Ladies and gentlemen Europe is running out of time.
This is not the story we have been hearing lately.
Things are supposedly great again.
The Euro area is now expected to grow at The breakneck speed of 2.3% in 2018.
The turning point from almost a solid decade of crappy European news was an election that
took place in France in April and May of 2017.
There was a serious concern that Marine Le Pen’s Front Nationale would win the election.
Nationalist parties like Le Pen’s had been steadily gaining power throughout the EU,
with the June 2016 Brexit vote being their greatest victory.
Nationalists running Poland or Hungary are one thing, but if the Euroskeptic le Pen had
won in France, one of the EU’s two most important countries the show would probably
have been over.
Thankfully the very pro European Union Emmanuel Macron saved the day.
Macron gets a lot of good press and I understand why.
If anything I think his accomplishment deserves more attention.
The party he founded just a year earlier, En Marche, didn't just beat Le Pen.
It also blew France's established two party system out of the water.
Can you imagine how cool that would be in the US?
So Macron won the presidency.
Then his party went on to win a parliamentary majority.
And then, last fall, he managed to reform the labor market in a way that his three predecessors
failed to do.
Macron does give me a lot of hope.
But there is another aspect to that election last May.
Marine Le Pen’s Party got 33% of the vote.
Four years ago when her Party got 24.8% of the vote in European elections I was optimistic,
even though many others were freaking out.
I thought the nationalists couldn't possibly do any better.
Well they did..
People seem to have tuned out Le Pen’s steady March towards power.
Macron is impressive.
But he may also be the EU’S last chance in France.
And France's election wasn't the only one last year.
In Germany everybody was pleased when their nationalist party only managed to become the
third largest party in parliament, after almost tripling its vote.
Austria’s nationalist party is now part of the governing coalition.
Italy’s election next week is expected to result in more victories for anti-EU, or at
least euroskeptical parties.
The return of economic growth has bought the EU some breathing room.
But the Union is shaky, and there is less money to spread around in the post Brexit
budget that is being negotiated this year.
I guess what I am trying to say is that this break from crisis may be brief and it must
not be squandered.
When people talk about the end of the EU, they act as if we are just talking about the
end of an overly socialized bureaucratic mess.
If that were true I certainly wouldn't miss it.
But we are also talking about the end of a force for stability and shared goals in Europe.
Stable, well established countries like France and Germany would likely be hurt economically
by the end of the EU, but would otherwise probably be fine.
For countries further from the core, however, EU failure is likely to be a much more serious
issue.
We are already seeing new rumblings in the Balkans and on the border WITH Russia to the
east.
And Spain is currently dealing with the resurgence of the Catalan independence movement.
Which is what we will deal with next time.
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