If you were surprised by the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, you might want to brace yourself for the cartwheels of change about to roll across Europe.
Because of an unusual set of circumstances, ahead is an especially vote-heavy year with potentially heavy political casualties. Millions of people are heading to the polls, and many are in an agitated mood.
The lineup of elections and referendums is a wide-open opportunity for mass venting about the many frustrations of the past years: the migration crisis, the economic crisis, the bailouts, and fallout, in a flailing European Union.
Like Nov. 8 in the U.S. — and June 23 with Brexit — the succession of polls is also a chance to clobber the establishment.
Naturally, Europe’s anti-establishment protest parties stand to reap the benefits of the discontent.
At risk are some of Europe’s top leaders, now suddenly among the political walking dead.
By this time next year, the world’s most powerful gatherings could look very different. Donald Trump aside, rarely before has the prospect for change in the international arena been so sweeping.
Even before Trump’s triumph, Europe’s political house looked set for an overhaul. The winds of change were already blowing in France, Germany, Austria, Italy and elsewhere.
Gales in opposition sails
But Trump’s winning bluster is now putting gales in the sails of Europe’s populists and nationalists riding the anti-establishment mood.
“The French reaction was: absolutely, this is a huge boost to [populist National Front leader] Marine Le Pen,” says Xenia Wickett, the head of the U.S. and Americas program at Chatham House, an international affairs think-tank.
“The prospect of a Le Pen government in Paris is very, very real.”
Le Pen’s is an anti-immigrant, anti-establishment party. She was one of the first nationalist leaders to congratulate Trump, while her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the party, tweeted, “Today, the United States. Tomorrow, France. Bravo!”
Once on the fringes of France’s political landscape, Le Pen could be one of two candidates in the final run-off for president — and in light of Trump’s victory, France’s elite are now openly musing about the possibility she could actually win next spring, unseating Francois Hollande.
But the votes that will initially set the tone for Europe’s coming year are happening far sooner, and on a single day.
On Dec. 4, Italy and Austria go to the polls. Neither would normally be on Europe’s agenda this late in the year — putting them squarely, and perhaps ominously, in the American election’s wake.
Austria’s contest is a rerun of an earlier, close presidential vote, and it’s expected that Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party will prevail. That would make him the first elected far-right leader in Western Europe since 1945.
Referendum in Italy
Italy’s vote is a referendum initially scheduled for the fall. On the table is a package of constitutional reforms that Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has proposed to streamline lawmaking.
But because of growing anger over the migration crisis — Italy has become the top destination for asylum seekers — as well as over corruption and dangerously high unemployment, the vote is being seen as a plebiscite on Renzi’s performance. So far it looks like he might lose — and that might bring down his government.
Waiting in the wings is the Five Star Movement, a protest party that wants curbs on migration and a referendum on dumping the euro.
Also at risk are several other leaders and governments, some of whom have been around for the better part of a decade.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s popularity and her party have been hurt by the migration crisis and her decision to allow hundreds of thousands of mostly Syrians to enter the country last year.
Her Christian Democratic Union saw support plummet in local elections this year. The beneficiary was again an anti-immigrant party on the rise. The right-wing Alternative for Germany is expected to do well in next year’s national election, too.
Trump’s ‘patriotic spring’
In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ anti-Islam and anti-immigrant Freedom Party stands to build on the back of the disillusionment. He may not form the next government after the March vote, but his party’s influence is expected to grow.
He calls Trump’s victory the latest episode of a “patriotic spring.”
While many of these parties are inspired by Trump’s win, it was actually a protest party on this side of the Atlantic that formed the best and perhaps worst model for harnessing the growing malcontent in the West.
The United Kingdom Independence Party, under Nigel Farage, had very little chance of forming a government. But it managed to help force a referendum and motivate the disillusioned to bring Britain to vote to leave the EU — and change the face of Europe.
“I’m the catalyst for the downfall of the Blairites, the Clintonites, the Bushites, and all these dreadful people who work hand in glove with Goldman Sachs and everybody else, have made themselves rich, and ruined our countries,” he said last week.
It is certainly language that is resonating across this continent and across the pond.
Farage, Trump, and others are tapping into a rich vein of discontent that will yet produce many more surprising headlines.
mayo615 
The Guardian
Source: Boris Johnson is a clown who has united the EU against Britain | Jean Quatremer | Opinion | The Guardian
Friday 25 November 2016 13.36 GMTLast modified on Friday 25 November 2016 14.36 GMT
Britain can be proud of itself. Once again, it had already shown the world the way. In propelling Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage to triumph on 23 June, it demonstrated well before 8 November that Donald Trump was nothing new.
In fact foolishness, vulgarity, inconsistency, and irresponsibility seem actually to be British inventions that have been painstakingly copied – once more – by the Americans.
The age of such drab characters as Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron is over. No more, it appears, must we suffer leaders equipped with a brain and a sense of the common interest. The hour of the political clown has come.
In a few short weeks, Boris Johnson, the former journalist – for whom facts were never an obstacle likely to get in the way of a good story – has succeeded in squandering what little sympathy and understanding was left in Europe for a Great Britain embroiled in the mess of this referendum.
It is quite some diplomatic achievement to have succeeded in uniting, as never before, the 27 remaining members of the European Union – including Germany and the Netherlands – who are all now firmly together in deciding to do the UK no favours whatsoever.
It will be a “hard Brexit” not because that is what Theresa May wants, but because her future ex-partners consider they have no choice faced with a Great Britain so resolutely indecisive.
Johnson has deeply annoyed his continental partners by displaying, firstly, his complete ignorance of the union (perhaps not altogether surprising if you knew him as a “journalist” in Brussels, as I did). According to his very personal interpretation of the European treaties, it is “bollocks” to say that the four fundamental freedoms (free movement of people, goods, services and capital) are inseparable.
“Everybody now has it in their head that every human being has some fundamental God-given right to move wherever they want,” he said earlier this month.
For Johnson, here there can of course be a “dynamic trade relationship and we will take back control of our borders, but we remain an open and welcoming society”.
Yet the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, warned him very clearly as early as September. “We’ll happily send Her Majesty’s foreign minister a copy of the Lisbon treaty,” he said. “He can then read about the fact that there’s a certain connection between the single market and the four freedoms. At a pinch, I can talk about it in English.”
Schäuble reiterated on 18 November that there “will be no à la carte menu. There is only the whole menu or none.” His Dutch colleague Jeroen Dijsselbloem, meanwhile, hammered the message home: Johnson is spouting stuff that is “intellectually impossible” and “politically unachievable”.
Nevertheless, Johnson repeats his mantra ad infinitum: he is right, and the others are all wrong. The problem, however, is that at the end of the day it is the others who will decide. And if you want something from someone, it is generally wiser to avoid telling them they are an idiot.
But the foreign secretary adds clumsiness to ignorance. Johnson – who has, remember, written a biography of Winston Churchill – does not seem to grasp that it takes a mind with a rare degree of finesse to be able to combine humour and diplomacy.
His quip that the Italians would sell less prosecco to Britain if the UK was not able to stay in the single market not only created a diplomatic incident, but underlined the obvious weakness of the British argument: if the EU risks losing access to a market of 64 million Brits, Britain will lose access to a market of 440 million Europeans.
And last but not least, Johnson, who himself raised the spectre of hordes of Turkish citizens arriving in the UK if it stayed in the union, now steps up as as the most ardent defender there is of Ankara joining the EU – even if it reintroduces the death penalty.
“I can no longer respect this,” raged the normally placid Manfred Weber, leader of the conservative EPP group in the European parliament. “When you want to leave a club, you have no say anymore in the long-term future of this club.”
A famous French screenwriter Michel Audiard coined a phrase in the early 1960s that applies perfectly to Johnson: “Les cons, ça ose tout, c’est même à ça qu’on les reconnaît.” This means, roughly: “Fools” (to choose a relatively inoffensive rendering) “will try anything – that’s how you know they’re fools.”
The foreign secretary, who like Trump is no fan of beating about the bush, will pardon my familiarity. Or perhaps not.