Europeans Waking Up

As of Monday afternoon, the projected results differed, depending on which source you consulted, but according to the latest numbers at the Guardian, the Radical Left group, which includes Ireland's Sinn Fein and 19 other parties, many of them overtly Communist, is expected to lose one seat, dropping to 36.

Moving to the center, the Renew group, consisting of no fewer than 47 more or less centrist parties, fell from 102 seats to 79.

The center-right European People's Party, which is the largest of the seven parliamentary groups and which is dominated by Germany's Christian Democratic Union crept up from 176 seats to 186, an increase that von der Leyen pointed to by way of substantiating her claim of centrist victory: "We won the European elections, my friends," she told a gathering of EPP members.

Timmermans claimed victory, but Wilders convincingly announced that where the Dutch vote was concerned, there was "Only one big winner" in the EP elections - the PVV. In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy Party, which until recently was a tiny, marginal phenomenon, received 28% of the vote, taking it from 10 to 23 of Italy's 76 seats and giving it the country's largest EP delegation.

Thanks largely to strong support from voters in former East Germany, it will now hold more of Germany's 96 seats - 16, up from nine - than the ruling Social Democrats, making it Germany's second largest party in the EP. Meanwhile Germany's Greens tumbled from 20.5% of the German vote in 2019 to 12%. There were stunning results in Austria, too, where the populist Freedom Party came out on top, doubling its number of seats from three to six out of a total of 20, putting it one seat ahead of both the Social Democrats and the People's Party, a Christian Democratic body.

In France, which has 81 seats in the EP, President Emmanuel Macron's Renaissance Party performed so calamitously - receiving 15.2% of the vote as compared to eurosceptic Marine Le Pen's National Rally's 31.5% - that Macron made a shocking announcement: he quickly dissolved the French Parliament and called for new elections, to be held in two stages, on June 30 and July 7.

Belgium, with 22 seats, underwent an even more dramatic shake-up: in the wake of a terrible showing by his Liberal Party in the face of conservative opposition - it came in eleventh, with the long demonized Vlaams Belang, a fierce opponent of mass Islamic immigration, in first place - Prime Minister Alexander De Croo announced that he would resign on Monday. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/yes-more-europeans-are-waking-up/