king billy casino Is Europe Turning Its Back on the Left?

A few months agoking billy casino, anxious American liberals told themselves a cautionary tale about politics in Europe: A seemingly inevitable rightward surge in this summer’s elections there was a dark portent of the political future, for Europeans and for Americans.

As it turned out, that surge didn’t really happen. In June voting for the European Parliament, the far right gained only modestly, and the centrist governing coalition held pretty firm. In early July, Britain’s Labour won the second-largest parliamentary majority since World War II, humiliating the center-right Tories and sidelining the farther-right Reform. And a few days later in France, a combination of strategic voting and strong left-wing turnout kept Marine Le Pen and her menacing National Rally party out of power.

But just two months later, the story in Europe has grown a bit bleaker — not only in Germany, where this month the Alternative for Germany became the first far-right party to win a state election since 1945, but also in those places whose elections produced, in July, such sighs of relief on the global left.

In France, the socialist skew of the parliamentary election apparently displeased the centrist president, Emmanuel Macron, who responded by dillydallying for nearly two months and simply refusing to form a government.

He had called the election by surprise, openly challenging his country to reject Le Pen and her increasingly popular brand of xenophobic nationalism. But when the French electorate did exactly that, it was not on the terms Macron had hoped for: The president’s centrist coalition hadn’t won, in terms of parliamentary seats, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s left-wing coalition, with whom Macron had made only a begrudging last-minute alliance, had secured the largest number. In response, Macron seemed almost not to accept the results, or at least not to feel they obliged him to move with any urgency to appoint a new prime minister, leading some observers to wonder how long the country could go without one — and whether the stalemate might quickly harden into a new status quo.

Last week, Macron finally made his choice: Michel Barnier, a conservative and former Brexit negotiator for the European Union whose party won less than 7 percent of the first-round vote, and who had campaigned, in a previous election, on mandatory military service, a yearslong end to migration to Europe, and turning over to the army the policing of various communities that had “lost control.”

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.king billy casino

• Is
• king billy casino
• Europe
• its
• Turning