Tocqueville, the Revolution and the European Parliament election

In the French city of Tours, in the heart of the Loire Valley, we can find an explanation for Europe’s turbulent politics. Geert Wilders has recently won the Dutch election. Putin ally Robert Fico is back as the Prime Minister of Slovakia. Giorgia Meloni, with her political roots in Italy’s post-fascist movement, remains securely in power. Viktor Orban shows no signs of planning his departure.

The European Parliament elections are expected to lead to further successes for nationalists and populists. According to opinion polls, Alternative for Germany is the country’s second-largest party, attracting more German voters than the Social Democrats and the Liberals combined. In Austria, which also has a national election this year, the Kremlin-friendly Freedom Party has now become the largest party. And in Belgium, which will also elect a new government in June, Vlaams Belang – a Flemish separatist party whose predecessor (Vlaams Blok) was banned by a Belgian court 20 years ago due to its racism – is leading.

What is going on? The support for these political rebels is the world turned upside-down for anyone with political education in post-war Europe. But Charles Grandmaison, a young official in Tours’ city administration, points us to the right sources to understand the development. These sources tell us that the origins of Europe’s political turbulence lie in political centralization. Brussels’ political power has grown remarkably over several decades, creating an “administrative tutelage.” New regulations, writes an astute observer, “succeeded one another with such an unusual speed that government agents under orders often found it difficult to sort out how to comply.” New taxes and levies are introduced, but they are not enough to cover rapidly growing expenses. More debt is built up. The underlying economic philosophy, to the extent that there is still a coherent idea, is about preserving power – to the point that political leaders now “prefer stagnation over competition.”

Political accountability is lacking. It is said that we live in an era of polarization, but the elites actually become more alike each other: they dress the same and behave the same way. They are all educated at universities and have almost the same views. The political colour of commissioners may vary over time, but the direction has been the same – “the omnipotence of central power.” There is no third estate of citizens to hold leaders accountable. Journalists and the hommes de lettres of the time enchant rather than scrutinize power. Economists want even more governance and control and are dazzled by the efficiency of China. And individual freedom? May it rest in peace.

This criticism from the sources in Tours is perhaps a bit unfair and does not explain everything. But then again, they are not really about the EU or what is happening in Europe – at least not today. Grandmaison was an ambitious city archivist in Tours in the 19th century. If his name is known today, it is because he assisted with documents and sources in Alexis de Tocqueville’s magnificent work on the ancien régime and the French Revolution and the subsequent era of the barricades.

But Tocqueville, a liberal aristocrat better known for his study of American democracy, is also a thinker for our time. For politics is, figuratively speaking, once again on the barricades. Populists and nationalists are there, as are anti-racists, XR, and others on the illiberal left. The streets are also the place for yellow vests and vaccine conspiracy theories, Catalan separatists, and Spanish defenders of the constitution. Farmers block squares in Amsterdam and Berlin. Continental unions march again. Events far from Europe lead to passionate demonstrations even here. George Floyd’s death brought tens of thousands of demonstrators to the streets. Falun Gong meets many weekend strollers in city centers. The war in Gaza is also splitting Europe.

And then we have Greta. Her school-striking movement, Fridays for Future, is one of many confirmations that we live in a time that – like Tocqueville’s era of the barricades – is romantic. Along with nationalism, the worship of nature and its mystery was one of the leitmotifs of Romanticism. Universal nature was an organism with a world soul. Education and enlightenment, on the other hand, put human nature in chains. Large factories were “the dark Satanic mills” and, then as now, industrial and technological development was met with apocalyptic phrases. It was, like today, welcome to have a lot of opinions about things, even if you didn’t knowledge of them. Children and fools were considered to have the most free and noble insights. Folk culture was pure, high culture corrupt. Absolute inwardness, as Hegel termed Romanticism, was both principle and practice: introspection was the code for being invited to the true—for nations as well as for people.

Tocqueville observed that technocratic centralism flourished in parallel with the politics of self-identity and the passions. Now, the EU is obviously not on the same political latitude as the old regime or Robespierre’s reign of terror, but Brussels’ power has grown rapidly over the past quarter century. Just like then, the EU has developed an appetite for all kinds of regulations – even regulations that nobody understands how to follow. More political issues are being decided in Brussels, including ones that many thought the EU had nothing to do with. The total expenses have grown tremendously if you include the “Corona Fund” and the support mechanisms during the euro crisis. There is a constant search for new charges – for example the plastic bag fee and new climate duties, which have been proposed as “taxes” to be taken straight into the EU’s coffers. The appetite is even greater.

Critics of and sympathizers with this development have one thing in common: their opinion and that of others do not really matter. The centralization of power has changed the shape of the EU and should place greater demands on constitutional and democratic control. The EU has become a state and, like other states, its power needs to be limited and the EU’s leaders need to face the verdict of the electorate in order for freedom to be preserved. But the EU has no constitution that marks the limits of the EU’s influence. Of course, the treaties have legal weight, but can often be rounded by politicians – especially if new policies lead to “an ever closer Union”. To the extent that there is a constitutional check on EU expansion, it is exercised by German courts.

The executive arm now combines political and administrative power. Twenty years ago, the Commission was still a collection of fonctionnaires with mainly limited tasks. Today, it has considerable political power and mixes it with the exercise of authority in a way that blurs the lines between politics and rule compliance. The Commission was previously honest and made an effort to carefully investigate its proposals. Now it is often sloppy and masks inferior quality with inflated rhetoric – just like in Berlin, Paris or Stockholm. Already Jean-Claude Juncker described his commission as a “political commission”. Ursula von der Leyen has made that role even bigger.

But the commission faces no real accountability. The elections to the European Parliament have little impact on leaders and the policies pursued. The Parliament has been professionalized and is a better democratic institution than before. European parties are also keener to mark differences between themselves and give voters different options: divisions between parties are now greater than within them. But the European Parliament is too preoccupied with symbolic ornamentation. It also applies to how the parliamentary parties view the election and the now established practice of putting forward a Spitzenkandidat. As before, most European parties have nominated a leader to be their candidate for the position of Commission President. However, that is an assignment that the Parliament certainly needs to approve, but it does not decide who is nominated. Those who become the parties’ top candidates are also usually people that the lion’s share of that party’s voters have never heard of – let alone know.

If we follow Tocqueville’s observation, the absence of a constitution, meaningful elections and a common civic ideal is the EU’s great challenge – not the rise of illiberal parties. When such bourgeois liberalism is absent, power and politics gradually become monolithic. All parts of a state are usurped for an all-encompassing. Such political environments also gradually lead to impotence and inefficiency. The focus is on activity and maintaining position – not on achieving defined results. Leaders, as the French liberal aristocrat noted, become so intimate with the position of power that they prefer stagnation to competition.

These observations may be correct, say some, but still want to turn elections and the European debate into a conflict between order and rebellion, patricians and plebeians. Europe’s political climate is feverish and rebellious, and the election is expected to give even greater power to parties and movements believed to want to change the political regime and overthrow the European project. Even more moderate rebels are feared. Because Europe has serious challenges – war and the climate crisis – and they require political stability and total attention. And aren’t all rebels, regardless of nationality, unreliable in such politically existential matters?

The fear is exaggerated. Christian democrats, liberals and social democrats will in the first place be able to scrape together a majority in the European Parliament after the election. But we can also identify differences – sometimes large – between the rebels that calm the nerves. There is no unified nationalist, populist or radical conservative movement. Some of the rebels are reliable forces to face Putin’s offensive, others are closer to being fifth columnists. If you think that the EU should do more to defend Taiwan against the threat from China, you will find more friends among rebel groups in the parliament than in the traditional parties. Some of the populists propose sensible correctives to a derailed energy policy, others claim that climate change is just a hoax. Just like in the US, some rebels want to ban abortion: others, on the other hand, want to unleash the trade in human organs. On many economic issues, Orban has more in common with Macron than with Wilders.

The example of Giorgia Meloni also confirms the central insight from the sources in Tours: old regimes and rebels are united in support of political centralism. When Meloni won the Italian elections in autumn 2022, many expected a revolt against Brussels – especially in migration policy. With Putin’s friend, Matteo Salvini, as deputy prime minister, Italy was supposed to change its line on Russia. But Meloni’s government quickly bought into the idea of “more Europe” in migration policy and has pushed for new EU policies. Under Meloni, Italy has continued to support Ukraine, voted for new Russian sanctions packages and recognized Ukraine as a candidate to join the EU.

The change is not really surprising. After all, nationalists are friends of unitary states and tend to like power – especially political arrangements that do not limit political power. When they come to power or are close to it, it is rather expected that they leave behind decades of populist criticism of elites to instead support centralization that strengthens their position – also in European politics. The Sweden Democrats and the True Finns, for example, have now left their opposition to the EU. Yes, illiberal leaders like Orban and Fico protest EU sanctions against Russia and the occasions when the EU uses the treaties to limit their power. But they also want a bigger budget and more money from Brussels. Spain’s Vox and Rassemblement National, the party of the Le Pen family, rattle loudly on EU issues but give support to Brussels’ economic interventionism.

It is not the EU and its existential threat that is on the ballot in the elections to the European Parliament. The old regime and the rebels have more in common than they show. The light that is going out – it is the liberal idea that all political power needs a mandate. Centralized power may be necessary, sometimes even desirable. But it needs clear limitations.

(This essay has previously been published by Axess Magazine).