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Just as increasing numbers of Americans, in response to such outrages as the disastrous Biden economy and the unending invasion at the southern border, appear to be shedding their distaste for Donald Trump, more and more Western Europeans, mostly in response to mass Islamic immigration, are rejecting their globalist elites and turning to the right. A month ago I wrote here about New York Times columnist Roger Cohen’s hysteria about the rise of the so-called “far right” in Europe – an attitude that is, needless to say, representative of legacy-media views. Well, this past weekend – specifically, from Thursday, June 6, through Sunday, June 9 – a great many Europeans, casting their votes in the elections for the 705-seat European Parliament (EP), affirmed their support for that fearful “far right.” Not all of the results, but a great many of them, have proven unsettling both to the leftist poobahs in Brussels and to their minions in the mainstream media, and those results provide at least a smidgen of hope that, when it comes to individual freedom and national sovereignty, the continent of Europe ain’t down yet.

To be sure, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, claimed that her so-called “center” – meaning the heart and soul of the EU establishment – had held the line against the “extremes” – meaning, on the one hand, outright Commies, and, on the other, a tiny number of actual right-wing radicals but mostly just proud patriots who don’t like being governed by unelected Brussels technocrats and don’t like seeing their countries transformed by mass (and largely illegal) immigration. Most commentators, however, appeared to have a very different take on the election results than von der Leyen. The Associated Press, for example, spoke of “strong electoral gains for the hard right” – “hard right,” of course, meaning anyone who seeks to strengthen national sovereignty and put a halt to the ever-increasing power of the open-borders globalists. “Voters across Europe,” observed Douglas Murray, “are fed up with being told not to notice mass immigration or not to object.” And Politico (the European one, not the American one) concluded that “Europe’s center of political gravity is veering to the right.” Hurrah.

Following the lead of Nigel Farage – who presided over the campaign to take Britain out of the EU from inside the EU itself, sitting as a member of the EP for two decades – many of Europe’s right-wing political heavyweights, including Wilders, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, and France’s Marine Le Pen, as the AP put it, want “more power in the European Parliament” precisely so that they “can weaken it from within.” And the election results – which began to be released on Sunday night, Central European Time, after the Dutch voted on Thursday, the Irish and Czech on Friday, and everyone else on the weekend – encourage one to hope that these rebels against EU tyranny may well be able to pull it off, to some extent at least.

As with all bloated, power-hungry bureaucracies, the EU’s parliamentary structure is complicated, and the election results can be looked at from multiple perspectives. Most of the national parties that are represented in the EP belong to one of several different groups, or caucuses, based not on nationality but on shared political orientation, and it’s illuminating to see how these groups fared in the election. As of Monday afternoon, the projected results differed, depending on which source you consulted, but according to the latest numbers at the Guardian, the Radical Left group (GUE-NGL), which includes Ireland’s Sinn Fein and 19 other parties, many of them overtly Communist, is expected to lose one seat, dropping to 36. The Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D), a large group made up largely of parties with the word “Labour” or “Social Democratic” in their names, dropped by five seats to 134. The Greens/European Free Alliance (Grn/EFA) lost big, plunging by 19 seats to 53.

So much for the left. Moving to the center, the Renew group, consisting of no fewer than 47 more or less centrist parties, fell from 102 seats to 79. The center-right European People’s Party (EPP), which is the largest of the seven parliamentary groups and which is dominated by Germany’s Christian Democratic Union crept up from 176 seats to 186, an increase that von der Leyen pointed to by way of substantiating her claim of centrist victory: “We won the European elections, my friends,” she told a gathering of EPP members. “We are the strongest party, we are the anchor of stability.” Of course, in the corridors of EU power, words like “stability” and “continuity” and “order” are far more popular than words like “freedom” and “liberty.”

Which brings us to the groups at least some of whose members might fairly be characterized as anti-establishment, nationalist, and/or eurosceptic. The European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), whose 20 member parties include France’s Reconquest, Alliance Germany, and the Sweden Democrats, rose from 69 to 73. The Identity and Democracy group (ID), which includes the Freedom Party of Austria, Belgium’s Flemish Interest (Vlaams Belang), the Czech Republic’s Freedom and Direct Democracy, the Danish People’s Party, the Conservative People’s Party of Estonia, France’s National Rally, Italy’s League (Lega), and Wilders’s Party for Freedom, leaped from 49 to 50 votes. And the Non-Aligned parties (NI), including the Netherlands’ Forum for Democracy (founded by Thierry Baudet), the Alternative for Germany, and Hungary’s ruling Fidesz, got 46.

Looking at the results group-by-group may not be too encouraging. But there’s another way to slice the pie, and that’s to look at the results country-by-country. And the fact is that in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom (PVV) – which won big in last year’s Dutch elections and is now the leading player in the new government in The Hague – had another red-letter day. In the last elections for EP, the PVV won only one seat; it’s now expected to hold seven out of the Netherlands’ 34 seats – placing it one seat short of a three-party (Green-Left-Labor) alliance headed by Frans Timmermans. Timmermans claimed victory, but Wilders convincingly announced that where the Dutch vote was concerned, there was “only one big winner” in the EP elections – the PVV. In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy Party, which until recently was a tiny, marginal phenomenon, received 28% of the vote, taking it from 10 to 23 of Italy’s 76 seats and giving it the country’s largest EP delegation.

The Alternative for Germany, which is strongly eurosceptic but which has some ticklish issues that are, shall we say, a tad too reminiscent of the unpleasant old days of the 1930s and 40s, won big, receiving 16% of the German vote, compared with a mere 11% in the last EP elections in 2019. Thanks largely to strong support from voters in former East Germany, it will now hold more of Germany’s 96 seats – 16, up from nine — than the ruling Social Democrats, making it Germany’s second largest party in the EP. Meanwhile Germany’s Greens tumbled from 20.5% of the German vote in 2019 to 12%. (Across Europe, in fact, the Green parties did horribly.) There were stunning results in Austria, too, where the populist Freedom Party came out on top, doubling its number of seats from three to six out of a total of 20, putting it one seat ahead of both the Social Democrats and the People’s Party, a Christian Democratic body.

But the most thrilling news of all, perhaps, came in France and Belgium. In France, which has 81 seats in the EP, President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance Party performed so calamitously – receiving 15.2% of the vote as compared to eurosceptic Marine Le Pen’s National Rally’s 31.5% (Europe’s Politico called it “a crushing victory”) – that Macron made a shocking announcement: he quickly dissolved the French Parliament and called for new elections, to be held in two stages, on June 30 and July 7. Le Pen, whose party’s delegation in the EP will be led by a rising young political star named Jordan Bardella, welcomed Macron’s announcement, adding that the results of the election should be seen as marking “an end to this painful epoch of globalism.” Two neat tidbits: one, the National Rally proved to be especially strong among the young, with more than one in three Frenchmen under 24 casting their votes for Bardella; two, in all of France, only the voters of Paris supported Macron, with the entire rest of the country going for the National Rally.

Belgium, with 22 seats, underwent an even more dramatic shake-up: in the wake of a terrible showing by his Liberal Party in the face of conservative opposition – it came in eleventh (!), with the long demonized Vlaams Belang, a fierce opponent of mass Islamic immigration, in first place – Prime Minister Alexander De Croo announced that he would resign on Monday. Good start. May others of his useless ilk also withdraw into embarrassed anonymity and let their places be taken by courageous citizens who are determined to rescue their countries, their cultures, and their freedoms from devastation.