Europe's Lurch To The Right And What's Behind it

Europe's electorate has moved solidly to the Right, both in the EU elections to the European parliament and in a number of local elections.

In France, Germany, Italy, and Poland ruling center-right governments got unexpected endorsements from th electorate, while in two socialist ruled countries, Britain and Spain, leftist parties got creamed. So did socialists in Hungary, Austria, Bulgaria, and elsewhere.

British PM Gordon Brown is so unpopular that his ministers are jumping off Labour's sinking ship so rapidly it's hard to keep track. Almost everyone concedes that if an election were held today, the Conservatives would win easily and Labour might actually fall to being Britain's third party. The British National Party, well to the right of center did extremely well in Britain's local elections...much better than anyone dreamed.

The parties of Germany's Angela Merkel and France's Sarkozy cleaned up at the polls , and in the Netherlands Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party ended up as the second strongest party in the country behind the ruling Christian Democrats.

After decades of socialist rule, what's behind Europe's right turn?

Aside from simple frustration with the existing order and its encouragement of multiculturalism and unlimited immigration from the Muslim world, the reason can be summed up in one word: Obama.

For years, Europeans had the privilege of living in a bubble. Those primitive, childish Americans spent billions of dollars to protect Europe from the Soviets, allowing Europe the luxury of not having to spend money to provide for its own defense. And the booming American free enterprise economy and favorable trade agreements allowed Europe to build its own economy by selling exports to America, and to fund an outrageous socialist welfare state built on the ponzi scheme of high taxation and the expectation that this pleasant status quo would continue.

Then along came Barack Hussein Obama.

Europeans might have originally loved the idea of someone like Obama to replace that despised cowboy George W. Bush, because just like American voters, they simply didn't know much about Obama. But after six months, they've seen him working hard on wrecking the American economy, tripling our deficit and doubling down with massive spending . Even worse, he wanted the Europeans to embrace the same madness, calling for the EU to initiate 'stimulus packages' with borrowed money, just like the US. They turned him down flat, and a collective shudder ran through Europe when they realized how badly Obama was managing the US economy and what that meant for Europe's prosperity.

Obama's economic policies have shown the Europeans the ugly side of the end result of the socialist nirvana their politicians on the left have been bamboozling them with for decades, and the realization has set in that without the US economy as the driving engine, it's a recipe for ruin.

Obama then increased that angst by sharply cutting America's defense budget, reneging on planned missile defense bases in Poland and the Czech Republic provided for in treaties signed by the Bush Administration, promising a 'reset' with an increasingly aggressive Russia, and talking openly about cutbacks in American forces stationed in Europe.

He then sent things into overdrive with his non-policy on Iran's nuclear weapons ( at precisely the time when Europe was gearing itself up to get a little tougher with the mullahs) , by publicly calling for Turkey's admission into the EU and by his Islamist and pro-sharia rhetoric in places like Cairo.

What Obama's antics have done, along with the financial crisis, is to bring Europeans back to reality as they understand that Obama's America is not going to be there to bail them out of trouble. And that the US is likely to have a huge task just repairing the damage occurring on Obama's watch after he's gone.

It's a strange paradox that the man so many Europeans hailed as a fresh beginning when he got elected has turned into exactly that...in a way many of them never anticipated. And it's equally odd that th eman who campaigned on improving relations with our European allies has ended up doing exactly the opposite.