In many nations of the European Union, the chickens are coming home to roost as what has been in some nations a decades-long bid to offset declining birthrates among the native population by importing immigrant laborers transforms the host countries.
Francois Hollande, Socialist Party candidate for the 2012 French presidential election, is seen in his car after a visit in Les Ulis, suburb Paris, April 7, 2012.
In the space of two weeks, three European governments have fallen, sending seismic shock-waves across the continent and calling into question the experiment that has consumed its elites for decades: the construction of a centralized, socialist superstate known as “Europe.”
It may just be that the foundering of the coalition government in the Netherlands, the repudiation of Nicholas Sarkozy in France and the plunging fortunes of the two main Greek parties represents more than a rejection of austerity measures dictated by Brussels at the behest of the Germans.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, these political developments are probably not going to end the creeping, sovereignty-crushing European venture or even mark the beginning of its demise. But they may just constitute the end of the beginning of the end of “Europe” as a single, transnational political enterprise.
To be sure, French voters elected socialist Francois Hollande, who favors the European Union and reflexively supports the vision of its founders that has seen it evolve from a trade pact to a community to proto-political union. Still, his electorate, like the Greeks and Dutch, wants no part of the EU’s main project at the moment – fiscal discipline and budgetary austerity.
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