Europeans Increasingly Skeptical of the EU by Srdja Trifkovic
Excerpts from Srdja Trifkovic’s latest Sputnik Radio interview, in which he comments on the findings of a new poll which indicates that an increasing number of Europeans want their countries to leave the European Union. More than half (53%) of the respondents in Italy said they would like their government to hold a referendum on EU membership. Similar sentiments are felt in France, Germany, Spain and Poland. [Audio]
[…] We are witnessing an overall public backlash against the European Union. It is increasingly perceived not as an institution geared to facilitating the flow of goods, services and people, but as a means of political and ideological control by an elite that is alienated from ordinary people… In Italy’s case it is clear that the level of dissatisfaction with the political establishment is very high. If someone like Beppe Grillo, a comedian who has never conducted a serious campaign, gets as many votes as he did [25.5% in 2013], we are looking at a discredited establishment, where politics is seen as part joke and part tragedy.
In Poland the disenchantment is to a large extent due to the attempt by Brussels to impose immigration quotas on former Soviet bloc countries. They rebelled together, the Visegrad Group, starting with Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban, but including the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland’s [prime minister] Beata Szydlo. They simply do not want to submit a key element of their sovereignty—the decision on who will reside inside their frontiers—to the unelected Eurocrats in Brussels…
International bureaucrats operating from inside the Brussels machine—from Ireland, Finland, Italy, Greece, or Estonia—have much more in common with each other than with the people of their own countries. They partake in the same political rituals, they belong to the same competitive hierarchical structure, and they are part of the same process which is completely divorced from the democratically expressed will of their electorates… We have an equivalent of the nomenklatura, which in the old communist days was the name for the chosen cadres of the communist party. It existed as the elite of the state, quite apart from the society. Nowadays we have the Brussels nomenklatura, which is just as divorced from the society of their own native countries as the old communist elite had been in Brezhnev’s, Khrushchev’s, or Stalin’s days…
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They have no new tricks to offer… Faced with the migration tsunami, they can either kidnap the rhetoric of the right—which is what some establishment politicians are trying to do in France by emulating Marine Le Pen—or else they continue repeating their old multi-culti mantra, which is what Angela Merkel is doing in Germany…. The European Union as we know it has no internal sources of ideological and emotional renewal. It is a spent force, it is in permanent crisis exacerbated by Brexit. The Lisbon straitjacket no longer functions. It is no longer capable of satisfying either the technical requirements of “an ever-tighter Union,” which is the federalists’ slogan, or de Gaulle’s old vision of united Europe from the North Sea to the Urals…
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