By Klaus Dräger
Note: What follows is not a thorough analysis of what happened in the last European elections, but just a first look at the results based on politico website and its exit polls
For the results see here:
You also may wish to check the results country by country – which is available there.
According to that projection, the GUE/NGL (concerning their current composition with Syriza etc.) will be down from 52 MEP’s to 38. Even that should be taken with a ‘grain’ of salt: e.g. the Spanish Unidas Podemos list (6 MEPs) has Greens from Catolonia and Equo on its slate, who might choose to affialiate themselves with the Green group in the EP.
For the outgoing GUE/NGL President Gabi Zimmer (DIE LINKE), this outcome is nevertheless a ‘success’:
Up to you to judge about such supposedly leftist ‘realism’.
Apart from Portugal (and maybe Cyprus), most of the radical left formations fared electorally worse than predicted by the usual polling institutes. E.g. the SP NL will have no MEPs (2 were predicted, now down to a mere 3.4 %), and the Slovenian Left also none (predicted were 10 %, 1 MEP). And so on in the bigger EU-states: LFI only at some 6.6 %, Unidas Podemos at some 10 %, DIE LINKE Germany at some 5.5 %.
Finally, it did not seem to matter which ‘party building model’ the lefties chose: ‘Traditional’, left-populist-movement orientated (according to Laclau and Mouffe), something in between … Interesting …
If this is not an electoral disaster for the EU radical left (the reasons behind this to be discussed), then I obviously don’t know anything about politics …
Concerning the German Euro-results – it’s very easy:
CDU & CSU about 30 % (a decline aginst 2014); SPD about 16 % (catastrophee); Greens the winners with some 20.5 %., the hard right AfD still successfull but stagnating at 11 %, DIE Linke disastrous at 5.5% (on equal footing as the Liberals). Thats it. Varoufakis list (despite a broad media coverage for him in Germany) at 0.3 %.
In my view: the ( EU) extreme centre still holds, but will re-group itself a bit around items such as climate change etc.
On the EU-level, the ‘Green wave’ should not be overestimated. With about 68 MEP’s the Green EP group is a bit more influential than before (becoming a modest player within the ‘extreme centre; this reaching from weakened EPP and S&D groups and mildly strengthened ALDE + Macron). And the Greens see themselves more and more as a ‘centre’ formation – open to collaborate with EPP, Liberals, S&D etc. to seek compromises in a bourgeois direction. Anyhow, 68 out 751 MEP’s is not such a strong position for the Greens within the EP. And the major things will still happen within the Council, and EU-governments already switched to the right (apart from Portugal, where is anything even mildly ‘social-democratic`happening at that level?)
Apart from that, I guess that Tsipras will soon be gone and historically forgotten, just as happened with Labour-leader Ramsay McDonald in the 1920ies in the UK. As Perry Anderson (in my view rightly) predicted early on in 2015: “In the short-run, Tsipras will no doubt flourish on the ruins of his promises, as – the most obvious foreign comparison – the Labour leader Ramsay Macdonald once did in Britain, heading a National Government composed of Conservatives and imposing austerity in the Depression, before being buried in the contempt of his contemporaries and of posterity.”
PS
another overview on the outcome can be found here:
On Brave New Europe, Mathew D. Rose provides a straightforward analysis:
Roger Martelli explains the outcome in France (in French):
Ignacio Escolar explains the outcome in Spain (including the regional elections; in Spanish):
