More and more Europeans are keen on destroying the EU from the inside

February 25, 2014 Leave a comment

More and more Europeans are keen on destroying the EU from the inside

By Jason Karaian @jkaraian

February 17, 2014

We have just passed the 100-day mark until elections will be held for the European parliament. According to the latest polls, the self-hating parliament, as the head of a prominent think tank puts it, is about to do even more self-harm. Across the EU, voters are flocking to euroskeptic parties whose platforms emphasize taking back powers ceded to Brussels, if not dismantling the bloc entirely.

According to election-tracking site Electionista, which helpfully collects all of the latest poll data in an online spreadsheet, these mostly rightwing parties are poised to make big gains from their previous showings:

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Does it matter? Insurgents from the political fringe have always been better represented in the European parliament than at the national level, thanks to low turnout and the perception that votes for the obscure, distant institution present an opportunity to protest without serious consequences.

But what’s different this time around is that the rightwing insurgents seem serious about teaming up (pdf), which would give them more clout in the parliament. At the same time, the parliament has acquired more power and prominence, not least the ability for the largest party group to pick the next president of the European Commission, the EU’s influential executive arm.

But even if the anti-EU populists double their ranks in the parliament, from around a tenth of seats today to perhaps a fifth after the elections, it won’t be enough to outnumber the mainstream groups. What’s more, anti-EU parties have a checkered history (pdf) of cooperation, so internal cohesion is far from certain.

A right turn, and the road ahead

Still, there are still important consequences of the European parliament’s lurch to the euroskeptic right. In the European parliament, a sizable share of representatives bent on the EU’s demise will put the onus on mainstream parties to limit their bickering, lest nothing gets done and the obstructionists win by default. This could redefine the debate over the EU’s development, pitting those who would deepen it against those who would destroy it; a lot of nuance is lost when legislation is pitched in such stark terms.

At the national level, leaders may fear that voters will get a taste for voting against the establishment beyond the European parliament. The British Conservative Party’s promise for a referendum on EU membership reflects this worry, as the far-right UK Independence Party steadily picks off its supporters. The recent anti-immigration referendum in Switzerland, with a similar vote in the works in Norway, provides additional fodder for rightwing parties inside the EU to agitate for similar initiatives at home.

A lot can happen between now and May, particularly for insurgent political parties that are combustible at the best of times. But what is clear is that the European parliament is no longer an irrelevance, and its upcoming elections will be one of the European project’s biggest tests to date.

Filed under Macro Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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