German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has warned of the damage that the success of populists in the European elections could cause to the European Union.
“We have results in France, Austria and also in Germany that have given anti-European populists a remarkable increase in the number of votes,” Steinmeier told regional public radio station Bayerischer Rundfunk on Tuesday during an official visit to the southern state of Bavaria.
“If two or three large countries in the center of Europe show attempts at disintegration or disintegration tendencies, then that is not entirely harmless for Europe,” Steinmeier said. “These election results in Germany and France are something that should cause concern.”
There is also political work to be done in Germany, he said. The election results were different in the east of the country and in the west, and it did not help to constantly predict the country’s demise.
Politicians, he said, must try to meet the needs of the people in the right way. And they simply have to be present, he added.
The coronavirus pandemic was not the only reason young people were now voting for the far right, Steinmeier said, but it had contributed to the problem.
“These are the long-term consequences of measures, especially for young people who have not yet been able to find their own way to deal with the situation, with the lockdown, with the closure of schools, but who have had no social contacts during that time. time.”
In the European Parliament elections earlier in June, far-right or populist parties came first in five EU countries – France, Italy, Austria, Hungary and Slovakia – while coming in a strong second place in Germany, Poland and the Netherlands.
The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) came second in the poll with 15.9%, a strong performance ahead of all three governing parties, although well behind the conservative CDU/CSU bloc with 30%.
In France, the nationalist National Rally led the poll by a wide margin with 31.37% of the vote.
The far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) narrowly edged past the two traditional centrist Austrian parties to take first place with 25.4% of the vote.
The far right also topped the polls in Italy, with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy (FdI) taking 28.76% of the vote.
