30 Europe The EconomistJune 1st 2019
2 Salvini has called for measures at which
the m 5 s has balked, including immigration
controls, infrastructure schemes and more
autonomy for Italy’s rich north. Alarmingly
for Brussels, the League leader also urged a
tax-cutting stimulus. Italy already risks
breaching euro-area budget-deficit limits,
and the European Commission is reported-
ly preparing to begin disciplinary proceed-
ings. But a defiant Mr Salvini said he had
been given “a mandate calmly to revisit old
and outdated parameters”.
In Austriathe election provided only
brief respite for Sebastian Kurz, the young
head of the ruling conservative People’s
Party (övp), amid a scandal that has shat-
tered his government. On May 18th Mr Kurz
ejected his coalition partner, the far-right
Freedom Party, after a tape from 2017 sur-
faced showing its leader, Heinz-Christian
Strache, promising government contracts
to a woman he believed was related to a
Russian oligarch. Perhaps benefiting from
disillusionment with Mr Strache’s party,
the övp went on to win a record 35% of the
vote. But one day later Mr Kurz’s govern-
ment was toppled in a confidence vote. A
caretaker government will take office be-
fore elections in September, in which Mr
Kurz will hope to resume where he left off.Not as bad as it seemed
Emmanuel Macron, the French president,
will have been disappointed to lose to Ma-
rine Le Pen’s National Rally (formerly the
National Front), which took 23% of the
vote. Yet the outcome was far from devas-
tating. Despite 28 weeks of gilets jaunes
(yellow jackets) protests, and Ms Le Pen’s
efforts to turn the election into a referen-
dum on Mr Macron, she ended up with a
slightly lower score than in 2014. Less than
a percentage point separated the two lists.
Perhaps most importantly, the result
confirmed the upending of politics that Mr
Macron brought about when he seized the
presidency in 2017 with a new party, En
Marche. The mainstream parties on the left(Socialists) and right (Republicans) togeth-
er scored less than 15%. The only impres-
sive gains came from the Greens, who took
13%. Mr Macron will now seek to reboot his
presidency. He promises that policymak-
ing will become more “human”, but also to
stick to reform plans for pensions, unem-
ployment benefits and the public sector.
Nationalists struggled in the Nordics,
especially Sweden and Denmark, against
socialists and liberals. In the Netherlands
the Labour Party secured a surprise win on
the back of an energetic campaign by Frans
Timmermans, a candidate to run the Euro-
pean Commission. But hard-right Flemish
separatists did well in a general election in
Belgium, held on the same day.
In Polandthe ruling populist Law and
Justice (pis) party won 45% of the vote, put-
ting it in good stead to win a general elec-
tion due in the autumn. The European Co-
alition, an ad hoc group of anti-pisparties
led by the centrist Civic Platform (po), will
struggle to remain united after taking a dis-
appointing 38%. With other parties in trou-
ble, the pis-porivalry will continue to dom-
inate Polish politics. But pis, under its
leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski, is setting the
agenda with generous handouts and popu-
lar slogans. poand others are struggling to
find a coherent pitch to voters.
It was a dreadful election for Liviu Drag-
nea, head of Romania’s ruling Social
Democrats (psd). Voters at home and
abroad turned out in droves against a gov-
ernment widely perceived as corrupt. The
psdtook just 23% of the vote, and 80% of
Romanians backed a referendum opposing
the government’s judicial reforms. A day
after this drubbing Mr Dragnea, the archi-
tect of laws designed to reduce penalties
for corruption that sparked huge protests,
was handed a three-and-a-half-year prison
sentence for abuse of office. With Mr Drag-
nea’s career surely over, the opposition will
now seek to turf his party from office.
Centrists enjoyed modest success else-
where in central Europe. In Slovakiaa co-alition backed by Zuzana Caputova, a liber-
al who won March’s presidential election,
came first. Viktor Orban’s Fidesz won half
the vote in Hungary, though two small op-
position parties did better than expected.
Beyond meps, Spaniards also chose 12
regional governments and 8,131mayors. A
month after winning a general election, Pe-
dro Sánchez’s Socialists took 33% of the
vote in the European election, confirming
them as comfortably the largest party. The
results were also a relief for Pablo Casado,
the new leader of the conservative People’s
Party (pp). After a drubbing in the general
election Mr Casado tacked towards the cen-
tre, winning 20% and hanging on to Ma-
drid’s regional government. Other parties
struggled. Ciudadanos, a centre-right out-
fit, slid to 12%. The far left and right faded.
The two wings of the Catalan separatist
movement secured 49% of the vote in the
region. But legal troubles may prevent their
two meps from taking up their seats.
Mr Sánchez still needs to build a parlia-
mentary majority. Albert Rivera, Ciudad-
anos’s leader, will face pressure to stop his
veto of deals with the Socialists in protest
at their conciliatory approach to the Cata-
lan problem. Weeks of haggling lie ahead.The next to go?
Alexis Tsipras, Greece’s prime minister,
called a snap election for July after his left-
wing Syriza party suffered a crushing de-
feat at the hands of the centre-right New
Democracy (nd). Nationalist voters pun-
ished Syriza for Mr Tsipras’s biggest
achievement: resolving a 28-year dispute
over the name of Greece’s northern neigh-
bour, now known as North Macedonia.
ndlooks set to win the general election.
That will reassure other euro-zone govern-
ments worried about Greece sticking to its
post-bail-out reform plan, after Syriza em-
barked on a burst of pre-election spending.
But Kyriakos Mitsotakis, nd’s leader, may
struggle to form a coalition. And Mr Tsipras
is unlikely to go into docile opposition. 7Bad news for Kramp-Karrenbauer, Dragnea and Tsipras....but Salvini triumphs