The State of the European Union. The European Parliament faces its most important elections yet

RIGHT-WING POPULISM IN THE EU: A THREAT TO THE INTEGRATION PROCESS 49 grand coalition during Rutte’s second term: its support crumbled in the 2017 elections from nearly 20% to 5.6%. Germany Of the five states examined, Germany (still) seems by far the most stable. The country has seen the highest growth rates and the greatest reduction in unemployment since the crisis. Wages are also growing in real terms once more. However, a problematic issue, and a key factor explaining the rise of right-wing pop- ulism, is the change in patterns of distribution and the increasing perception of socio-econom- ic inequality. The bottom 40% of earners have hardly seen any increase in income over the last twenty years. There is a clear fear among the working class and the lower middle class of so- cial decline due to the effects of globalisation. Furthermore, a large proportion of the popula- tion in the former East Germany feels like they are second-class citizens in comparison to West Germans. In terms of the political stability of the coun- try, the two parties of the grand coalition still dominated the landscape until recently, but they suffered severe losses in the latest federal elec- tion in 2017 (a total of 14 percentage points). In Germany too, there is a growing impression among part of the population that the large po- litical parties are increasingly unable to resolve the country’s problems satisfactorily. In the state elections in Bavaria and Hesse in 2018, the CDU/ CSU (Christian Democrats) and the SPD (Social Democratic Party) both suffered double-digit losses. In the meantime, opinion polls for the federal elections showed that the CDU/CSU had slipped to the mid 20s, and the SPD sometimes dropped as low as 14%. The AfD (Alternative for Germany) entered the federal parliament for the first time in 2017 with 12.7% of the vote (see Funke/Mudra 2018). Without doubt, their success was fuelled by the fourth explanatory factor: the refugee crisis. If the culture of wel- come was still dominant in 2015, this has long since been weakened by growing scepticism among most citizens, in view of the significant flow of immigrants. The centre parties have re- acted to this situation with policies to seal off the country and carry out deportations (EU- Turkey agreement: more states are declared to be safe third countries). They have also increas- ingly taken on the rhetoric of the AfD on the issue of refugees. Right-wing populism has still been kept in check in Germany to a greater extent than in the other countries, partly because of economic and political stability, and also because of the historical and cultural explanatory factor. In con- trast with France, and particularly Austria, fas- cism has been critically processed in the Federal Republic of Germany since the time of the stu- dent movement and the period of democratic reform introduced by Willy Brandt. There is still a strong barrier in Germany to prevent election of parties that relativise the atrocities committed under the Nazis. The rise of right-wing populism, growing political instability and the consequences for the upcoming European Parliament elections This analysis of several countries has not just shown the growing strength of right-wing populism; it also reveals a growing level of in- stability in the party system in the countries examined. This trend is most striking in Italy and the Netherlands, but the systems in France

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