The climate crisis and immigration are the focus of the debate ahead of the next European elections. They are the two issues that most concern the 369 million Europeans called to the polls next June.
The latest survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations, which La Vanguardia publishes exclusively in Spanish, paints a very different picture than five years ago.
So, during the last campaign for the European Parliament, the debate was dominated by Brexit and Trump's election. The populists advocated leaving the EU and the majority parties advocated strengthening it.
Now, however, the debate is marked by fear and anxiety. Six out of ten Europeans, according to the Eurobarometer, believe that their country is moving in the wrong direction. Many voters fear that their governments, including that of the EU, are not capable of solving the five crises they have suffered over the last fifteen years: the climate crisis, the immigration crisis, the health crisis with the pandemic, the security crisis with the war on Ukraine, and the economic one with international financial tensions.
“Many of these Europeans experienced these crises as an existential threat,” explain Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard, authors of the study. All five of them conditioned the policy of European governments and none of them have been surpassed.
The fear of their reproduction will decide the vote much more than the traditional border between left and right. This is so, as Krastev and Leonard argue, because “the parties on both sides of this ideological divide converge on many issues, even the most controversial ones like immigration.”
The survey was carried out in eleven EU countries, plus the United Kingdom and Switzerland. The crisis that most worries is the climate, followed by immigration, health and economic instability. Some 70 million Europeans point to one of these crises as the one that has had the most impact on them and, therefore, conditioned their vision of the future. Immigration is a priority for some 58 million people and the war in Ukraine (security) for 49.
Immigration is the most worrying crisis for Germans, Ukraine is for Poles and Estonians, while economic turbulence worries, above all, Italians and Portuguese. The Spanish put health before any other crisis and the French, the climate.
Krastev and Leonard talk about five tribes, each with its preferred crisis.
The immigration tribe will vote to the right and the extreme right. These are older people with less academic training, who have memories of the Cold War, support strengthening the armies and want to stop the energy transition.
The climate crisis tribe is made up, above all, of young people and those with a university degree. While they are concerned, above all, with the future of the planet and advocate international cooperation, members of the immigration tribe are concerned about the loss of identity and put national interest before community interest.
There are, therefore, two very defined sides, with solid electoral bases: those concerned about the future of the planet and those fearful that Europe will cease to be white and Christian.
The fear of immigration, curiously, is overcome with a conservative government in power, although the problem has not been resolved. Meloni, for example, won the elections in Italy on an anti-immigration platform and now this crisis is of little concern. And the same thing happens in the United Kingdom since Brexit, although now there is more immigration. It is clear that perception is almost everything.
The last elections in the Netherlands pitted the immigration tribe against the climate tribe and the extreme right won over the left-wing coalition. A similar pulse will also occur in the European ones.
