Thursday, May 23, 2019

The Slow Motion end of the EU has begun

Election results are notoriously ignored in the EU, but geez louise:
  • LONDON (Reuters) - Investors are on edge on the eve of elections to the European Parliament as they weigh the chances of eurosceptic groups grabbing a third of seats, a level at which analysts say they could stir more trouble for governments and the economy.
    The rise of populist, eurosceptic parties has thrust the European elections, normally a dull affair mostly ignored by global markets, to the forefront of portfolio managers' list of concerns.
    ...
    "It's clear that eurosceptics are going to get more votes than they have before," said John Taylor, co-head of European fixed income at investment firm AllianceBernstein.
    "[If they can get a third of votes] they might become a very disruptive influence when you need Europe to come together to fight things like a trade war."
Anti-EU and anti-establishment parties are on a roll in Europe, following similar results in Australia.  The EU Parliament is admittedly an empty suit, but it has to be a major embarrassment to have 30% of the MEPs from parties that despise the EU.

The globalist Left finds itself astride the march of Progress, futilely shouting "stop".

6 comments:

  1. juvatMay 23, 2019 at 11:48 AM

    "it has to be a major embarrassment to have 30% of the MEPs from parties that despise the EU. "


    Got to be greater than 50% in Congress and close in the Senate that despise America.

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  2. Old NFOMay 23, 2019 at 4:20 PM

    Yep, and the peons have stood up and said enough... :-)

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  3. libertymanMay 23, 2019 at 6:05 PM

    It looks like next week will be the end of May...

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  4. KinnisonMay 23, 2019 at 6:14 PM

    It is said that the people are revolting.

    You said it! They stink on ice!

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  5. Douglas2May 23, 2019 at 9:15 PM

    Let me be the contrary voice here -

    Voting ends on May 26, and we should remember that at a similar distance in time before the Australian election votes were tallied we all thought that the Liberal/National coalition would loose badly to Labor. Yet in that election the underdogs won the election outright. We're believing the polls, and yet (for many reasons) the polls have become less and less reliable, and not always in the same direction.

    And the election is only for seats in the EU parliament, which is a Potemkin parliament -- members cannot introduce legislation, they can only vote on proposals put forward by the permanent unelected bureaucracy of the European Commission. Nearly any proposal that gets voted down gets altered and reintroduced -- multiple times if necessary -- so unlike the US or commonwealth countries' senates or the UK House of lords, the administrations' bad ideas can only be delayed, rather than stopped. Things will be voted on again and again until the vote comes out right, even if it takes intervening elections to do so.

    The voters know that this is the case, so in many EU countries the elections for MEPs are used by voters very much as a "protest vote" when they are unhappy with their own country's leadership. In the countries (other than BE, BG, LU, CY and EL that have compulsory voting) participation rate is far behind that for national elections, and there is no inhibition against electing wacky representatives, because the members seated in the European parliament have no power to change anything anyway.

    Press may report breathlessly about a surging political right across the UK and many EU countries, but the results of this election have no predictive power for what will follow in important national elections or in how EU law and policy will change in the future.

    It's been ~12 years since I left Europe, and I've only lived full-time in 2 EU countries (although I worked in many more), so maybe I'm not reading things correctly. But I don't think that this election has any great significance, other than being an embarrassment to the UK Conservative and Labour political parties which convince them to make some personnel changes.

    Douglas2/unknown

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  6. KenMay 24, 2019 at 8:19 AM

    AP News this morning was swearsies that climate change is what matters most in the run-up to the election of deck-chair arrangers.

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