European Elections and Immigration

In June 2024, after European Parliament election results showed French President Emmanuel Macron's party with 15% of the vote and far-right leader Marine Le Pen's with 32%, Macron called for snap elections in a surprise move in an effort to thwart the far right's ascendancy in France.

The elections seemed to backfire when Marie Le Pen's rightwing National Rally emerged as the leading vote-getter in the first round of French elections. The National Rally came in first with 34% of the vote, ahead of the New Popular Front (29%), a hastily organized party put together just days after Macron's call for snap elections. Macron's party, the Together Alliance, won about 23% of the vote. Smaller parties rounded out the remaining votes.

In the second and final round of voting, however, Le Pen's National Rally and the New Popular Front swapped places: New Popular Front won 178 seats in Parliament, Macron's Together Alliance won 150 seats, and Le Pen's National Rally came in third with 142 seats.

Much of the global media reported the results as a major victory for France and a blow to the right-wing. France had staved off the threat of a growing rightwing movement. But for how long?

The National Rally gained 53 new seats in Parliament and now has only five seats less than Macron's party. None of the parties won an outright majority, and negotiations among the parties to form a government are proving to be difficult and tedious. Whatever governing coalition emerges will likely be tenuous. In fact, all parties agreed to allow Macron's government to continue through the Olympics to avoid a political crisis just as the Olympics were kicking off.

In the UK, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak likewise called for early elections. Sunak, leader of the Tories (Conservative Party), hoped to galvanize supporters whilst catching the opposition Labour Pary off-guard. Like in France, the PM's strategy backfired. The Labour Party won handily, and the Tories suffered their greatest drubbing in the party's long history.

The Tories had largely botched Brexit and post-Brexit policies. Also, attempting to placate its right flank, the Tories promised to tackle illegal immigration. They failed miserably. The only real alternative for voters was the Labour Party.

Except that the nascent upstart party Reform UK received the second highest votes behind Labour and gained an unprecedented five seats in Parliament. The fact that they received only five seats in Parliament is due to archaic election rules that Reform UK promises to address.

In the United States, former President Donald Trump seemed to be in full command of the US 2024 presidential election campaign following an historically disastrous performance by Joe Biden, the sitting US President, during the first presidential debate, and after surviving an assassination attempt.

But Joe Biden agreed to step aside as the Democratic Party's nominee after enormous pressure to do so. Vice President Kamala Harris is now the party's nominee. Though the race remains tight, it seems that momentum is currently in Harris' favor. She represents a break with the recent past and offers hope for younger generations. US politics, at least at this moment, appears to be somewhat mirroring the UK.

Lastly, in the Netherlands, the right-wing Party for Freedom won recent elections but selected prominent independent politician Dick Schoof as Prime Minister rather than controversial party leader Geert Wilders to soften the party's rightwing reputation while leaving Wilders to push the envelope outside of the Prime Minister's office.

The Netherlands, it seems, is the only country to have elected a right-wing party (along with Italy last year). Britain and France, and perhaps the USA, meanwhile, have turned leftward.

But have they, really?

One main issue that cuts across elections, from France and the Netherlands to the UK and US, is immigration. As I wrote much of this this, Leeds UK was in flames as non-English, predominately Muslim people rioted after Leeds police were called to a home where domestic violence was occurring. An infant child had sustained a head injury and required hospitalization. The police and Social Services determined that five more children were in immediate danger, so the children were removed.

The city erupted.

That same night, in East London, another riot erupted following the killing of a Bangladeshi by police … in Bangladesh.

Later, following the horrific killings of young girls in Southport, riots erupted among ethnic English. Police enforced an information blackout and only referred to the killer as a 17-year old born in Cardiff, Wales, but information leaked that the killer was of a migrant background.  Anti-immigration riots erupted all across the UK.

These riots in the UK came on the heels of months of massive pro-Palestine and pro-Hamas protests led largely by UK Muslims, and unrest in neighboring Ireland, where scores of native Irish have been holding protests against liberally permissive immigration policies following an attack in Dublin that was similar to the one in Southport. In Ireland, protestors burned down an abandoned factory that was readied to house migrants.

In summer 2023, Paris burned for a week as predominately Muslim migrants rioted in protest against a police killing of a 17-year old of Moroccan descent. Businesses, banks, supermarkets, and libraries were destroyed and damaged.

These are just the very latest of recent migrant-related unrest in Europe. Countless others have occurred in the UK, France, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Italy, and the Netherlands, all in recent months and years.

The October 7 attacks by Hamas terrorists on Israel prompted widespread and large-scale protests, sometimes violent, throughout the entirety of the West, against Israel. Those protests continue nearly a year later even as Hamas continues to hold over 100 Israelis and others, including Americans, hostage.

Immigration and non-integration of primarily Muslim migrants is a major issue in Europe. The US has a much better history of integration, assimilation, and acculturation, no matter one's religion, than in Europe. All of the European right-wing parties – Reform UK, the Dutch Party for Freedom, Marie Le Pen's Nationally Rally in France, and Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) in Germany – are primarily single-issue parties, with that single issue being immigration. In the US, Donald Trump's faltering campaign is also largely driven by the issue of immigration.

Immigration is a thorny issue for political liberals in the West. Tolerance, freedom of religion, and freedom of expression are all hallmarks of modern political liberalism that define Western values. So, too, for human rights and compassion. The West has therefore not turned away refugees fleeing war and oppression. Fareed Zakaria, however, argues in his recent book Age of Revolutions that the immigration process in the West is broken and is allowing mass immigration to happen far too fast. Most migrants to Europe are economic migrants from North and West Africa, and the Middle East, whose economies are largely expanding – but they seek political asylum as an easier path to residency than economic refuge. Schools and social services are overwhelmed.  The rapid pace of change brought by mass migration is sparking widespread backlash from indigenous Europeans who view their nations and cultures as under siege.    

The left in Europe and, to a lesser extent, Democrats in America, ignore the fears and urgency of mass immigration at their peril. To dismiss such fears as xenophobia, racism, or anti-political liberalism – and to continue to not fix broken immigration and asylum policies – is to court populism. The focus on "faculty lounge" issues as Democratic Party veteran James Carville calls them – issues like identity, unconventional pronoun usage, DEI, and the like – while ignoring genuine concerns about too much immigration too fast, will likely result in the election of rightwing parties in Europe, and possibly Trump in the US.

To be fair, Keir Starmer in the UK and Emmanuel Macron in France, and now Harris in the US, campaigned or are campaigning on "kitchen table" issues, primarily the economy. This has proved to be a winning strategy, and it is smart. Further, now that Biden has stepped aside and Harris is the new Democratic nominee, voters in America have a real alternative than the return-to-the-recent-past that the Biden/Trump campaigns presented.

Still, it is Europe that I worry about. In France, as the election was being tallied, police were out in force. Riots were expected: riots had erupted after Le Pen's party won in the first round, and a repeat was expected if Le Pen's Nationally Rally won the second round. But the New Popular Front surprisingly won. Riots ensued anyway, though they were way more subdued and isolated than before. In celebrations of the New Popular Front's victory, flags of Palestine and other countries of the Middle East were more prominently on display than the flag of France. The new left-leaning French government might be short-lived.

The US is still the leader of the West. Hopefully, a moderate Harris administration can navigate these next few years – geopolitical challenges aside (or included) – and avoid the mines of extremist politics on both sides, and quietly and deftly focus on economic growth while enacting sensible immigration reform. (The Biden administration tried to pass real immigration reform but was stymied by a Republican Party not willing to allow the Democrats any sort of legislative progress before the election, even if it was to reduce immigration which is ostensibly their number one cause). I wish the same for the UK and France. The rest of Europe would surely follow suit and take the wind out of the sails of the more extreme factions of the right and left.