This commentary appears in The European Conservative’s forthcoming 132-page guide to the June 2024 European Elections—available next week.

By Mick HUME

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It was telling that the right-wing populist party that surged in Portugal’s general election in March 2024 is called Chega! (Enough!). The message millions of Europeans seem set to deliver to the EU establishment in the June elections is that they have all had enough of being dictated to.

The populist democratic revolt is spreading into almost every EU member state, upending the political order with the rise of sovereigntist and conservative parties—even in such bastions of socialism and social democracy as Portugal and the Netherlands.

Meanwhile in the traditional pillars of EU power, the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) is running second in national polls, and National Rally (RN) leader Marine Le Pen is talked up as favourite to replace French president Emmanuel Macron.

Member states are experiencing a common populist backlash against the increasing centralisation of power in the EU, and the consequent destructive impact on the lives of Europeans of everything from mass migration to the Green Deal.

The tractor convoys blockading roads and cities everywhere, as angry farmers protest against the ideologically driven Net Zero dogma destroying their livelihoods and communities, embody the Europe-wide character of the uprising.

Earlier this year, as protesting farmers lit tire bonfires and clashed with riot police outside the European Parliament, one banner on display in Brussels captured the complaint of millions today. It declared: “This is not the Europe we want.”

No, this is not the Europe we want. It is the political Europe built by EU elites who believe that they know better than, and what is best for, the rest of us. Elites who prize their ‘ever-closer Union’ over national sovereignty and democracy; who impose high-minded green austerity policies to ‘save the planet’ with no thought about the damage they will do to the lives of millions on the ground; who force Europe’s nations to accept mass migration, not so much because they love migrants, but because they hate national borders and the notion of a sovereign people having control of their own destiny.

This is the Europe that has led many Europeans to reject the old political parties that built it. Power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of unelected Brussels bureaucrats and the big players.

‘More Europe’—and thus less say for the peoples of Europe—is the elites’ answer to everything. And millions have had Enough!

The EU political establishment and its allies in the media have united in a campaign to denigrate and delegitimize the democratic revolt of our time. They want to turn populism into a dirty word, declaring it a ‘virus’ against which democracy must be vaccinated. They brand any political movements outside the narrow mainstream as ‘far-right’ extremists, who should be cancelled, censored, banned or locked up.

They seek to play down the populist revolt, claiming for example that the protesting farmers are unworldly peasants exploited by extremists. One alleged expert even suggested that the farmers fly LGBT rainbow flags from their tractors, presumably to ward off ‘far-right’ bloodsuckers just as garlic was supposed to keep vampires at bay.

The EU elites will also seize every opportunity to declare ‘the end of populism,’ smugly announcing that the return of arch Eurocrat Donald Tusk as Poland’s prime minister last year means ‘the adults are back in charge’ and the naughty children have been sent to bed.

Yet somehow national populism refuses to lie down, repeatedly waking again with a new burst of life in one European country after another. Because contrary to the slanders put about by its detractors, the populist surge is not the invention of political ‘extremists.’ If anything, the peoples of Europe are ahead of the populist parties in their anger at the establishment. Politicians did not organise the farmers’ protests or the protests against mass migration that have been bursting out all over the continent, but have been running to catch up.

We are witnessing the public eruption of a deep-seated divide between two Europes. There is the one centred on the elitist citadels of Brussels, Luxembourg City or Frankfurt, where EU commissioners, judges and central bankers issue their rules and edicts. And then there is the real one, where millions of Europeans have to deal with the consequences for their way of life.

That ever-clearer divide ensures that populism is not going away anytime soon. There is nothing superficial or short-term about this people’s revolt. It has been coming for a long time.

Democracy, as invented by the Ancient Athenians, had two constituent parts: demos–the people–and kratos–power or control. Since democracy re-emerged in its modern form in Europe, oligarchies have done all in their power to keep the demos and kratos as far apart as possible.

Since its inception as the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952, then the European Economic Community from 1956, to the European Union since 1993, the EU elite has sought to separate control in Europe from any expression of the popular will.

Power in Brussels has been built into a top-down system of control by unaccountable commissions, courts and civil servants, a system which former European Commission President Jacques Delors, the patrician ‘architect’ of the European Union, described as “benign despotism.”

Today the EU establishment seeks to redefine democracy to mean whatever suits its narrow interests. It thus ends up trying to defend ‘democracy’ from the demos itself–the wrong sort of people, who insist on voting for the wrong sort of parties, the populists.

The EU’s idea of ‘democracy’ is that member states vote to do as they are told by Brussels. If not, they can expect to be punished. As European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen warned before the last Italian elections, if a “democratic government is willing to work with us,” things will be fine. But, “If things go in a difficult direction, I’ve spoken about Hungary and Poland, we have the tools.”

In other words, if you vote in the wrong direction—as Italians did by electing Giorgia Meloni prime minister—you are no longer considered democratic in Brussels. And you can expect to be subjected to the same ‘tools’—legal blackmail dressed up as the ‘rule of law’—as Hungary and previously Poland, where democratically-elected conservative governments have been denied billions in EU funding, for failing to follow Brussels’ orders on migration or family policy.

This dangerous trend has gone furthest in Germany, where there are serious discussions about the need to ‘defend democracy’ by banning the Afd. In order to save the people from themselves, elitists would thus deny millions of Germans the right to vote for the party of their choice.

The same trends are evident across the EU as the June elections approach. The big adverts outside the European Parliament in Brussels, urging EU citizens to ‘Use Your Vote’ would be more accurate if they warned ‘Use Your Vote Responsibly—or Else…’

It is time to go on the offensive and stand up for national democracy and sovereignty. Whenever they try to treat populism as a dirty word, I recall the definition of the p-word in the Cambridge Dictionary: “Populism—political ideas and activities that are intended to get the support of ordinary people by giving them what they want.” Giving the people what they want! Outrageous! That idea may fill the EU elites with horror. But we should surely embrace populism as another word for democracy.

And when they try to dismiss populist protests as ‘far right,’ we should turn the argument around by identifying with the causes they have sought to smear.

So, is it now ‘far right’ to hate the genocidal Islamists of Hamas and protest against antisemitism in Europe? Is it now ‘far right’ to support Europe’s farmers fighting to defend their livelihoods and feed the continent? Is it now ‘far right’ to insist on the biological fact that there are only two sexes and that men cannot demand to be treated as women? Or is it now ‘far right’ for parents and others to protest about children being exposed to pornographic drag shows?

We should make it clear that we are going to continue standing for these and many other principles, no matter what dirty names they call us.

If we are bold, Europe’s elections can be a great opportunity to strike a blow against the Brussels oligarchy. Conservatives will need to put their faith in the people and democracy, as our best hope of striking back against the anti-democratic institutions that are controlled by the other side. The recent referendum result in Ireland, where the people shocked their rulers by rejecting the Dublin elites’ woke proposal to write the family out of the constitution, should fill us with hope.

Five years ago, in the 2019 EU elections, I was part of a small group in an office above a London shop, running the campaign for the Brexit Party. Six weeks after Nigel Farage launched the party, we won those elections with more votes than the Tory and Labour parties put together. Proof that, even in staid old Britain, anything can happen in politics these days. Five years later, as the cry of ‘Enough!’ and the demand to ‘take back control’ spread across Europe in 2024, the populist, democratic genie is not going back into the Brussels bottle.

Every political crisis now confirms that the real threat to European democracy, to the ability of people to control their own destiny, comes from above, not below. When The European Conservative launched our Democracy Watch column to track these dangerous trends, we made clear that, behind all the issues in every European election today, “there is a bigger, unspoken question: Who rules? Who is to decide the future of Europe? Will it be the centralising EU elites, or national governments? The peoples of Europe, or the technocrats of Brussels and the central bankers of Frankfurt?”

Who rules? That remains the real question on the ballot papers in June. Let’s try to ensure that the EU oligarchy gets an answer it won’t like.

Original article: The European Conservative