"It wasn't as bad as it could have been" is not the same as "We held it together"

I mentioned the wonder and miracle of the Indian subcontinent and its 39-days of voting by some 600 million people last week. This week it is the turn of Europe - continental elections for the European Parliament and some national and local elections thrown in as well. Highest turnout in decades. Whatever one's ideological or partisan affiliations, these are wonderful, near miraculous, exercises in democratic sovereignty on a scale and frequency inconceivable a century ago. Indeed, virtually inconceivable before the 1990s. We shouldn't lose sight of just what an accomplishment this is.

Even if it feels like a tragedy to many of the participants in the process. This is one more Dick Tuck moment where "The people have spoken, the bastards."

My thesis has been that establishment parties are being turfed out of power by the voters everywhere, not because of some left or right political issue but because the establishment parties have been grossly ineffective at dealing with existential issues for their electorates.

The establishment parties (and their mainstream media dependents) see this as a left-right issue when in fact it is a democracy deficit issue and a competence issue. They believe themselves, as the Mandarin Class of the best and the brightest technocrats to have been doing a magnificent job despite all the objective performance measures and they are completely flummoxed at the behavior of the electorate who carry the burden of the Mandarin Class failures.

Because most establishment parties, while nominally left or right, are all essentially big government parties, almost totalitarian government parties, they cast any opposition as extreme, bigoted, hateful, violent, etc. I don't think voters are necessarily opposing leftist positions, but they sure are rejecting the current leftist positions. The big government positions. The mainstream media, willing hostage as they are to the mainstream parties, therefore cast this as an issue of a rising radical right or rising nationalism. Their own biases are blinding them to the reality.

I see much in the EU election results to support that thesis and little to contradict it.

The mainstream media continues to struggle with their own Mandarin Class blinkers.

The New York Times reports the initial results this morning.

Click to enlarge.

Not as bad as it could have been? That kind of misses the mark doesn't it? And the problem is, as you get into the details, it is not even true. Establishment parties almost everywhere suffered increasing, and sometimes dramatic reverses. In the European Parliament, both the center left and center right mainstream parties are down significantly. They both lost 37 seats each for a combined loss of mainstream parties of 74 seats in a 751 seat chamber.

What happened with the Founding Six of the EU, those six nations who launched this experiment in continental government; France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. I'll concentrate on the first consequential four.

France - Macron's positions resoundingly rejected and the Le Pen's nationalist party seems to have taken the biggest plurality. Macron, like some other recent Mandarin Class candidates, campaigned on the ignorance, perfidy, and general deplorableness of the electorate, and the electorate said enough. A rise of the right and decline of the left story.

Germany - Not a left right but much more clearly a mainstream versus margins story. The Social Democrats approach irrelevance and the center right saw some decline. The nationalists, Greens, and other minor parties saw increases.

Italy - The upstart conservative party, The League, has taken the largest share of the vote, 34%.

Netherlands - Combined European Parliament and national elections at the same time. There were big national elections in March of this year which shifted everything markedly to the right. With these EU results, it looks like things might have shifted somewhat back towards the center but are still to the right of where they were. The Social Democrats took 6 of the 26 seats, up from 3. Otherwise, it was largely puts and takes.

What about the other big economies?

UK - Both Labour and Conservatives have done very poorly, losing to a new Brexit Party only formed a couple of months ago. The Brexit Party seems to have taken about 35% of the vote and are 40% larger than the next largest party. Very much a rejection by the electorate of the establishment parties.

Spain - Spain seems to be the only country which does not support my thesis. The Socialist Party won a distinct victory.

Lifting up out of the weeds I see a virtually uniform (Spain excepted) rejection of the establishment parties for fringe parties or newly formed parties. Overall, the center has continued to move to the right.

France is suffering an existential rejection of its traditional parties. Britain is suffering an existential rejection of its traditional parties. Germany is suffering an existential rejection of its traditional parties. Italy is suffering an existential rejection of its traditional parties. Greece is suffering an existential rejection of its traditional parties (though to be fair, that has been going for a decade.)

Establishment parties lose substantially.

New parties and fringe parties do very well.

National politics are in turmoil in nearly all the core countries or largest economies in Europe.

Conservative parties, nationalist parties and new center right parties seem to have done well.

Most the initial mainstream media headlines seem to be pushing the line that because the Euro-skeptic parties failed to win a majority in the EU parliament, that that constituted a win.

I think that is bad framing. They are suffering an overcommitment to the left-right lens of seeing things and are over-committed to the left part of that left-right lens. They should be focusing not on who wins and loses but what are the changes in party power. If you do that, the picture is quite a bit different from "We didn't lose as badly as we thought we were going to lose."

If the mainstream media were to let go of their Mandarin Class privilege, and let go of their commitment to left wing establishment parties, there is some really interesting news out there. Interesting and consequential. And well worth investigating and reporting.

Why is this rejection of the mainstream parties happening now?

Why is it happening across the globe?

Why are voters disemboweling the parties for whom they have voted for so long?

Why does the rejection of the establishment parties seem to be favoring the right more than the left?

Why are ever more parties popping up in Europe, not only removing power from the mainstream parties but also making coalitions harder to form because there are so many small parties?

Why do the establishment politicians not have a greater sense of electoral self-preservation?

Why do political parties no longer seem able to address widely perceived pressing social issues?

Why do establishment parties persevere with policy positions which are demonstrably unpopular?

Is there really a democracy deficit?

What happens when citizens do not trust their own form of government?

Can we have governance without government? (See Belgium and Netherlands where administration continues for months and even years between coalition governments)

Does rejection of establishment parties serve as a prelude to electoral subsidiarity?

I could go on. Instead of analysis of real trends and real issues, we get years of opinions about fictional issues such as collusion and no reporting of facts.