I’ve got a few new articles out in the usual mags. Over at UnHerd I’ve written about Donald Tusk’s victory in Sunday’s Polish elections and its momentous consequences — for Poland, the EU and NATO. Long story short: it’s clearly a big win for pro-EU forces, but attempts to use the result to justify a new integrationist power grab will backfire. Interestingly, the Polish right-populist ruling party, Law and Justice, would appear to be the latest victim of the “Zelensky curse”: the Polish government has been one of the staunchest supporters of Ukraine — but growing anger over Ukrainian refugees, economic turmoil and support for Kyiv ultimately led to its downfall.
I’ve also written about a recent report revealing that Italy is the country with the fewest young people in proportion to its population of any country in the European Union, due to free-falling birth rates. I argue that the reason “pro-family” conservative politicians like Giorgia Meloni are unable to reverse this trend is that they rely on empty anti-woke platitudes rather than addressing the root cause of the problem: the dominant economic orthodoxy, which, in the EU’s case, is hardwired into the “economic constitution” of the bloc, and of the single currency in particular. Ultimately, there’s only one “pro-family” policy capable of truly reversing the trend: a radical overhaul of the failed neoliberal policies of the past twenty years. But banging on about “family values” is admittedly cheaper.
Last but not least, I’ve written for Compact about the Nazi-fascist origins of the European Union. The Canadian parliament’s “Nazi salute” was more than an embarrassing gaffe; it was a a Freudian slip — an unintentional mistake which reveals one’s true nature. More specifically, it revealed that contemporary liberal-progressive ideology overlaps with Nazi-fascist ideology in more ways than many would like to admit. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the in the latter’s birthplace — Europe. Taken at face value, the European Union — officially founded on values such as freedom, human dignity, equality, inclusivity and peace — could not be further apart from the chauvinistic, racist and militaristic ideology of Nazi-fascism. Indeed, it is commonly believed that modern Europeanist and federalist thought has its origins in the thinking of Resistance circles, as an antidote to the ultra-nationalism which had given rise to the horrors of Nazi-fascism. The reality is somewhat less edifying.
Thomas Fazi 