Europe's Election Season, Read From a Border That Watches Both Directions

Europe's next electoral cycle could change the continent's direction, the Guardian columnist Nathalie Tocci argued this week, warning that if far-right nationalists gain power in four large countries simultaneously, Europe is in for what she called a dramatic Trumpian tilt. The piece ran on Tuesday in the Guardian's comment section.

Tocci's premise is a mismatch she identifies at the heart of the European project: decisions on the economy, peace and security are made largely at the European level, while electoral politics remains stubbornly national. Voters, she suggests, are asked to pass judgement on governments whose room for manoeuvre has already been narrowed from Brussels.

The argument is a commentary, not a report of an event, and no election result is being predicted here. What the piece does register is a mood the foreign press has been tracking across the continent for months: the possibility that several national votes in a short span could produce a bloc of governments less attached to the current European consensus than the one they replace.

For a region that borders two EU member states and two non-members, the Tocci argument lands differently than it does in Rome or Paris. Friuli-Venezia Giulia's eastern edge is where the Schengen internal border meets the external one, where Slovenian and Croatian membership in the eurozone and Schengen has redrawn the map of who is inside and who is out, and where the politics of enlargement is not an abstraction but a matter of which side of a checkpoint a lorry queues on.

The sources cited here do not name the region, and this dispatch does not claim any local reaction to Tocci's column. What can be said from the wire is that the column's central concern — the gap between where decisions are taken and where they are legitimised — is the same gap that has shaped the north-east's own relationship with Rome and Brussels for a century, through two changes of sovereignty and the long accommodation of a Slovene minority inside an Italian region.

Tocci's warning about a coordinated far-right advance is speculative in the sense that all electoral forecasting is speculative. The Guardian published it as opinion, and it should be read as such. But the underlying observation, that European elections are increasingly national referendums on European constraints, is one the foreign press has made in its own reporting, not only in its columns.

What the wire does not supply is any indication of how Italy's own next national contest will fall, or whether the four countries Tocci has in mind include Italy. The column does not name them, and this dispatch will not guess. The value of the piece for readers outside Italy is that it states plainly the stakes the foreign press attaches to the coming season: not who wins where, but whether the winners arrive in sufficient numbers to act together.