Europe Lurches Right

London

Trying to divine the political future from the results of European Parliament elections always involves an element of entrail-gazing. Across the continent, people take the opportunity to register protest votes; many don't vote at all. The turnout for the June elections (43 percent) was at a historic low. But even with those caveats, two things are obvious: the center-right has won at the expense of social democrats, even in France, Germany and Italy, where voters might have been expected to give ruling conservatives a kicking; and the collapse of the left vote has let in an unprecedented number of far-right and neofascist candidates, as well as a few more Greens.

The far right made gains in the Netherlands, where anti-Islam campaigner Geert Wilders's Freedom Party came in second, with 17 percent; in Italy, where the Northern League more than doubled its share of the vote; in Hungary, where the anti-Roma Jobbik party took three out of twenty-two seats; in Austria, where two extreme right parties polled 18 percent; in Slovakia, where strident nationalists won their first seats; and in Britain, which elected not one but two candidates from the British National Party (BNP)--a whites-only neo-Nazi group committed to "reversing the tide of non-white immigration."

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