (whether alone or in a coalition). For these smaller parties, especially the marginal, extremist ones with no chance of entering office, the “outbidding” strategy usually becomes dominant. Euroskeptic parties that are deemed “coalitionable” tend to adopt a more nuanced opposition to European integration, and under some circumstances may amend that opposition or even drop it altogether. The traditionally rocky relationship between the French So-cialists and the smaller French Communist Party to their left is a classic example of the outbidding dynamic. When the Spanish Socialists were in power between 2004 and 2011, a similar situation obtained between them and Spain’s smaller United Left. In both countries, the sight of the mainstream party holding office with no intention of including its smaller kin-party in a coalition led the latter to become more Euroskep-tic and radical.7

Mainstream parties prone to Euroskepticism may soften or harden their stance as circumstances shift. Under pressure from the UKIP, for instance, Britain’s Tories have recently become more radically Euro-skeptic. The UKIP’s ascent has put the governing Conservatives in a dif-ficult position regarding their promise to hold a referendum on whether Britain should stay in the EU. A U.K. general election is set for 2015. In order to neutralize the UKIP and hold their core electorate (polls suggest that Farage peeled 2.4 million voters away from the Conservative Party in the 2014 EP elections), Cameron and his Tories will find themselves pressed to take a more radical Euroskeptic stand in an effort to outbid Farage. 8 Will the Tories be able to stick to their position that in any referendum British voters would be best advised, all things considered, to opt for staying in the EU so that London can work for a better EU-UK relationship from within EU ranks, where British leverage will be greatest? If so, how can the Conservatives maintain such a view—which shares the belief that Britain is currently getting a poor deal from the EU—and not be vulernable to the UKIP’s Euroskeptic outbidding, since the UKIP flatly says that Britain should quit the EU?

82 Journal of Democracy

Political Party CountryShare of National Vote/Seats Won

EP2014

EP Group Affiliation 2014

Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) Austria 19.72% (4) NI

Vlaams Belang Belgium 4.14 % (1) NI

Hrvatska stranka prava dr. Ante Starèeviæ Croatia (1*) ECR

Progressive Party of Working People (AKEL) Cyprus 26.98% (2) GUE/NGL

Civic Democratic Party (ODS) Czech Republic 7.67% (2) ECR

Danish People’s Party (DF) Denmark 26.6% (4) ECR

True Finns Finland 12.9% (2) ECR

National Front (FN) France 24.86% (23) NI

National Democratic Party (NDP) Germany 1% (1) NI

Alternative for Germany (AfD) Germany 7.1% (7) ECR

SY.RI.ZA. Greece 26.60% (6) GUE/NGL

Golden Dawn Greece 9.38% (3) NI

Communist Party of Greece (KKE) Greece 6.07% (2) NI

Independent Greeks (ANEL) Greece 3.47% (1) ECR

Jobbik Hungary 14.67% (3) NI

Fianna Fail Party Ireland 22.30% (1**) ECR

Five Star Movement (M5S) Italy 21.16% (17) EFDD

Lega Nord Italy 6.16% (5) NI

Coalition ZZS (LZS+LZP) Latvia 8.26% (1) EFDD

National Alliance (VL – TB/LNNK) Latvia 14.25% (1) ECR

Order and Justice (TT) Lithuania 14.25% (2) EFDD

Party for Freedom (PVV) Netherlands 13.32% (4) NI

Christian Union / Reform Political Party (CU-SGP) Netherlands 7.67% (2) ECR

Congress of the New Right (KNP) Poland 7.15% (4) NI

Freedom and Solidarity (SaS) Slovakia 6.66% (1) ALDE

Izquierda Plural (IP) Spain 9.99% (6) (5)GUE/NGL (1)Greens/EFA

Swedish Democrats Sweden 9.7% (2) EFDD

UK Independence Party (UKIP) United Kingdom 27.49% (24) EFDD

TOTAL SEATS 132

Source: http://www.results-elections2014.eu/en/country-results-hu-2014.html * Croatian Party of Rights dr. Ante Starèeviæ (Hrvatska stranka prava dr. Ante Starèeviæ or HSP AS), a eurosceptic party, participated in the EP2014 in a coalition with Croatian Democratic Party (HDZ), a conservative mainstream party and member of EPP. Its one MEP went in ECR.** Fiana Fail is traditionally not a eurosceptic party. However its veteran of 20 years and currently only MEP, Brian Crowley, surprisingly joined the eurosceptic group in the new EP, after which the party expelled him. ECR – European Conservatives and ReformistsEFD – Europe of Freedom and DemocracyALDE – Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe

Table 2—european parliamenTary elecTions 2009 and 2014: euroskepTic parTies

83Liubomir Topaloff

On the other level, Euroskeptic parties must also compete for the anti-EU vote with more extreme (and sometimes even outright Euro-phobic) parties, usually located on the ideological fringes. As a conse-quence, the new members admitted to the family of mainstream parties will have to play a delicate balancing game, with skillful strategic po-sitioning usually making the difference between success and failure at the national polls.

The Euroskeptics who are entering mainstream politics have a real chance to make an impact on both the national and European levels. They can polish their messages, gauge their positions on the ideological spectrum, and strive to reach another milestone in their quest for promi-nence. These newly “mainstream” Euroskeptics of the UKIP, the Five Stars Movement, the True Finns, the AfD, and Syriza—if we can con-ditionally call them that—are far less extreme than Golden Dawn, the KKE, Jobbik, the Swedish Democrats, the FN, the Flemish-nationalist Vlaams Belang in Belgium, the Party for Freedom (PVV) of the charis-matic Dutch extremist Geert Wilders, or the BNP (which failed to secure a seat in the new EP).

Despite some Euroskeptic parties’ declared desire to form an EU parliamentary group to be called the European Alliance for Freedom, common ground has proven hard to find and their efforts have fallen through. This is because little unites the Euroskeptic parties beyond their pronounced Euroskepticism. Indeed, they are a heterogeneous lot, often with incompatible views on major issues in both domestic and EU politics, from immigration to the economy to culture. Thus finding a single Euroskeptic voice becomes all that much more elusive a goal. The traditionalist and social-welfarist FN and the libertarian PVV, for example, share a disdain for the EU but not much else. While Wilders is among the most strongly pro-Israel politicians in Europe, the Le Pens are anti-Semitic. Although Marine Le Pen has sought to change her par-ty’s image by dispatching FN officials to Israel and winning the sympa-thy of Israel’s ambassador to Paris, France’s anti-Semitic vote is still too tempting for her to ignore.

Other Euroskeptic parties—Jobbik, Golden Dawn, the BNP, and Ger-many’s neo-Nazi National Democracy Party (NDP)—thrive on racism, making the task of coalition formation in the new EP more problem-atic. Jobbik, which finished second in Hungary’s EP elections, promotes notions such as “gypsy criminality” and “poverty as a crime.” Golden Dawn has been involved in several violent incidents. In 2013, Greek police arrested its leader and other members and charged them with be-longing to a criminal organization after the stabbing death of a promi-nent leftwing hip-hop performer in Piraeus. In 2014, the BNP’s eccen-tric president Nick Griffin claimed that the Ebola virus might provide a solution to the immigration problem. These extremist parties, recogniz-ing their own precarious positions around the edges of their respective

84 Journal of Democracy

national political systems, can be understood as bidding for full control over the outermost ideological fringes of the right-wing vote.

Meanwhile, Euroskeptic parties that are radical but not extreme strive to distinguish themselves from the extremists. Such parties use more nuance in the way they approach immigration, EU integration, and globalization. As a result, however, diversity among Euroskeptics is increasing, so that we find Euroskeptic parties scattered widely and thinly across the spectrum. Germany’s Euroskeptic AfD, for example, has strong views against immigration, but has also been careful to dis-tance itself from the NDP and its unsavory neo-Nazi reputation. In fact, the AfD chose not to mix with extremist parties at all and has joined the EP group led by the British Conservatives.

Farage categorically refused to join the European Alliance for Free-dom envisoned by Le Pen and Wilders. Later, he refused to let either the FN or the PVV join the Euroskeptic ten-party Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD) parliamentary group that he chairs, though he did accept an individual French MEP from the FN who broke with Le Pen and crossed the floor. Meanwhile, the would-be founders of the Freedom Alliance including Le Pen and Wilders have declared their firm intention not to ally with the BNP, Jobbik, Golden Dawn, and the like. This has meant that all these parties (the FN and the PVV included) have found themselves permanently relegated to the nonattached (NI) members’ group.

Although the FN, the PVV, Vlaams Belang, the FPÖ, and Italy’s Northern League can collectively muster more than the required twenty-five MEPs that are needed to establish the Freedom Alliance as a parlia-mentary group, they fell short of the requirement that every such group must include parties from no less than a quarter of all EU member states (or in other words, at least seven different countries). So these parties remain without a formal parliamentary group and the institutional bene-fits, guaranteed committee seats, and basis for common action that such a group would bring.

In short, despite the high-strung rhetoric and emotions set off by their recent strong showing at the polls, the Euroskeptics themselves will not speak with a unified voice. Yet their success has put Europe’s political elite on notice that it will need to change. That could actually be good for European integration, assuming that the elite can adapt.

The Disintegration of the EU Narrative

What explains Euroskepticism’s recent surge? In the first place, it has happened simply because Europe is democratic: In a democratic Europe, a project such as the EU—long an affair designed and run by elites—cannot forever be conducted behind closed doors, largely separate from the rough and tumble of freewheeling democratic debate. It has also

85Liubomir Topaloff

happened because there is a new strain of opinion in Europe on which political entrepreneurs (the people who found parties and build careers on them) can draw. For all its shiny technocratic institutions, the EU rests deep down on the basic human emotions of hope and fear. Specifi-cally, it grew out of the hopes and fears of a generation of Europeans who lived through the terrible traumas of the twentieth century—a time of genocide, global wars, and tyrannical threats to human freedom at whose bloody epicenter stood a battered and ravaged Europe.

In this sense, the rise of Euroskepticism is an expression of the pass-ing of the post–Second World War order, which institutionalized the fear of another war and coupled it with hope for a better future (at least in the material sense). Behind the rhetoric of “ever closer union” stood both a promise of economic prosperity and a worry that Europe without unifying institutions—the old l’Europe des patries—would fall again into the sanguinary mire of devastating fratricide. The EU’s legitimacy rested on the hegemonic narrative of “ever closer union” (the phrase itself comes from the 1957 Treaty of Rome), which for a few decades at least derived powerful support from economic facts on the ground: For the closer Europe’s union became, the better Europe’s economies performed.

In addition to a prosperity of “many winners but no losers,” the Union sought regional security. Through economic, social, and political coop-eration and integration, Germany with all its fearsome strength would be contained and made a force for good. The Soviet threat would be held at bay, and so would the harmful effects of globalization.

For young and even middle-aged Europeans today, however, the hor-rors and sufferings of World War I and even World War II are as far away as the Punic Wars—all are just words in history books. Germany, the great “problem country” of the first half of the twentieth century, is now indisputably the leading economy and most powerful political force in Europe. Angela Merkel, its chancellor, is the continent’s most influential politician.

In the EU’s first few decades, the “benefits for all” narrative greased the wheels of compromise that led to economic prosperity and greater security. The rudimentary and rough system of economic cooperation and political compromise established in Rome was highly redistributive, and until the mid-1970s the EU countries’ Gini index was relatively flat, indicating a fairly even income-distribution picture. But then, ow-ing to various global and regional dynamics, the European project began to slip. The need for reform culminated in the vision of a new type of integration, spelled out in the Single European Act, adopted in 1986 as a major revision of the Treaty of Rome. The bedrock of this new ver-sion of integration—a truly common market; freedom of movement for people, commodities, capital, and services; and the establishment of a monetary union—was laid down at that point.

86 Journal of Democracy

The catch was that the deepening of integration cut the heart out of the old “benefits for all” EU narrative. The new order of things created losers as well as winners. As people, commodities, capital, and services began to move about freely, the better educated, the better placed, and the more flexible did better. The redistributive policies on which the vision of an “ever closer union” rested became more tenuous. A huge group of losers slowly but steadily formed. The FN’s blue-collar in-dustrial workers and independent small-business owners may seem at first glance to be “strange bedfellows,” but taken together they embody the profile of European integration’s “losers.” The former must face competition that is heightened by European citizens’ right to live and work freely anywhere in the EU; the latter, meanwhile, suffer from the competitive advantages and consolidated bargaining power that large corporations, chain stores, and so on can bring to bear in a single market.

From this point of view, Euroskepticism appears as a symptom—the external manifestation of the EU’s disintegrating foundational narrative. What we call (for lack of a better term) “Euroskepticism” is a cry to halt and reverse the processes of European integration. At its core, Euroskepti-cism results from the crackup of both a political-economic system and the story that undergirds it. When Euroskeptic parties attack EU institutions and demand a rollback of European integration, they are debunking the European myth itself. Being pragmatic and strategic actors, Euroskeptic parties do this to improve their standing with voters. They point to the in-consistency between the myth’s promises and reality, and push the topic of Europe straight to the heart of domestic political discussion. Euroskeptics may selectively blame all evils on a nontransparent, overly bureaucratic, and corrupt EU while failing to acknowledge the benefits that it provides, but no one should forget that they are still giving voice to real discontents.

In the past, mainstream European elites dealt with the challenge posed by Euroskeptics by dismissing them as irrelevant, by seeking to marginalize them, and by shaming them. The recent European elections have shown that this strategy no longer works, and often is counterpro-ductive. There are a few steps that elites can take in order to counter the tidal rise of Euroskepticism. First, they must stop ignoring Euroskepti-cism’s existence, and address it directly. For the longest time, Europe-an-level topics have been technical and boring. Mainstream elites have conveniently relied on a “permissive consensus” to hide behind bureau-cratic utilitarianism and technocracy while sidestepping accountability for their actions. This is no longer possible, and that must be recognized.

Furthermore, mainstream European elites themselves have been ut-terly dull, indecisive, uninspiring, and incomprehensible in the way they communicate the virtues of the European-integration process. Hiding behind Brussels to make unpopular but necessary decisions, they have diminished the EU’s legitimacy, doing themselves a huge disfavor while inadvertently helping the Euroskeptic argument. Such behavior cannot

87Liubomir Topaloff

command enthusiasm, let alone loyalty. There is much to be learned from the abler Euroskeptic leaders, whose charm and ability to address issues are inspirational and action-stirring.

European elites must also acknowledge that the rise of Euroskepti-cism is a clear manifestation of the EU’s democratization—and a genuine response to the EU’s much-discussed “democratic deficit.” Neither the Euroskeptics nor the issues that they raise can be discounted any longer. Most of all, however, the EU needs to tell an updated story, one that cap-tures the fears and hopes of Europeans today, not seventy years ago. If those who favor the process of European integration cannot come up with such a narrative, they will all too soon find themselves facing not mere skepticism but full-blown disullusionment with the European project. Pro-Europeans have a choice: Either stick with the old and hollow myth of an “ever closer Europe,” or embrace a new vision for Europe that ad-dresses the challenges of globalization and offers a new version of a truly inspiring “dream” to the younger generations of tech-savvy and global-ized but disillusioned youths. The former course will lead them to battle Euroskeptics on losing ground, while the latter will deny Euroskepticism a battlefield. It is regrettable that the initial reactions to the results of the EP elections favor the former approach and ignore the latter.

NOTES

1. Adam Przeworski has made this point most succinctly: “Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections.” See his Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 10.

2. Anne Penketh, “Manuel Valls Vows No Change to Roadmap After Front National Elections Win,” Guardian, 26 May 2014.

3. “European Elections: ‘A Bad Day for the European Union’—Schulz,” available at www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27572456.

4. Andrew Higgins and James Kanter, “Fringe Groups in European Voting,” New York Times, 25 May 2014.

5. In 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen won 5,525,032 votes in his runoff against Chirac. In 2012, Marine Le Pen won 6,421,773 in the first round (she did not make it into the run-off). Turnout in these two rounds ten years apart was remarkably similar at just under 80 percent, making the results comparable.

6. Jean-Marie Le Pen responded to criticism by the French singer Patrick Bruel, who is Jewish, with a suggestion that he should be included in the “next batch,” using the French word “fournée,” usually used in the context of a “batch of baked bread.” See Dan Bilefsky, “A Remark in France Is Assailed as Racist: Jean-Marie Le Pen Draws Fire for Apparent Anti-Semitic Pun,” New York Times, 9 June 2014.

7. For more on how “coalitionability” competition among kin-parties shapes strategic positioning among Euroskeptic parties, see Liubomir K. Topaloff, Political Parties and Euroscepticism (London: Palgrave, 2012), ch. 5.