When is a free election not democratic? When it produces the ‘wrong’ result from the point of view of the pro-Brussels media and Europe’s political elites.
That seems the only conclusion to draw from the reaction to recent election results in Europe. The likely fall of Poland’s conservative Law and Justice (PiS) government after last Sunday’s election has been greeted as if it was an act of national liberation, hailed as a triumph for democracy. Yet the electoral success of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been condemned as an attack on German democracy, with high-level demands to ‘defend democracy’ by banning the AfD—for winning too many votes.
The basis of democracy is supposed to be equality—one man or woman, one vote, all worth exactly the same. But the EU establishment’s differential reaction to these elections suggests that for them, to update George Orwell’s Animal Farm, ‘All Voters Might Be Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others.’
Europe’s elites have twisted ‘democracy’ to mean whatever suits their interests. They wield the D-word as a sword with which to attack their enemies and knight their allies. If you toe the Brussels line on a big issue such as migration and conform with key EU ‘values’ such as LGBT education in schools, you can be dubbed democratic. But if an elected government refuses to kowtow to the European Commission and courts, then we can be told, for example, that ‘Hungary is no longer a democracy.’
Now we can make sense of the reaction to the Polish elections. Donald Tusk, the former President of the European Commission who led the Civic Platform (KO) opposition to Law and Justice, was capering around like a lovestruck teenager declaring that “Poland won, democracy has won!” Tusk’s pro-EU cheerleaders rallied round to repeat the message. “Expected political earthquake delights Brussels” reported the BBC. Politico was also delighted, declaring “Welcome back, Donald: EU sighs in relief over Poland election results.” German politicians seemed particularly excited about the election results, hailing the return of Poland as a “democracy for Europe.”
These reactions might seem strange, given that Tusk and his KO actually lost the election. The conservatives of PiS gained 35.4% of the votes, after a campaign marred by blunders and scandals—well down on the 43.6% with which PiS won the last election in 2019. But it was still well ahead of the Civic Platform, which got 30.7% this time. That may prove enough to cobble together an anti-PiS multiparty government, although Law and Justice is not giving up just yet. But 30% hardly looks like a democratic triumph for Tusk; indeed it’s a big decline from the last time he was Poland’s prime minister, when he won more like 40% of the vote.
And in any case, when did Donald Tusk become a poster boy for European democracy? He is best known as the President of the European Council from 2014-19, one of those many European ‘presidents’ who took office without ever needing to receive a single vote from the peoples of Europe.
In the UK, we remember President Tusk as the Brussels bureaucrat who did everything in his power to stop and reverse the 2016 referendum vote for Brexit—the biggest democratic vote in British political history. He warned Remainer Tory prime minister David Cameron that even offering the British people the chance to vote on EU membership would be “so dangerous…so stupid.”
Years after 17.4m Brits voted to Leave, Tusk was still trying to stop Brexit. He announced in 2019 that he hoped there would be “a special place in hell” for Brexiteers, and then interfered in that year’s UK general election to back the opposition Remainer parties against Boris Johnson’s Tories, telling them to “never give up” on overturning the mass vote for Brexit.
So, Tusk should be nobody’s idea of a champion of democracy. What qualifies him for that title in Brussels today is simply that he has led the pro-EU opposition to the sovereigntist, populist PiS government in Poland.
For eight years, the conservative Law and Justice government has been a thorn in the side of the supranational Euro authorities on everything from migration to family policy. That is why they are so delighted at the prospect of Tusk the Brussels bureaucrat being back in power in Poland, promising to conform to EU ‘values.’ They are holding out the prospect of handing Poland billions in EU funds, withheld from the PiS government, if the new regime does as it is told by Brussels. The message is that, in order to be celebrated in as a ‘democracy for Europe,’ Poland will have to sacrifice the sovereignty that allows it to be a real national democracy.
During the Polish election campaign, as reported by The European Conservative, Germany and France were even accused of plotting to overthrow the PiS government, and trying to bribe Ukraine to join the plot. Meanwhile the pro-EU sections of the Polish media stoked up scandals that damaged the reputation of Law and Justice. At the same time, they were all accusing PiS of rigging the election in its favour. (Once Tusk emerged ‘victorious,’ of course, it was hailed as a free and fair election.)
If conservatives used such underhand methods, they would be accused of far-right dirty tricks. In the hands of the EU-loving elites, however, the same tactics somehow become part of a noble crusade for democracy.
Contrast all of this with reactions to Germany’s state elections, held just a week before the Polish general election. The national conservatives of the Alternative for Germany continued their electoral advance by finishing second in Hesse with 18.4% and third in Bavaria with 15.8%. Those two big states account for a quarter of the German population. The results demonstrated that the EU-sceptical populists are gaining support in the Western and Southern regions of Germany, as well as in their usual strongholds in the East.
In response, Germany’s Social Democratic Chancellor Olaf Schulz warned that, “The votes that have gone to a right-wing populist party in Germany must worry us. It is about defending democracy.” In other words, people freely voting for the AfD were somehow attacking democratic norms. So the German mainstream needs to ‘defend democracy’—against millions of German voters, aka the demos.
Other centrist German politicians drew out the logic of this anti-democratic ‘defence of democracy’ by stepping up their calls for the AfD to be banned altogether. They want to defend their elitist notion of democracy by removing the basic democratic right of choice from around a quarter of German voters, to judge by national opinion polls.
Aah, but the Left will say, if we don’t stop the AfD now they could one day be elected like Hitler, and then ban democracy altogether like the Nazis did! This is an abuse of political language, to brand anybody critical of the EU as ‘far right’ or even ‘Nazi.’ It is also an abuse of history. Hitler was never elected to power; he was appointed chancellor by Germany’s aristocratic elite in 1933, at a time when the Nazis’ vote in elections was going down. The ‘Too much democracy led to Hitler’ lie is a common anti-democratic slur we hear all the time.
As I argue in my book Revolting!, ours is age characterised by the sentiment, ‘I believe in democracy—But…’ The biggest ‘but’ in the EU now is about drawing lines between supposedly good and bad democracy. Expect much more of this stuff in the run-up to next year’s elections to the European Parliament. In response, we need to insist that democratic rights are universal. They must apply to EU-sceptical voters in Germany or Poland every bit as much as others, and are not to be interfered with at the whim of unelected Brussels bureaucrats. Democracy belongs to the demos, the people, to do with as we choose.