The 'Far Right' Moves Nearer

But they still have their TV gigs, don't they? And Ofcom has no plans to do anything about that. Even though what they did - to receive compensation for promoting a medical product - is supposedly illegal.

~In such a world, the European election results are ...well, modestly encouraging. On the basis of mere exit polls, the Belgian Prime Minister has been forced to resign and the French President has been bounced into doing a Sunak - dissolving the National Assembly and calling a "snap election" for the end of the month. An election he is certainly going to lose, and very badly.

So the bigshots whooping it up at Normandy just a couple of days ago had a bad night: Macron's party got less than half the votes of Marine Le Pen's. Indeed, between her triumphant National Rally and M Zemour's ReconquĂȘte (the Reconquest party), what the BBC and even the Telegraph insist on calling the "far right" got just shy of forty per cent of the vote. (M Zemour's party is for those who think Mme Le Pen is no longer "far right" enough.) In Germany Olaf Scholz saw his party come third, behind the even more "far right" Alternative fĂŒr Deutschland. Over a million of Scholz's voters switched to the ooh-ever-so-far-right AfD.

So the "far right" are getting a lot nearer: maybe the Telegraph should try holding the telescope the right way round.

Instead, the media took consolation in finding the far-right rampage didn't go quite as far as it might: in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders' Freedom Party has gone from zero seats to six to emerge as the largest single Dutch party in the European Parliament - but all the experts are agreed that for some reason this is a wee bit of an under-performance.

Within the numbers are some interesting trends: Green parties did badly across the board, and in Germany significant numbers of their young voters switched to AfD. The question, as always, is whether these shifts are urgent enough to arrest the Continent's accelerating degeneration into a Eurabian dump - or whether it's a last half-hearted spasm before surrender to the inevitable.

But what is undeniable is that voters across the west are demanding more choices than their blinkered elites are willing to offer. Random example: "There was also less success for the far right," pronounced the Beeb, "in Belgium where the separatist Vlaams Belang lost out to the nationalist New-Flemish Alliance."

Like much of the BBC's reporting, this isn't quite accurate: Both the Vlaams Belang and the New Flemish Alliance are "separatist" and "nationalist". Both parties want to bust up Belgium and have an independent Flanders, but the NFA is more "centre-right" about its secessionist ambitions than the harder-core VB. This would not have been considered a normal electoral choice in the capital city of the European Union as recently as a decade ago.

Is there a way out for the Euro-princelings? As Marine Le Pen said last week, "You get the feeling Macron wants a war." There's a lot of that about.

~As I had cause to reflect after watching the seven-party UK election "debate" on the Beeb, Ofcom-approved "public discourse" isn't worth a tuppence three-farthing. Indeed, the purpose of Ofcom, "BBC Verify" and the various "disinformation" and "misinformation" units that now afflict us is to ensure that free speech gets hemmed in ever more tightly within parameters that ensure nothing of any consequence will ever be discussed. The most pitiful moment on Friday night came when Farage's riff on mass migration was received in stony silence and the Scots Nationalist bloke denounced him and said migrants were great and very necessary - and the crowd erupted into rapturous applause, cheering their own eclipse and the death of their nation. It is kind of impressive to see even a BBC audience willing to go down on the Titanic of multicultural illusions: we don't need no stinkin' lifeboats.

There is no point to Scots nationalism because there aren't going to be any Scots. In 2022, Scottish deaths outnumbered births by thirty per cent. The Scottish people don't need a nation because, on those trends, eventually you'll be able to fit 'em all into a suburban cul-de-sac. So whoever that SNP guy was has now come up with a new rationale - Scots nationalism that doesn't require any actual Scots: you're so touchy that you don't want to be in the same nation as the English, Irish and Welsh, so you want to leave it and be in the same nation as the Sudanese and Albanians.

In the end, it's all demography. The trans madness in which the present Scottish government is so invested is fascinating but ultimately a biological dead end: You can change all the boys into girls and all the girls into boys but in the end there aren't enough of either to alter the outcome. You're merely arguing about who'll be using which bathroom on the Oblivion Express.

Mark's international bestseller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. If you haven't read the book during its first seventeen years, well, you're missing a treat. It's still in print in hardback and paperback. (Buy it at a 77% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 47% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)

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Mark Steyn is an international bestselling author, a Top 41 recording artist, and a leading Canadian human rights activist. Among his books is "The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don't Say You Weren't Warned". (Buy it at a 49% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 67% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)