Asked and Answered

It is not clear why a chunk of the blue-collar working base has swung almost overnight from Left to Right, but clearly we are seeing the delayed detonation of two political time-bombs: rising unemployment and the growth of immigrant enclaves that resist assimilation. — The Telegraph

I am pleased to call the author of this line, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard , bloody brilliant, and you should go read his whole piece at once. The key is that the failure of the socialist left in Europe, however good and proper, nonetheless leaves Europe less sheltered than ever from its painful and long-postponed rendezvous with reality:

So, we may lose three or four governments in Europe in coming days or weeks — or even worse, they may survive. The drama is unfolding as I feared. Half way through the depression, we are facing the exactly the sort of political disintegration that occurs in times of profound economic rupture.

[ . . . ] Don’t count on the political fabric of Europe holding together if our green shoots shrivel and die in the credit drought of the long hot rainless summer that lies ahead.

This is as I have suggested, and AE-P leaves us wondering something else I’ve gone on about elsewhere: who or what can step into the breach? Is a Europe that slips back into faction and fragmentation a ‘luxury’ that Europe, or the world, can afford? The answer to the second question still is no, and the answer to the first question still is France.