The recent victory of Poland’s anti-Europe, right-wing Law and Justice Party is another nail in the coffin of the European Union, primarily because of its failure to halt a migrant crisis threatening to swamp the continent.
This latest win for an anti-Brussels party has come on the heels of Slovenia’s Prime Minister Miro Cerar declaring that the migrant crisis may be “the end of the EU as such”.
Migration is now officially out of control. More than 250,000 migrants have crossed the Balkans since September and still they come. Greece is taking 9,000 a day, while hundreds of thousands are making their way from Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
This week’s Polish landslide is only the latest example of Europe’s voters turning against the Union.
Across the continent, anti-EU parties are sprouting like mushrooms after a flood: Denmark, Germany and Holland are seeing anti-migration parties zoom up the polls. France’s National Front is up 13 per cent since the summer and, last year, Britain’s anti-EU UKIP beat both mainstream parties in the European elections, with polls there showing a majority will vote to leave the Union in next year’s referendum.
And anger at Brussels is not confined to the right. Spain’s Eurosceptic leftists are making gains also, in a country where 72 per cent say they no longer trust the EU. And Greece’s Syriza hard-left party has won two elections in a row.
The message from the voters could hardly be clearer: they don’t want mass migration and will dump leaders incapable of stopping it.
But, in Brussels, bureaucrats paid by our taxes to govern us sit paralysed in the headlights of the migrant crisis. European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker is still arguing over quotas to share out the 120,000 who arrived in July, refusing even to acknowledge that expected numbers have since tripled.
The majority of those arriving on Europe’s shores are economic migrants. Even those from Syria are fleeing not war itself but refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. Nor are they the poorest of the poor, because it costs upwards of $5,000 a person for the migrant gangs to get them to Europe.
Voters in the EU don’t want mass migration and will dump leaders incapable of stopping it
What ordinary voters know, and Juncker and his gang do not, is that Europe is already full. Unemployment is rampant, with one in four out of work in Spain.
The time to crack down on migration was when the problem was small, before the smuggling business became boom time for every gang and mafia enterprise.
And the failure to do so is symptomatic of everything that is wrong with the EU. Since the end of the Cold War, the EU bureaucracy has multiplied, a generation of leaders coming of age in the belief they can draw fat salaries from the taxpayer without having to make hard decisions. The EU ‘project’ was to become a superstate, where nobody need work and everyone would get benefits.
Its zenith arrived in 2009: the EU appointed the grandly titled High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. And what grand figures have entered this elevated office? First it was Britain’s Baroness Catherine Ashton, followed this year by Italy’s former foreign minister Federica Mogherini two political non-entities.
Both women are pleasant individuals and have much in common, each coming from an idealistic background. In her younger years Ashton was treasurer of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and Mogherini was a rising star in the Italian communist youth. But neither has held down a private sector job or boasts management experience, and Ashton was appointed having no foreign policy experience at all.
Little wonder that with such people at the helm the dream of a common European foreign policy is just that – a dream. And the dream is imploding fast.
Because the most revealing thing about the victories in Poland and across Europe is that these essentially Christian voters are not against their European neighbours, rather they fear the results of populations from very different cultures and religions arriving in such numbers.
They are demanding it be stopped and the failure to stop it will, as Cerar acknowledged this week, doom the EU to collapse.
Richard Galustian is a security analyst.