The success of the sovereigntist, anti-globalist right in the European Parliament elections on June 9 is sending shock waves through the political and media establishment of the Old Continent,  especially in Germany.

“We will build a bastion together with others against the extremes of the left and right,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said after the results became known.

Von der Leyen, who is currently lobbying to be appointed to a second term as the commission’s unelected leader, called on social democrats and liberals from the Renew Europe Group to create a common front with the center-right conservatives in the European Parliament to resist “extremism.”

This electoral victory means that the nationalist right will have up to a quarter of the 720 seats in the EU assembly. This will have little immediate impact on the functioning of the Brussels machine, however. Members of the EU Commission, where the real power is, are appointed by national governments, not by members of the European Parliament.

The significance of last Sunday’s result is in the long-term trend it signifies. Political analysts point out that “cordon sanitaire” policies to exclude hard-right parties—most notably the Alternative for Germany (AfD)—are eroding. Millions of potential supporters now know that their votes for one of those parties are no longer just lost protest votes.

The establishment reaction to this phenomenon was a clear sign, as if one were needed, that when it comes to the key issues of sovereignty, identity, immigration, family, etc., there is but one Eurocratic party with several local subsidiaries. They may call themselves social democrats, Christian democrats, liberals, or greens; but they all subscribe to the same post-nationalist ideology. Most significantly, they all support EU’s current immigration policy, which—if allowed to continue—will lead to the demographic replacement of most European nations with the teeming multitudes from the other side of the Mediterranean.

They also loath the nationalist right with the same vehemence. The Social Democrats’ (SPD) leader Lars Klingbeil told the NTV channel that the result of the European elections is making many people realize “that the Nazis have become stronger in this election, many people are waking up and fighting for democracy.” North Rhine-Westphalia’s Prime Minister Hendrik Wüst, a Christian Democrat (CDU), has also described the AfD as a Nazi party. On the eve of the election, Bavaria’s Christian Social Union (CSU) top candidate Manfred Weber said regarding the AfD: “We will not allow these neo-Nazis to destroy our Europe.” In the same spirit, von der Leyen herself warned that “the extremists have one thing in common: they want to weaken, destroy and ruin our Europe.” “That will never be allowed to happen,” she added.  

“We will not allow,” “that will never be allowed,” and “our Europe” vs. “the Nazis”: that is the discourse of today’s liberal totalitarianism. Thanks to Wüst, Klingbeil, Weber, von der Leyen and those like them, their Europe has been pushed into the global Western cauldron of wokedom and insanity. Thanks to them, the apparat of the EU has morphed over the past quarter-century into a cultural-Marxist “community of values” run by unelected officials who actively promote the suicide of the Old Continent.

These people have a peculiar understanding of “democracy.” The leader of the German Greens, Emily Büning, lamented: “We were unable to convince many people to vote democratically.” Büning’s logic is clear: If the opponent wins in a democratic election, then the election is not democratic. Conversely, the election is only democratic if the Greens win.

In the same vein, the Bavarian Social Democrats’ top candidate, Maria Noichl, declared that the election result was not merely a defeat for her party but for democracy as a whole. Anyone who does not vote for the SPD, in other words, is not actually a democrat. The success of the AfD and other nationalist parties in Europe genuinely shocked Noichl: “Who would have thought that we would again be faced with such nationalist thinking, so that European values are in danger?”

Who, indeed? Apparently not the Bavarian bohemian bourgeoisie, blissfully unaffected by the influx of migrants into working class neighborhoods and enthusiastically supportive of the green mandates which have made life miserable for millions of their less fortunate fellow citizens.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung ran an editorial right after the election under the headline “When people do not understand what they are doing.” It opined that some voters were “not living up to their responsibilities” by voting for the AfD. In other words, one in six German voters is either ignorant and does not really know what he is doing, is irresponsible, or both.

“This is understandable,” Alexander Grau noted with a touch of sarcasm in the right-leaning Weltwoche. “There you are sitting in beautiful Munich, where the red-green world is still in order, and every day you fight bravely ‘against the right’ from your desk. And then the party whose name you are not allowed to mention becomes the second strongest force in the country. That is frustrating.”

The Weltwoche’s Philipp Gut noted further that a person’s character is revealed in a crisis, in defeat. And since politicians are also human, one must say: these representatives of government power are failing completely at this moment:

Not only do they have no human greatness, no decency, no goal-focusing, they reveal with frightening clarity that they fundamentally despise the people, the voters and the democratic system. Anyone who speaks like this, who dismisses voters who exercise their free democratic right as anti-democrats and Nazis, is discrediting himself.

In sport, Gut concludes, this would be a red card. In democracy, there are elections. The next elections are sure to come.

Indeed. The problem is that the CDU/CSU-SPD-Green Party may decide, sometime in the not-too-distant future, that no true democracy can tolerate anyone they deem Nazis as legitimate participants in the political process; and that no election can be truly democratic if such parties are allowed to field candidates. As we’ve seen on June 9, too many voters do not know what they are doing, and too many are behaving irresponsibly. They need to be protected from themselves—and “our” democracy, just like “our” Europe, needs to be protected from them.