The Rise of The Right In Europe Hints at Discontent

The votes across Europe have been counted, and the clear winners in the European Parliament elections are the parties who are pushing for the break-up of the body they’ll be working for.

Around a fifth of seats in the parliament are now held by hard-right anti-establishment or euroskeptic parties from countries including France, the U.K., the Netherlands and Denmark . And concerns are already being raised about how this might affect the economy of the European Union (EU).

The economic policies of those anti-establishment parties which have done well are often vague – or even non-existent. Many have been set up as single issue, and have attracted votes partly as a protest against mainstream political parties.

Take the U.K. Independence Party, who had the biggest share of the vote (in a 36 percent turnout) in the U.K.’s European elections.

The party’s economic spokesman, Stephen Woolfe, told CNBC Monday that he had been in the job six weeks and would only now begin to formulate the party’s economic policy ahead of a party conference in September.

UKIP’s taxation policy is an example of the party’s lack of clarity, veering between a flat tax and a general “simplification of the tax policy,” according to leader Nigel Farage. Richard Murphy, campaigner at Tax Research UK, has accused the UKIP platform of making “no sense at all.”

Farage himself had described the party’s previous manifesto for the 2010 U.K. general election as “drivel.”

via CNBC

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