On June 9 we are called to elect our representatives in the European Union. These elections will allow the consolidation and visibility of the conservative and national-populist Europe that already governs in Italy, the Netherlands, Greece, France, Sweden, Hungary, Austria, Bulgaria, Ireland, Czech Republic, Cyprus, Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Slovakia , Romania, Poland, Luxembourg, Latvia, Portugal, Belgium and Lithuania. Of the 27 countries that make up the EU, 22 are governed by right-wing and center-right parties (not Spain, Germany, Denmark, Slovenia and Malta).
Each new European election activates the vote of European citizens, appealing to them to vote to combat Euroscepticism, anti-Europeanism, a negative vision of the future, indifference to social injustices or the desire to settle scores with the parties that govern their countries. countries. However, on this occasion what is asked of them, in the vast majority of states, is that they exercise their vote to prevent European founding values, such as integration, solidarity and peace, from limiting decision-making. to address issues such as immigration, the reduction of public spending or European defense.
European citizens are increasingly aware that the Union has been built and is being built on the basis of the accession of countries that value commercial aspects, such as Sweden; others who do it to survive politically and geographically, such as Ukraine, which asks to accelerate its integration to respond with greater political and military capacity to the war generated by Russian expansionism; others, to leave behind and heal the wounds of the past, as Spain, Portugal and, above all, Germany did; geopolitical accessions, as was the case of Turkey’s desire to be part of the great European family to establish its future straddling East and West, or accessions to lead Europe, like France.
The EU, which was born for the definitive reconciliation of European countries after the Second World War, is now besieged by the ghosts of war, finding itself in the dilemma of creating and extending the idea of ??a Union that must be capable of responding militarily. to countries that may attack its integrity or maintain its current position of defending peace with diplomacy and economic pressures.
In this political context, in a European Union built to date from selfish, interested, enthusiastic or necessary adhesions to develop and guarantee democracy in the countries that make it up, the powerful image of a Europe in which they must coexist and relate to unhappy communities like the Ukrainian one, threatened communities like Finland or Sweden, happy communities like Spain, Portugal or Italy, and closed communities like Hungary or Bulgaria.
In these elections, marked by issues such as migration, European military defense, the war in Ukraine and nearby Gaza, climate change, the energy crisis or fiscal unification rules, it is at stake to determine the vision that is imposed on how the future of the EU should be faced, once it is confirmed that future integrations will not be marked by the European values ??that founded it, but by geopolitical balances.
We have gone from believing in the EU, from having faith in it, to needing it to the extent that many European citizens have come to abhor the dependence that their states have on the Union and the subordination to its institutions and controls.
While for the right and European national populism the elections this June must certify that they are the ones who now decide politics in Europe, for social democracy they are key to achieving, with a good result, defending themselves from conservative and national populist Europe, taking the shape of a hedgehog that curls up into a ball of thorns to protect itself from its external enemies. For this reason, in these elections, the right wants to talk about the Europe in which we live, while the left seeks to evoke the dreamed and impossible Europe.
The right will win because it has understood better than the left that happy communities do not want to be dragged down by the problems derived from not knowing how to control immigration and from not having better attended to internal security in their countries.
