RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/understanding-the-results-of-the-european-parliamentary-elections/

The legacy parties continued to decline and the populist right advanced only so far. Now, the pro-EU left, which gained ground, may grow more assertive.

Sunday’s results in the European Parliament elections are like a clever modernist painting, apparently formal, abstract, and meaningless, which as you move back from it, looks increasingly like a busy city street with cars, taxis, buses, and people going quite clearly in their different directions. You can even guess where some of the drivers will end up. Similarly, if you step back and glance at the election returns with, as yet, not a great deal of exit-polling data on which to base deeper judgments, you will probably reach these preliminary conclusions:

1) The mainstream parties of the center-Left and center-Right (or so-called legacy parties) continue a decline that has now been going on, at different speeds in different countries, for several decades. Italy’s Christian Democrats fell apart in the 1990s; its post-Communist socialists more recently; Berlusconi’s once-dominant Forza Italia fell into single figures this time; and the socialists are still struggling, at 22 percent. In this election, Italy’s insurgent populist partners — the League and the Five Star Movement — got 51 percent of the total vote between them, and they’re not getting a divorce. It was a less happy story in Germany where the two main parties in the “Grand Coalition” — Angela Merkel’s CDU-CSU and the Social Democrats — both lost ground compared with their performance in 2014, scoring only 45 percent jointly when they would once have been in the high seventies. France’s traditional parties of government almost disappeared from the results, all scoring in single figures. And so on. The most dramatic collapse of the centrist parties was in Britain, where the governing Tories fell to below 10 percent. But that story will get fuller treatment elsewhere.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/germanys-bare-headed-brouhaha/

The outcry over remarks made on Saturday by the German government’s first-ever anti-Semitism commissioner, Felix Klein, is peculiar. If Klein were not truthful about his assessment that Jews who wear their kippot [skullcaps] in public in Germany these days are at risk, he would be doing a disservice to his post.

Nor did his comment about anti-Semitism in Germany “showing its ugly face more openly” emerge in a vacuum. No, his mentioning that calling someone a Jew is once again being used as an insult—even in schools with no Jewish students—followed and was reflective of a worrisome report released last Tuesday by the German Interior Ministry. According to the report, anti-Semitic hate crimes rose by nearly 20 percent in 2018 from the previous year, and the number of physical attacks against Jews in 2018 had increased to 69 from 37 in 2017.

Admitting that his opinion on the matter had “unfortunately changed compared with what it used to be,” Klein also acknowledged that strategies for combating the phenomenon would have to be forged.

Klein was immediately called to task by Jewish leaders at home and abroad. In a Facebook post on Sunday—in German, English and Hebrew—Berlin’s chief rabbi, Yehuda Teichtal, wrote: “The combating of anti-Semitism is a top priority so it is appreciated that this is being addressed by top representatives of the government. At the same time, the KIPA [sic] is a clear symbol of Jewish identity and should be worn with PRIDE. Of course all the necessary security precautions need to be taken, at the same time, hiding our identity was never the solution, we should be always be PROUD of who we are. AM ISRAEL CHAI [the people of Israel live].”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-promise-and-peril-of-modis-triumph-11558989753

Narendra Modi’s triumphant re-election as India’s prime minister may not have been a shock—ever since Indian forces retaliated in February against Pakistan-based attacks in Kashmir, the contest had been moving in his direction—but it does represent an important tipping point in Indian history, and therefore in world history.

As Tunku Varadarajan wrote in these pages last week, India is turning decisively away from the Western ideological foundations of its founding fathers. The secularist and liberal beliefs that grounded Indian politics during the long era of Congress Party domination have lost majority support. Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalism can do what the Congress vision no longer can: assemble a consensus that makes India governable.

A dedication to secular liberal values imported from abroad is weak tea for holding large political agglomerations together, and the Congress vision of India was dying long before Mr. Modi administered the coup de grâce. Before the new era of majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party governments, India was turning into a country without a majority. Regional- and caste-based parties had eaten away at the Congress consensus. The complicated coalition building necessary to form a majority was frustrating effective governance. Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalism for now offers a collective identity that can mobilize Indians across the subcontinent, defeating both the dying secularism of the Congress Party and the more parochial visions of the regional and caste parties.