Some voters say 14 years of the Conservative Party rule, following a policy of austerity, has ‘wrecked Britain’. Outgoing prime minister Rishi Sunak. Reuters
As per Time Magazine, 3.4 million of the 4.3 million in poverty were born after 2010.
Former prime minister Gordon Brown dubbed these children the ‘austerity generation.’
“Yet in almost every single year of the past decade, even as their need has been mounting, the government’s support for children has been spiraling downwards, each year more difficult than the year before as, with almost surgical precision,” Brown wrote in The Guardian.
Binish Syed Qureshi, who grew up in Salford in South Manchester, told Time Magazine she can’t afford higher education.
The teenager, set to turn 18, is working at a fast food outlet.
“I’m honestly underpaid,” Qureshi said. “I feel a bit lost in life.”
Things have been particularly bleak for young people.
Time Magazine quoted Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s cost of living tracker as saying that 92 per cent of households with a young person reported going without essentials between 2022 and 2023.
Meanwhile, 9 of 10 people between 15 and 24 now count having enough money to cover basic needs as an aspiration in life.
A TSB’s Money Confidence Barometer survey in December 2022 found that young people are seven times more likely than their grandparents to have taken out new or additional debt in the past 12 months – or expect to do so in the next 12 months.
“We’ve become the third world country now. We were a first-world country,” one frustrated voter told Al Jazeera.
How Europe went right
The far-right caused a political earthquake in Europe in June after surging in the polls.
The elections, which are held every five years, are a critical measure of public sentiment and have long-term implications for EU policies and governance.
France’s Emmanuel Macron’s party went down to the far-right National Rally party.
“I’ve heard your message, your concerns, and I won’t leave them unanswered,” Macron said.
A joyous Le Pen, whose National Rally won over 30 per cent of the vote, said, “We’re ready to turn the country around, ready to defend the interests of the French, ready to put an end to mass immigration,” Le Pen declared, reflecting the far-right’s rallying cry across Europe.
Marine Le Pen, French far-right leader and far-right Rassemblement National (National Rally – RN) party candidate, deliver a speech after partial results in the first round of the early French parliamentary elections in Henin-Beaumont, France, June 30, 2024. File Image/Reuters
In Germany, support for Olaf Scholz’s center-left Social Democrats sank as the far-right Alternative for Germany sprung into second place.
AfD leader Alice Weidel said after the results, “After all the prophecies of doom, after the barrage of the last few weeks, we are the second strongest force.”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz had acknowledged the dismal performance of the three governing parties that are part of his center-left government.
He added that the success of the far-right in the European election in Germany and other European countries was worrisome.
“The election result was bad for all three governing parties. No one is well advised to simply go back to business as usual,” Scholz told reporters in Berlin.
“At the same time, however, it is also important that we do our work, ensure that our country becomes modern, that it moves forward and, incidentally, prepare for the fact that approval will continue to grow so that the results of this work can also be put to the vote at the next general election and the citizens have confidence in the work,” the chancellor added.
In Italy, Georgia Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy emerged as the strongest party – setting her up as a possible bridge maker, if not kingmaker, in Europe.
Brothers of Italy won 28.8 per cent of the Italian vote in two days of polling in Italy that boosted their majority from national elections less than two years ago.
The results also confirmed Meloni’s dominance in the governing coalition with right-wing anti-migrant Lega, led by Matteo Salvini, and the center-right Forza Italia party, led by Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani since founder Silvio Berlusconi’s death last year.
Forza Italia won 9.6 per cent of the vote, and Lega plunged to 9 per cent.
The results forced a spooked Macron to call snap elections in France.
“I have decided to give you back the choice of our parliamentary future through the vote. I am therefore dissolving the National Assembly,” said Macron.
The gamble has thus far not paid off after the National Rally surged into the lead in the first round of legislative elections.
The RN won a third of votes in polls that witnessed a historically high turnout.
Surveys have shown that Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) is set to emerge as the single-largest party and Macron’s centrists could be relegated to a distant third.
The second round is slated to be held on 7 July.
If this continues, France will be in unchartered territory.
What do experts say?
Analysts told CNBC people in the UK were just ‘fed up’ of Tory rule.
“There’s a lot of distrust in conservative politicians and voters are going to look forward to a break in the chaos that the Tories had brought them,” Anealla Safda, Europe Editor, Al Jazeera said.
“We’ve had 14 years of conservatives. All the economic indicators except unemployment are down. Inflation is at a record. Young people are struggling to get homes. The NHS queues are at record levels.”
Experts say that the left gaining ground in the UK and the right surging in Europe have one thing in common – a demand for change and the economy.
“There’s an anti-incumbency mood again in Europe,” Dan Stevens, professor of politics at Exeter University, told CNBC.
Stevens added that regardless of the incumbent “there’s just a general dissatisfaction and want for change.”
Christopher Granville, managing director of EMEA and global politics at TS Lombard, told CNBC, “If you have very poor economic performance, then you would expect the political pendulum to swing, and when it swings it, it goes to the other side from where it is at present … It is swinging because people are hard up and aggravated. It’s as simple as that.”
European Union flags fly outside the European Commission headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, March 1, 2023. File Image/Reuters
“Of course, there’s a huge debate about the extent to which the respective governments are responsible for this poor economic performance … You can argue that they’ve been disastrously incompetent or you can argue that they’ve been innocent victims of external shocks, such as the energy crisis provoked by the war in Ukraine, the cost of living crisis etc,” Granville added.
“Wherever you stand on that debate, the reality is the same, that the voters wants to swing the pendulum.”
Indeed, The National quoted an April 2024 report from Carnegie Europe scholars as saying, “For decades, the traditional mainstream parties of the centre right and centre left have been losing ground, while anti-establishment parties have been gaining support.”
“According to research by the University of Amsterdam, 32 per cent of voters opted for anti-establishment parties in 2021, up from 12 per cent in the early 1990s. Radical-right parties make up about half of this share, and their support has risen faster than that of any other group.”
Experts also say that right-wing parties in Europe have managed to reel in voters outside their natural constituencies.
“Right wing and hard-right parties are not only winning because of immigration, yes, that’s their signature topic but they have been able to win because they attract a coalition of voters voting for them for different reasons,” Sofia Vasilopoulou, professor of European politics at King’s College London, told CNBC.
“They have a number of groups who are what I call ‘peripheral’ voters who tend to vote with them because of a lack of trust in politics, lack of trust in institutions, fatigue with the status quo,” she said.
“It’s a kind of a protest against politics in general, and there’s quite a lot of voters that they get because of that.”
Anand Menon, professor of European Politics and Foreign Affairs at King’s College London, said British voters were about to see a marked change in political atmosphere from the tumultuous “politics as pantomime” of the last few years.
“I think we’re going to have to get used again to relatively stable government, with ministers staying in power for quite a long time, and with government being able to think beyond the very short term to medium-term objectives,” he said.
With inputs from agencies
Source link : https://www.firstpost.com/explainers/uk-goes-left-as-europe-veers-right-heres-what-it-means-13789841.html
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Publish date : 2024-07-05 07:00:00
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