Europe loses competitiveness. It is far behind the United States and China in the technological revolution. Nobody takes the EU seriously as a foreign policy actor because the Twenty-Seven are incapable of reaching an agreement on Ukraine, on Gaza or on the role that Europe should play in the fierce fight for global hegemony waged by Washington and Beijing. These are the three great challenges we face in the near future, but they are not part of the conversation weeks before the European elections. There will hardly be anything else talked about in the campaign other than the height of the ultra-conservative wave, of populism, of the polarization that plagues all public opinions on the continent, of whether the European People’s Party is going to make an agreement with the most presentable far-right . Ultimately, the succession of crises of the last 15 years has left an unprecedented political disorder: all major economic crises sooner or later become major political crises. In the East, furthermore, we have been seeing for years an illiberalism with authoritarian overtones in many places at the same time, including hate speech: countries dominated by conspiracy regimes in which the opposition is demonized, the media is stripped of its ability to influence private media outlets, civil society and independent courts, and sovereignty is defined by the determination of leaders to resist any pressure to conform to Western ideals of political pluralism, government transparency and tolerance for strangers, with dissidents and with minorities, according to the definition of the intellectual Ivan Krastev. The Slovakia of national-populist Robert Fico, increasingly polarized, is a clear example of this dynamic.
But the problem goes far beyond Slovakia and Eastern Europe. The list of extraordinary events that have occurred in the last decade is astonishing: there are several far-right parties ruling the EU, the United Kingdom is out of the club, Hungary is leading an authoritarian reversal and in most countries a strong political polarization and high electoral volatility. That cocktail only needed a few drops of angostura: violence has burst into continental politics, and that makes it even more difficult to talk about the great challenges in the medium and long term. To the German Social Democrat MEP Matthias Ecke literally had his face smashed inwhen he posted election posters in his city, Dresden. It is not an isolated case, it was preceded by the attack on a German environmentalist deputy, Kai Gehring, by the attack suffered by the ultra-Spanish Alejo Vidal-Quadras, by endless worrying news here and there, from violent acts by the extreme right in Stockholm to the burning of election posters in the house of a Belgian socialist councillor. That crescendo remains unstoppable: the attack on the Slovak ultra Robert Fico – by a 71-year-old writer – raises the bar almost to the clouds. Fico is one of the prime ministers of the EU who has led more than six decades of peace and who now has a war in the neighborhood (Ukraine), another very close (Gaza) and the snake’s egg, of violence, incubating inside. The least important thing in this case is that Fico is, along with the Hungarian Viktor Orbán, one of the most uncomfortable leaders in Europe because he breaks the consensus of support for Ukraine. With Ukraine, he suddenly returned to war. Now, suddenly the violence returns.
This is the worst possible EU, except for all the other Europes that have been tried: all of them were very, very violent. In June, the EU is risking its competitiveness, its ability to compete with the United States and China, the possibility of once again being an actor in foreign policy at the height of its legend. And, from now on, the tranquility of the last 60 years. Stefan Zweig writes in his autobiography, The world of yesterday: “Europe was my homeland proper, the one that my heart had chosen,” just before getting into a world war. Zweig proposed a shocking subtitle for that monumental book: “The Unrecoverable Years.” And it was violence that made them irrecoverable. The historian Timothy Garton Ash often says that what this Europe in a state of permanent transition, wavering and weighed down by discontent, needs the least is “resignation.” zweigiana”. But what you certainly don’t need is the seed of violence; even less so in politics, which used to be the way a society dealt with uncertainty. An uncertainty that until now was peaceful: be careful with that, because the essence of unhappiness is wanting what we already have and have not yet lost.
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