Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party (Partij Voor de Vrijheid, PVV) finished in second place, with 15% of the vote, in today’s European Parliament elections in The Netherlands. They finished behind only the Christian Democrats, the country’s lamestream conservative party, which took 20%. The Freedom Party’s 15% will get them four out of 25 Dutch seats in the EP.
The UK also voted today, and the outstanding showing for the PVV foretells of good news for the BNP. Stay tuned.
Unlike elections for seats in the British Parliament, where the first place finisher gets the seat even if it’s not by a majority vote, “winner take all” in American parlance or “first past the post” in British, thereby deterring votes for parties other than Labor and Tory, the MEP elections are condusive to non-lamestream parties, so nobody has to fear about throwing away their vote.
UPDATE 6/5: The BNP has done well in the UK’s local elections, and have in fact won three county council seats so far, that position is indeed similar to the American elected office of the same name. It won’t be until tomorrow how well the BNP did in the MEP vote.
UPDATE 6/8: BNP takes two MEP seats, one of which goes to party leader Nick Griffin himself. These victories will mean that Griffin, Andrew Brons, who won the other BNP seat, and the BNP itself will receive £4 million ($6.3 million at today’s exchange rates) of EP salaries, expense accounts, and public financing for the BNP in aggregate per year over the next several years.
Right wing parties did well in other countries, many taking MEP seats. Heck, Sweden’s Pirate Party (anti-copywrong extremism) got a seat. Overall, lamestream conservative parties gained, lamestream liberal parties lost.
When it wasn’t throwing smears and pejoratives at the BNP as if it had become the Daily Worker all of a sudden, the Daily Mail, good Tory Party shills that they are, dismissed BNP wins as a “protest vote” against Labor and Gordon Brown. This is a common canard trucked out by the lamestream media and body politic every time a right winger wins. This was their reaction when Pat Buchanan either won or showed strong seconds in Republican primaries when he ran for President as a Republican in 1992 and 1996. The trouble is, almost every British party save Labor gained votes. Why aren’t those protest votes against Labor and its PM? Hell, the GREEN PARTY doubled its MEP take compared to four years ago, and that’s not a protest vote? Actually, that is, I guess that its gain could be explained by white left-wing voters who figured the Labor party as hopeless in these elections. Even the UKIP, an aracial Euroskeptic party, finished ahead of Labor. As it is, I think the British media pumped up the UKIP to preempt the BNP. If not for that, the BNP might have won a lot more seats. But the scheme didn’t preclude them from winning seats, thankfully.
Geert Wilders’s PVV wound up with 17% of the vote.
UPDATE 6/8: At least in the context of this vote, the BNP drew most of its blood from Labor. If this is to be taken at face value, the Daily Mail can knock off its BNP playa’ hatin’, for whenever Gordon Brown finally accepts reality and calls for the elections which will see him lose his ass, one vote for the BNP will be one fewer vote for Labor, and in essence one vote for the Tories. But I don’t take this at face value, because the political calculus might work for elections like the MEPs that are conducive to smaller parties but won’t work for the upcoming PM/MP elections where winner takes all, and therefore discourages non-large parties. With LibLabCon flipping the BNP the bird in the last 24 hours with rude and hateful remarks, I get the feeling that a good percentage of BNP loyalist voters won’t vote, and those who might have fallen in line with either Labor or David Cameron will also tend to stay home. The only exception is if there is a constituency where the BNP has a chance to be first past the post.
UPDATE 6/13: AR has had several posts about the BNP successes in the last week, and I have read some comments that reminded me of something that I totally forgot, and which might not portend well for the BNP growing much beyond what it is now. What I’m about to say is going to seem alien to the American mind, but is the key to understanding the whole thing.
British societies, and by that, I mean the UK itself sans Northern Ireland, and also Australia, (not counting their racial minorities), are fanatically class-conscious. There are extremely tight Berlin Wall type boundaries of persona, behavior, personality, attitudes, sociology and swagger between the various economic classes of British life. Class mobility is extremely difficult; even if a working or middle class household wins the lottery, they rarely if ever move to the rich part of town, mainly because of the social ostracism they will face in their new neighborhoods; their staying where they are means they will remain in familiar and friendly class territory. A rich person who loses their shirt would rather commit suicide or slum uptown than move to the middle or working class areas.
The BNP has typecast itself in the working class, and therefore, its glass ceiling is the numerical limits of the working class. The UKIP came in second place, mainly because it was favored by middle class conservatives who want something more than Tory squeamishness. Even if the establishment had not pumped up the UKIP to co-opt the BNP, the BNP would have still gotten just about the same number of votes that it did. Without the UKIP, those that voted for it probably would have settled for Tory, or stayed home.
The vitriol and hate directed toward the BNP from all the major political parties, Tory, Labor and LibDem, is just as much, if not more so, class contempt and jealousy and bigotry towards the white working class from the middle class and upper class, as it is political disagreement.
The only way out for the BNP is if it makes some sort of deal and patches things up with the UKIP, a joint party would be able to appeal to the voter-rich British middle class. But I don’t think that can happen, mainly because of the contempt that the middle class and working class have toward each other. Asking the Brits to overcome their classism would be like canceling a whole soccer season, but if they don’t, England is done for.
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