Upheaval in Europe -- I told you this was going to happen

Parties which oppose high immigration and Islam, and which support national sovereignty against EU encroachments, did very well in the recent European Parliament elections.  Calling such parties "far-right" is a thought-canceling MSM smear to discredit positions which they cannot challenge on the merits of the issues, and which are actually common and even majority views in Europe.  Viktor Orbán's Fidesz in Hungary, a true far-right party, actually lost support, seeing its worst results in nearly two decades.

If the rising movement has a common theme, it's traditional identity -- supporting the existing Western culture and values of each country against erosion by non-Western immigration and Islam, and defending national independence against the dominance of the EU.  These are imperatives which would quickly gain overwhelming majority support in the US as well, if our own country were facing Islamic immigration on the scale Europe is, and if it were part of some huge multi-national entity which bossed the elected US government around the way the EU does with its member states.  Calling such positions "far-right" merely blocks Americans from understanding what is really going on in our fellow Western democracies.

I've been saying it for years -- the fundamental sickness of European politics is that the parties there are determinedly oblivious to their voters' rising anger at high immigration, at the arrogant and often menacing presence of Islam, and at the European Union's meddlesome encroachments on national sovereignty.  The mainstream parties have had no response to these voters except to talk over them and call them names.  I've said all along that if voters could not get the mainstream parties to listen them, they'd take their votes and go to those who would listen, even if that meant supporting some unsavory characters.  Brexit was a warning, which the smug oblivious elites ignored.  The election in 2022 of supposedly "far-right" Giorgia Meloni as prime minister of Italy was another.  And now we have the results of last weekend's EU-wide elections.

The voters are telling their so-called leaders, we've had enough.  You have been fundamentally changing our societies against our will, and we're not going to take it any more.  Our tolerance for your arrogance is at an end.

Will the mainstream party politicians finally start to listen, humbly and respectfully, to their voters' concerns, and start to ask themselves how they got so far out of step with their people and how they can get back on track?  Or will they just double down on the same old name-calling and lecturing and sticking their fingers in their ears?

This may be their last chance before being swept away.  If Meloni won, Le Pen could win.  If Le Pen wins, the AfD could win next time.  (Note that the AfD did particularly well with young voters; in France, Italy, and other countries as well, the young are voting for anti-immigration parties in greater numbers than in the past.)

Throwing around epithets like "far-right" and "fascist" isn't going to work when those epithets are so obviously false.  Meloni has governed as a fairly conventional prime minister by European standards, while greatly strengthening anti-immigration policies in accordance with the democratically-expressed will of the people.  There's no reason to think that Le Pen or Wilders would be any different.  When you call everyone who disagrees with you "fascist" for long enough, people eventually realize that the word no longer has any meaning left when you're the one using it.

The options for the current tired old leadership are to listen to the people and change course, or be replaced by others who will do so.  Continuing the current policies of high immigration and coddling alien religious fanatics is not an option on the table.