EU drifts further to the (far)right :(

According to Politico this morning, there is a real chance that Jordan Bardella will win the French Presidency next year.

Remember Jean-Marie Le Pen, the disgusting racist Far-right leader of the Front National. Bardella is just a very clean-cut, sophisticated version of Le Pen. He's too clever to use the openly racist terms, but his policies and principles are the same.

If he does win, he will join a group of Far-Right EU leaders of key countries, including people like Georgia Meloni of Italy and Bart de Wever of Belgium.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The vast majority of EU countries are now run by right-wing or far-right parties. Germany, the biggest country, is run by Friedrich Merz and the Christian Democrats, and even this could get worse due to the growing support for the neo-nazi Alternative für Deutschland.

In the EU Parliament, the dominant party is the very right-wing (not quite far-right but not far off it) European People's Party (EPP), and of course the Commission is led by an increasingly powerful and increasingly conservative Ursula von der Leyen (of the EPP).

It is likely that Bardella (remember, think Jean-Marie Le Pen) will not be an outsider in the EU leadership. Like Meloni, he'd probably join the group called "European Conservatives and Reformists" (ECR), which is an ultra-right wing group that is accepted as a mainstream political group because there is another group even further to the right, Patriots for Europe, including parties like AfD and Viktor Orban's group. These are frequently also openly pro-Putin.

In the parliament, the EPP and the ECR work together to essentially shape the EU politics, and portray themselves as centre-right, but are far, far from the centre in reality, and typically they push legislation through with the support of the far-right Patriots, despite the opposition of the Centrists (Renew) and Liberals/Socialists who, together, do not have the numbers to block anything.

Irish people will get an idea of just how far right the EU has become from the fact that Fianna Fáil are part of Renew - yes, in the EU parliament, Fianna Fáil count as left-wingers !!

I don't really have anything intelligent to say about this (what's new?). I just think too many people are not paying attention to what's happening.

We see the destruction the fascists are causing in the US and we feel that we are different. But really, we're not, and we're moving further to the right every day. Ursula is a lot classier than Donald Trump, but between appeasing him and promoting several policies similar to his, she is moving us closer to him (yes, that is the stench you may smell in the air around Brussels).

Until now, Macron, for all his flaws, has been, along with Pedro Sanchez of Spain, a kind of brake stopping the EU from drifting too far to the right. If Bardella wins, and especially if Sanchez loses power in Spain to the Partido Popular (a very conservative group) or, worse, to a coalition of PP and Vox (even more right-wing), the EU will be fully in control of the far-right. Again, think Jean-Marie Le Pen.

And an EU in which Jean-Marie Le Pen would hold a position of authority as a respected statesman and policy advocate. That is where the EU is moving. Do not be fooled by the fact that our politicians are more eloquent, that we cloak our policies in fine language and express beautiful visions. We are now another right-wing block. We are still better than Trump's US, but that is an extremely low bar.

After the loss of the US, the EU was really the world's last hope. Canada, Mexico, Brazil and a few others have been doing what they can to stop the rot, but without a major-bloc on their side, there just isn't much they can do.

I don't know how this happened, and how it's still happening. But a huge part of it is that the Overton window is being cleverly moved further and further to the right.

• The way we treat migrants is and asylum-seekers used to shock people, but now we are concluding that we need to be harsher.
• The way we prioritise business profits over people's rights used to shock us, but now we use clever terms like "simplification" to remove more and more consumer protections in order to let our big businesses make more profit.
• We have doubled our defence spending at the request of Donald Trump, we just crumbled under the pressure of his "logic" and utterly failed to stand up to him.
• We crumbled under his tariff threats too - at first it seemed like pathetic appeasement, that we just didn't know how to deal with bullies - but maybe it's more that our leaders secretly agree with him more than they admit.
• The EU used to be the common-sense leader on things like climate-change and AI Governance. But on these areas too, we're now seeing massive push-back against the already minimal efforts we've made. It's like some of our politicians have started to believe Trump's lies and anti-scientific nonsense.

And we have followed Trump's utterly disgusting, shocking example of cutting our foreign aid. In a world where we can see with our own eyes the problems that billions of people on our planet still face very day from poverty, disease and other problems, frequently caused by European colonialism and the systems we left behind, how can Europeans look themselves in the eye, look at their SUV's and their Russian-gas-run heating systems, and decide that we should cut the already miniscule aid we provide in half so that we can give more profits to our business people? Who cares if millions of children die needlessly once we can make our lives more luxurious?

Do people think this is OK? Do you all believe the direction Europe is taking is the right one? It feels like we're joining Trump in Versailles, living a life of luxury in our ivory tower of privilege, while inside and outside the EU the less fortunate suffer. When the rest of the world finally gets organised enough to fight back like the French in 1789, history will have no sympathy for us.

But here's another tragic irony. All this right-wing drift is not making our lives better. It is making them worse. While our very rich people profit, the vast majority are struggling. No job-security (because it's far more important to protect the billionaire business owners' right to fire people), less social protection (because we need to give more tax-breaks to the rich), a failing job-market (because we don't dare do anything that might upset our tech-bro-lords). Many people reaching retirement age now cannot afford to retire.

Despite all the damage that we're doing to the world and its population, and to Europe's reputation, with our drift to the right, our people are struggling. Young people cannot afford homes like their parents could, but rather than fix the problem our politicians try to blame immigrants, many of whom live in dire poverty. Instead of building more homes, they propose to build stronger fences to keep the immigrants out. And we Europeans vote for this!

Anyone with an ounce of decency needs to start fighting this right-ward drift and standing up for ourselves and for humanity. We are better than this.