The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Major European Powers Lean Right in Recent Elections || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: June 13, 2024

The recent European elections yielded some significant gains for hard-right parties in a number of countries. Today, we'll be focusing on Germany, Italy, and France, and whether these shifts are game-changers or more political minutia. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/major-european-powers-lean-right-in-recent-elections

Hey everybody, Peter Zine here coming to you from Florida. Sorry, no beach scene today. I'm kind of in a bit of a hurry, but a lot of people have written in expressing an interest in what's going on in European elections. And since that happens so rare, I figure I would cover a little bit of that today. The short version is that we've got this thing called the European Parliament, which technically is the legislative arm of the European Union. And they have elections every few years. They just completed them. Italy, Germany, and France, the hard right racked up significant gains significantly higher in France and Germany than the ruling party did. And so the question of course is this a game changer.

Let's start with the Germans. The German government under Schultz has a three-party coalition that is very weak because the three parties agree on very little. So whenever something happens in Europe, the three parties have to get together and have coalition meeting, the kind of a common position before they start bringing in discussions with other countries. So it's a long and laborious process. It's really tedious and because the coalition is so weak and because the chancellor of Germany, Olau Ksholtz, is a weak leader. Germany is basically vanished from being a significant

player in most European affairs, or at least not very much of a leader like it used to be. In the case of Italy, you've got a government led by Maloney, who actually is of the hard right, if you want to use a term that some people find is a little bit weird. And so when her party did well, everyone's like, oh, she's the up-and-coming leader, and there might be something to that. And then third, you've got France, which, as always, is a special case. In France, again, the leading party under President Macron, excuse me, did very poorly. And it was the National Front, which is kind of a traditional rightist party, that did very, very much. well. McCrone took this as kind of a personal insult to his view of everything and called

snap elections in France. So France will now have full parliamentary elections in order to figure out who's going to run the country. Now there's a lot of if-ends and buts that go with this, but basically France is going to have elections less than two weeks after the European parliamentary election results which is not a lot of time getting we shaved up the criticism that a lot of folks have is that Macron is a little arrogant like he's a French president of course he's a little arrogant that's not a reasonable criticism certainly nothing new and so what is in play here well we've got kind of two things you need to keep in mind first of all the European Parliament is not all

that. It basically is only responsible for one thing. And that is saying whether or not the European commission, which is the kind of the executive arm of the EU, is allowed to stand. They can vote it down. If a new one is formed like we will be seen here in a few months, they can say, no, we reject the slate of commissioners. And that's really all the power they've got. So don't read this for more than it is. Because it's not a huge. deal in that respect. The European Parliament is not what makes the decisions in Europe. That is the Council of Ministers, which is the group of Prime Ministers and Presidents, the ruled countries directly. Basically, they work by either unanimity or something called

qualified majority voting from time to time in order to decide what happens at the European level. So what normally happens is you have a European Union election, the EP, European Parliament, that goes one way and then everyone takes a breather. And then we get back to politics as normal, where the far right doesn't do nearly as well. Now, what Macron is doing is betting that that is still the case, and he can take the political wind out of the sales of what was basically a protest vote in a very short period of time. I know I'm going to leave like nine things behind. Anyway, so he's betting that history is on his side on this one,

and, you know, we're going to find out real soon in just a few days. Okay. Second, Macron's personal leadership is not on the docket here. It's not on the chopping block. It's not at risk in any way because the political system of France is significantly different from the one in Germany or in the United States. So here, you vote for a president. In Germany, you vote for a party. Here, the president controls foreign economic policy. In Germany, you vote for the party. You get coalitions. within their parliament, the Bundestag, and that coalition decides who the prime minister is. So you have a singular leader in both places who makes most of the decisions. Now it works in France. In France, it's split. So the parliament selects the prime minister, and they are responsible for domestic affairs. But there's a separate set of elections for the presidency, and that's what Macron has been elected independently. So let's assume for the moment, the Macron was right. Well, then the far-or-right will be shown to be a flash in the pan, and they go back to old politics.

Let's assume for the moment that Macron is wrong, and these snap elections that he's called go the other way. Well, then the government falls. We get a new prime minister, but Macron is still president. And in that scenario, we got something called cohabitation, which basically means that not everybody agrees. In France, you know, whoopty. So I don't. I don't. want to make this out for more than it is. And even in the worst case scenario for the Macron government, you basically would have a split prerogative. The real issue, where this may matter, is going to be a national election, most notably in Germany, later. But that's going to be three years away, unless, of course, the government falls. And then we have a different

problem.