Europe’s Elite Populism

I n just the past few weeks, the European Union quickly took off its mask of genteel bureaucratic liberalism and bared its authoritarian fangs. Did you notice?

What the EU accused others of doing, becoming, or secretly wanting to do — it became and did. It did so, bitterly, just in the weeks after the final Brexit negotiations were completed.

Let’s review some of the latest. Late in her term, EU president Ursula von der Leyen rammed through an investment deal with China, one that had been opposed by other member states, though it served her native Germany’s interests and the ambitions of its leader, Angela Merkel. The agreement is not even yet public, and reported Chinese commitments to end their practice of forced labor are not remotely credible when Chinese ambassadors simply shrug at footage of manacled Uyghers being loaded onto train cars. Yet it goes on anyway.

For nearly four years, EU negotiators accused the United Kingdom of secretly wanting to run roughshod over Ireland and wreck the peace process of Northern Ireland by imposing a hard border on the island of Ireland. Yet, just weeks after the final trade deal was done between the U.K. and the European Union, Brussels had a fit of pique. Angry over the bad press that the United Kingdom had rapidly proceeded to vaccinate nearly 20 percent of its population against COVID-19 while the European Union struggled to vaccinate even 5 percent, the European Commission invoked Article 16 of the Northern Ireland protocol and announced imminent border controls for vaccines around Northern Ireland.

Outrageously, the European Union announced this without consulting the governments in London or Dublin, let alone any political representatives from Northern Ireland. Every single actual stakeholder in the process opposed the move, which was quickly walked back. This was an astonishing blunder that made a lie of all the concerns Europe claimed to have about peace in Northern Ireland. It immediately gave Prime Minister Boris Johnson the moral high ground and gave ammunition to Northern Ireland’s unionists who think the protocol is unworkable and ought to be scrapped altogether.

That isn’t the only political blunder connected to COVID-19 vaccines. Because the European Union was slow to contract, it is running desperately short of vaccines compared with nations such as Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Governments across the continent are warning that severe restrictions on travel could last into 2022 and that a majority might not be vaccinated until late in the year.

Member states have been warned that they are not allowed to negotiate separately from the European Union itself, which is pooling resources. Partly this decision is driven by the desire to use the COVID-19 crisis as a spur to further integration of Europe, uniting 27 separate health ministries into one blended mission. But, one country gets special dispensations, of course: Germany. The real power of the EU got away with signing a side contract for 30 million doses, without even a reprimand or demand to share from Brussels.

Meanwhile the heart of the European Union is dying. The bloc has spent years moaning about democratic backsliding in Visegrad countries Poland and Hungary — namely what they disliked was that the two populist conservative governments of those nations were so assertive with their limited powers in the EU itself.

But now, for the second time in little over a decade, Italy, the third largest power of the Union, will be led by a prime minister that not a single Italian voted into any office. Mario Draghi, famous for his handling of the Euro crisis at the European Central Bank, has been “invited” to lead a unity government after the fragile coalition government started to break down. Draghi was not even a member of Parliament. The reason for this is that the Italian political establishment cannot come up with a functioning government, and the polls say that if they turned to the voters, Matteo Salvini’s Lega party would almost certainly have the whip hand.

There is not a word about this from the people who style themselves as defenders of democracy and the liberal world order. An unelected technocratic prime minister is fine, so long as he’s on the side of the status quo.

What we are seeing in Europe is the authoritarian populism of incumbent elites. It’s not going to end well for them, or for Europe.