The European Election Won’t Break the EU
Even if anti-establishment forces win a third of seats in the European Parliament, they’re unlikely to cooperate enough to cause major disruption.
The European Parliament in Strasbourg, France.
Photographer: Jasper Juinen/BloombergJust how anti-European Union will the next European parliament be? Latest polls suggest that that populist, often euroskeptic parties, could do well enough in May’s vote to get a disruptive blocking minority — but that would require an improbable degree of cooperation on their part.
Given the difficulty of placing dozens of parties in 27 countries on a single political spectrum and then gauging their strength more than three months before the election, there is, understandably, a range of projections. Then there’s the added complication of matching up how the parties perform domestically with which umbrella groups they join in the European Parliament.