The EU is becoming the nightmare of the anti-Brexit movement

The EU is turning into a continuous nightmare. In a cruel twist of fate, Brussels has shed its progressive skin and become what its supporters warned against.

With the EU elections less than a month away, one can only imagine the cognitive dissonance that the pro-EU, anti-Brexit crowd must be experiencing. In a strange twist of fate, the EU becomes everything Remainers feared Brexit would bring to Britain.

(Remainers was what you called those who wanted Great Britain to remain a member of the EU, etc.)

For years, they have portrayed Brussels as a beacon of progressivity, peace and democracy, in contrast to the far-right, racist and economically suicidal Brexit project. Yet, ironically, it is the European Parliament, not the UK, which is about to swing sharply to the right, as several European governments have already done. Meanwhile, in just over six months, Britain will almost certainly vote Labor back into power – making it one of the few countries in Europe to have a centre-left government.

Across the Irish Sea, however, an anti-immigration backlash has escalated into nationwide unrest, while several EU governments – including Ursula von der Leyen’s European People’s Party – are considering Rwanda-style asylum deportation deals. In the meantime, the EU is aggressively cracking down on freedom of expression, both online and offline. In the past few weeks alone, police have intervened to break up peaceful assemblies on at least two occasions – a pro-Palestine conference in Berlin and the NatCon conference in Brussels.

On the economic front, Germany, the most important economy in the EU, is locked in stagnation and faces direct deindustrialisation, along with several other EU countries – all while the EU is warning that the harsh austerity measures will return. Angry farmers have besieged union capitals for months. As for the EU’s “peace project”, all European governments are now on war footing, with Macron leading the way with his threat to send Nato troops into Ukraine, drawing Europe closer to all-out war with Russia.

All this collides with Remainers‘ rainbow-coloured views of the EU. But their vision was always based on a fantasy: everything that happens across the Channel is not a betrayal of “EU values”, as they probably tell themselves – it is an inevitable consequence of the very architecture of the EU.

Although Remainers have always tended to see the EU as a bastion of social and labor rights, the reality is that the right-wing movement in the EU has its roots in the Brussels-driven attack on the European social and economic model after the financial crisis of 2008. High unemployment rates, stagnant wages and austerity measures implemented in response to the crash exacerbated existing inequalities and fueled rage against the political establishment.

To make matters worse, the EU sought to prevent any democratic backlash to these policies by limiting the scope of democratic decision-making by democratically elected governments, focusing instead on quasi-automatic technocratic rules imposed by undemocratic bodies. The European Union effectively became a sovereign power with the authority to impose budgetary rules and structural reforms on member states – not exactly what you’d expect from the “bastion of democracy” that the EU was often portrayed as by Remainers.

However, this only exacerbated the disillusionment of many Europeans with both mainstream political parties and the EU institutions themselves, which were perceived as dependent on global economic interests and disconnected from the needs of ordinary citizens. Meanwhile, the EU’s handling of the refugee crisis, which peaked in 2015, further fueled anti-immigration sentiment and fueled the rise of right-wing populist parties across the continent. The influx of migrants, primarily from war-torn regions of the Middle East and North Africa, and strained resources led to social tensions and demonstrated once again the failure of the EU’s top-down approach to policy-making – exemplified in this case by the idea of ​​redistributive quotas , which several countries refused to comply with.

Today, immigration has again moved to the center of the political debate. The EU’s border agency, Frontex, detected over 350,000 irregular border crossings into the EU last year – the highest number recorded since 2016. EU countries registered more than 1 million new asylum applications, an increase of 20% compared to 2022 – on top of the nearly six million refugees which have been taken in from Ukraine since the war started. It should therefore come as no surprise to learn that seven out of 10 Europeans believe their country is taking in too many immigrants – and that governments, faced with the prospect of serious social unrest, are running for cover.

On Monday, representatives of several European governments met in Denmark to discuss different types of “durable solutions” to immigration, including plans to move asylum seekers to third countries, reminiscent of the British government’s Rwanda scheme. Even more astonishingly, von der Leyen herself admitted in a recent presidential debate to being in favor of third-country migration deals with countries such as Tunisia and Egypt, even though this would not be possible under the EU’s recently approved migration pact. Ironic, considering that just a year ago, several EU governments and senior EU officials condemned the UK government for proposing exactly the same policy.

But then, consistency has never been a viable currency in Brussels. On Sunday, it was revealed that von der Leyen is also remaking her image as a grandmother with “traditional, conservative family values”, hoping to whitewash her reputation as a champion of the EU’s green rainbow agenda. Proudgrandma our https://twitter.com/27Tawnyowl/status/1787098277185249390 hers – although this is probably little more than PR. After all, even as the EU establishment pays lip service to the concerns of ordinary Europeans, to try to limit the popular backlash against its various policy mistakes, it is also doing what it does best: trying to undermine democracy.

Today, this does not primarily come in the form of financial management tools, which are already in place, but rather in the form of narrative control. Over the past few months, EU authorities have been running their own “Russiagate” hoax, claiming that Russia bribed European politicians to spread disinformation and interfere in the upcoming elections. Russia “uses shady channels that pretend to be media [og] uses money to buy hidden influence,” said European Commission Vice-President Věra Jourová.

“We uncovered a pro-Russian network that developed an operation to spread Russian influence and undermine security across Europe,” claimed Petr Fiala, the Czech prime minister. However, after an investigation, the head of the Czech intelligence agency admitted that his agency had no information about any bribery scheme.

Even von der Leyen admitted that there is no evidence of a Russian bribery network. But don’t expect this to deter the EU from doing exactly what it accuses Russia of doing: meddling in the upcoming election. On Monday, the EU Parliament met https://twitter.com/MCC_Brussels/status/1787855970002960843 50 pan-European NGOs to thank them for pushing to promote “EU values” ahead of the elections. This followed an announcement that the EU has signed partnership agreements with more than 500 NGOs – many at national level – all of which are tasked with promoting EU values ​​ahead of the upcoming elections. In other words, it is an explicit attempt to control the official narrative, by designating all communication that does not match the official narrative as “disinformation”.

All of which means that, as challenging as Britain’s economic and political challenges may be, the EU’s dysfunctional and increasingly authoritarian nature is testament to the fact that Britain made the right choice in decoupling from a failing union. As much as the British political class failed to address many of the concerns embodied in the Brexit vote, that vote nevertheless provided a democratic outlet for many of the tensions now building across the EU – and potentially opened the country to the possibility of democratic national renewal. And if that is not reason enough, we need only look to the EU to witness the grim alternative.

This article was published by Unhardened:

The EU is turning into a Remainer nightmare