The European Union is bleeding from a thousand wounds.
Despite some optimistic forecasts, its crisis is not over; its economies are fragile with very modest, if any, promises of better future, with significant unemployment, particularly among the young, soaring inequality, social exclusion and poverty. In the east, an increasingly aggressive Russia has been rewriting the continent’s borders, in almost total impunity: in the west, David Cameron has won elections on an agenda that openly questions the European construction.
In the heart of Europe, in Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz government has systematically dismantled the democratic political system and openly mocks fundamental European values. All over the continent, increasingly anti-European, radical right-wing nationalist parties, some with bluntly racist, xenophobe ideology keep gaining ground and imposing their demands and rhetoric on mainstream politics. In several countries they have already entered into Parliament; they threaten to become a decisive political power in France, come back reinforced in Austria and have just formed a bloc inside the European Parliament that will give them increased resources and public space.
In what has become the EU’s principal head-ache, Greece, the latest events forecast a dramatic outcome. In the South, just on the other side of the Mediterranean, the beautiful promises of the Arab spring were crushed and the whole region is suffocated in bloodshed, remodeled dictatorships, ruinous civil wars and an efficient, devastating war-machine, ISIS. Thousands of desperate people flee this situation and intend to cross to Europe in hope of finding a better life or sheer survival and thousands of them die on the way.
How does the European Union react to these grave challenges that are threatening its very existence? It issues lukewarm warnings to Russia, promises to accommodate Britain as much as possible, scolds Orbán, gets alarmed about the propagation of extremism and proposes to “resolve” the problem of illegal immigrants by increasing the budget for border protection and preventing refugees to reach its shores.