Across Western Europe, the right is rising. This strikes fear into the hearts of Brussels bureaucrats, as the London Times reports, with this headline: “‘Hormonal’ voters could hand hard-right victory, EU chief fears.”
Josep Borrell, the EU’s high representative for foreign policy, warns that migration fears could send political shockwaves across Europe.
Borrell, 76, a Spanish Socialist and former foreign minister, was referring to the fact that illegal immigration has hit its highest level since Europe’s last migration crisis in 2016, which drove a political backlash including contributing to Brexit. It comes at a time when Europe is braced for terror attacks linked to Hamas and a resurgent Islamist threat in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war.
Illegal immigration has spiked, and the risk of terrorist attacks is rising. People don’t like that.
He suggested that “fear in the face of the unknown and uncertainty generates a hormone that calls for a security response’, he said, theorising that populism has an irrational biological basis. “We will enter a survival mode based on fear and that may promote the ascent, or strengthening, of the extreme right,” he said.
Conservatism as mental illness, a favorite trope of the left. But why is it “irrational” to oppose mass illegal immigration, or to want to prevent terror attacks?
Brussels is braced for an earthquake after Europe-wide EU elections in June following big increases in support nationally for nationalist, populist, Eurosceptic and anti-immigration parties.
So is the “earthquake” irrational? Evidently not:
Figures released two weeks ago by the EU’s agency for asylum showed that the number of new refugee claims up until October 2023 had hit 822,000, a figure that does not include pending cases. “It is estimated that, at the end of September 2023, the total number of pending cases at all instances increased to over a million,” the agency reported.
Figures on irregular or uncontrolled border crossings for the first 11 months of 2023 reached more than 355,300, a 17 per cent increase. “This number has already surpassed the entire total for 2022, marking the highest value recorded since 2016,” reported the EU’s Frontex border agency.
The new crisis is fuelling security fears after a series of Middle East-related terror attacks since October, reminding voters that the commanders of the terror cells that carried out Paris attacks in 2015, then Brussels in 2016, entered Europe via the uncontrolled migration routes.
So the hormonally-driven, irrational “hard right” voters are correct, then? That is how a normal person would interpret these facts.
But the endlessly entitled European elites persist in seeing all opposition to their disastrous policies as bigoted, ignorant, and the result of mental or emotional imbalance. Not exactly a winning platform. I think the Eurocrats are right to fear that an earthquake is coming.
And, by the way, the earthquake could come to America in 2024 if Republican have the wit to run against Joe Biden’s insane–that is putting it charitably–open borders policy.
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