What Doesn’t Make Sense About the EU Elections

By Bruce Bawer

You’ve almost surely seen the famous photograph taken from space of the Koreas at night. North Korea is almost totally dark, South Korea is bright with lights. In one image, it conveys the dramatic difference between communism and capitalism.

Perhaps the most striking image to emerge from the elections for the European Parliament, the results of which began to be announced late on June 9, was a map of France showing which parts of the country had voted for President Emmanuel Macron’s ruling Renaissance party and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, which calls for radical changes in immigration policy. It was a very simple image. Paris was like a bright yellow sun, reflecting support for Macron; all the rest of the country, with the exception of a few tiny yellow dots here and there indicating smaller urban areas — like extraordinarily distant stars — was purple, like the night, denoting support for the National Rally.

Almost as fascinating was the German map. If you didn’t know otherwise, you’d have thought it was a Cold War-era map of West and East Germany. The east was almost entirely blue, showing that the majority vote in that part of the country was for the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany; the west was nearly entirely black, reflecting support for the ruling coalition consisting of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) and the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU).

The map of Italy was interesting, too. The south went solidly for the populist Five-Star Movement, while most of the north went for the Lega Nord, also populist. The sole exception was the notoriously left-wing Tuscany (Florence, Pisa, Siena), which supported the social-democratic Democratic Party. In Spain, the center-right European People’s Party took most of the country, with left-wing parties winning majorities only in a couple of regions, notably Catalonia (i.e. Barcelona). And in the Netherlands, the green-left-labor alliance (GL/PvdA) won the northern and central provinces (including the city of Amsterdam), except for the largely agricultural Flevoland, which went to Wilders’s Freedom Party, as did the three southern provinces bordering on Belgium.

Americans who are accustomed to thinking of their country in terms of red and blue states — and of blue cities located in the heart of red states — will understand the stark divisions represented on these maps. Then again, at least from my point of view, there are some things about the maps that can seem to be beyond understanding. How can it be that Parisians, whose city has arguably suffered more as a result of Islamic immigration than anyplace else in France, are more supportive of current policies than voters in the rest of the country? For heaven’s sake, after the election results were announced, there were furious protests in Paris — the city that experienced the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan terrorist shootings in 2015, that witnessed the still-mysterious fire that destroyed Notre Dame (one of many suspicious church fires that have taken place throughout France in recent years), and that has been turned, in large part, into a setting for sprawling immigrant encampments and open-air centers for midday Islamic prayer.

Same question about Germany. If you look at a map showing the population density of Muslims in Germany, it looks — again — exactly like a Cold War-era map of West and East Germany, with the western part being far more heavily Islamized (up til 9 percent Muslim or more) than the eastern part (less than 1 percent Muslim, except for Berlin, which is over 9 percent Muslim). So how is it that the east is so much more strongly anti-immigrant than the west?

Of course the Muslim vote itself is part of the answer. But the more important part of the explanation is the extraordinarily resilience of that inane and suicidal phenomenon known as political correctness. Or virtue signaling. Or, as I like to put it, utterly irrational Islamophilia. To watch a couple of videos of the post-election Paris demonstrations is to observe representatives of two distinct groups. One, angry young Muslim men — no surprise there. Two, elegant, respectable-looking non-Muslim women — the Gallic equivalents of the prosperous, left-wing, middle-aged, urban white females (the soccer moms, the chardonnay moms, the moms who enthuse over BLM and transgender ideology) who in the U.S. pose the greatest threat to the reelection of Donald Trump.

These are the same kinds of people who, ever since Oct. 7, have been taking to the streets every weekend in cities all over the West to condemn Israel and cheer on Hamas. Some of these chic Parisiennes, like their distaff ideological counterparts in cities like London, Florence, Barcelona, and Berlin, presumably live in affluent neighborhoods that are still largely insulated from the Muslim threat. Others have doubtless embraced political correctness so ardently, so irrationally — with, that is to say, an ardor bordering on the religious — that, even when confronted with the reality of increasing Islamic power, which plainly represents an existential threat to their own culture and freedom (including sexual freedom), can’t bring themselves to do anything other than to applaud it.

Which means that if the Europeans who are living in the most heavily Islamized parts of their continent — cities like Paris and Marseilles, Brussels and Rotterdam, London, and Bradford — are to be spared a full-scale Muslim takeover, it looks, ironically, as if the voters who will prevent that takeover and save their skins may well be the humble provincial folks who are Europe’s version of Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” — the farmers and other unsophisticated types whom the self-regarding inhabitants of the big cities look down upon and regard as unregenerate bigots. Interesting prospect, that.

First published in the American Spectator