The Centre Can Hold - just

but things are falling apart...

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

from the Second Coming by WB Yeats

The routing of Macron’s ‘centrist’ party in the EU Elections over the weekend was hardly a surprise, given the polling in recent months, but his decision to call a snap election, just like Rishi Sunak’s a few weeks earlier, has taken the Political establishment by surprise this morning.

Unlike Sunak, Macron is not risking his own prime seat at the Euros or the Olympics, but rather it looks like he is acting pro-actively to try and saddle his ‘right wing’ opposition with some of the blame for the inevitable bad economic outcomes over the next three years before the Presidential Elections, where he hopes his party can retain power (he himself can not stand a third time).

Democracy at work

But as we warned back in January (Farmers at the gates), the pressure building up on Globalists like Macron and Sunak is not coming from ‘the alt-right’, ‘the far right’, ‘the hard right’, or ‘the extreme right’ - or any other type of dog-whistle ‘right wing’ extremists, it is actually coming from normal people rejecting the top down WEF technocracy. Part of the new ‘New Normal’, is that along with normal levels of interest rates and normal economic behaviour in terms of return on capital versus cost of capital, we get a normal relationship between households and governments. Over the last decade the west has drifted into Crony Capitalism and the household has been dis-enfranchised. They are pushing back and while their champions are labelled ‘right wing’ or populist, this is simply democracy at work.

Positioning your opposition as somehow extreme in order to position yourself as ‘the centre’ is a rhetorical device that is fast running out of power. The centre as thus defined cannot hold and things are indeed falling apart. But that is because the real centre is the one fighting back.

Some aspects of the Elections that got less coverage were that the Belgian Prime Minister, where they had national as well as EU elections, also lost heavily and is stepping down, while Georgia Meloni - also apparently ‘hard right’ - saw the Brothers of Italy party increase its share of the vote compared with its breakthrough in 2022. Finding out the actual policy proposals of all these so called extremists is surprisingly difficult as almost all the Political commentary is from the self defined centre. One prime example is this, from today’s online Politico magazine :

“Von der Leyen’s center-right is quick to reject the xenophobia and euroskepticism of the far right, but it knows its voters share the same concerns on the cost of living, migration and a sense that Europe’s traditional core businesses — manufacturing and farming — are being strangled by green regulation.”

Politico magazine

The ‘Far right’ parties are campaigning against the two key policies of the self defined centrists - Open Borders and Net Zero - and yet here Politico magazine is acknowledging that the voters for the so-called centre are also concerned about the cost of living, green regulation and migration. And yet instead of addressing those issues they are simply painting the populists as extremist, offering no solution to the problems they themselves have effectively created. As with Hilary Clinton and the basket of deplorables, this bubble think is coming unstuck. Fast.

The campaign was really about Open Borders and Net Zero

The bottom line as we see it, is that these elections mark the beginning of the end for the self-defined centrists, who are in fact WEF Globalist technocrats, and that the key battle grounds are Immigration and Net Zero. Moreover, in order to survive, the EU institutions will push the globalists aside and allow greater autonomy at the national level and competition will start to do the rest. Watering down or even abandoning the economically suicidal green policies in one country will give it a meaningful economic advantage such that others will start to follow suit. Similarly self preservation, or even threats from the likes of Marine Le Pen to leave the EU or the Euro, will force the EU to allow for some pragmatic actions on border control.

Most interesting perhaps will be how a new collection of national leaders in Europe deal with a (likely) Donald Trump Presidency, especially with regard to green issues and the current sacred cow that is support for Ukraine (and associated self harming sanctions on Russia).

It is to be hoped, in the words of Yeats, that the best do regain some conviction and retake the centre ground and that the passionate intensity of the worst is consigned to the fringes. That would indeed be a good Second Coming.