IN A few weeks of summer, the political map in Europe has changed.
 
Electoral systems function as a compromise between the necessity to give the appearance of democratic accountability and to obscure but preserve the truth that power flows from ownership. And that, irrespective of election results, the state exists to maintain this state of affairs.
 
But in Britain, Germany and France, and a little earlier in Italy, these arrangements have ceased to function.
 
In Italy, fidelity to the European Union’s imperative to maintain “fiscal responsibility” is assigned to Italy’s permanent eminence grise Mario Draghi.
 
Sometime prime minister, sometime president of the European central bank (and this week entrusted with perfecting the EU’s military policy) Draghi is not in office, but not without power.

The government is in the hands of a right-wing constellation headed by Giorgia Meloni whose criticism of the Draghi orthodoxy, the EU’s austerity economics and its foreign policy of confrontation with Russia melted away within moments of assuming office.
 
Her Lega allies, who hold the ministerial economic portfolio, defend fiscal orthodoxy no less doggedly than did Draghi and thus have earned the toleration of the powers that be.
 
All this was preceded by a weakening of Italy’s proportional electoral system and the introduction of majoritarian elements similar to Britain, similarly to the more or less complete exclusion of the left.
 
In France, the present presidential system was introduced precisely to weaken the more representative and powerful Assembly that followed liberation. The mighty Gaullist party to which the post-war French bourgeoisie traditionally entrusted the management of the state has now declined into the tiny Republicans party and it is to its irremediably reactionary figure, Michele Barnier, that Macron has gifted the job of prime minister.
 
Macron’s refusal to accept the victory of the New Popular Front — whose nominee for the office of prime minister would normally be accepted — meant that democratic convention was abandoned and Macron now bids to construct a government of electoral losers dependent on the patronage of Le Pen’s National Rally.
 
Le Pen offers provisional support for Macron’s new confection with conditions. How much compromise emerges on the Budget depends on how much Le Pen can risk losing the support of her substantial working-class electorate given that during the Assembly election her economics spokesman insisted that National Rally would respect official France’s adherence to EU economic policy.
 
Thus six decades after the victory over fascism two of the largest European states are governed only to the limits that fascists will tolerate.
 
Last week’s elections in Eastern Germany saw the parties of the governing coalition humiliated.
 
Germany’s election system no longer functions to exclude from parliament any party that disputes economic orthodoxy or foreign policy while the big business-orientated neoliberal Free Democratic Party, like the bellicose Greens, fell below the 5 per cent and are out of the state parliaments.
 
With the far-right AfD topping the poll the question now posed is whether the Establishment right can govern Germany without them.
 
Like Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, the AfD affects a populist opposition to neoliberal economics and an opposition to the price of the Nato confrontation with Russia.
 
In another inversion of the cold war and six decades after the Red Army destroyed the Wehrmacht, the far right in Germany is winning elections — not least on a programme of opposition to the costs of war with Russia and to a flow of migrants driven, not least, by Nato bombing of the Middle East.

Mass migration is no accident

Britain’s majoritarian election system — evolved to ensure the continuity of capitalist control — is beginning to break down when, like in Germany the shift in public opinion no longer permits the orderly transfer of power between formations that do not disagree on the fundamentals.
 
It was the split in the ruling class and in the Conservative vote — with its majority earlier enhanced by Boris Johnson’s appeal to working-class Brexit voters — that gifted Keir Starmer an overwhelming parliamentary majority on less than a quarter of the votes eligible to be cast. And with three million fewer votes than his nemesis, Jeremy Corbyn gained with his avowedly left-wing manifesto.
 
Like Germany, it is anti-immigration opinion that has crystallised the vote of Reform UK, but dig deeper into the political opinions of these voters who have abandoned the parties of corporate consensus and a picture emerges which contradicts conventional conceptions.
 
On a whole raft of issues benchmarked against Labour’s 2017 manifesto, Reform UK voters appear in their majority closer to the British consensus of support for renationalisation of utilities, water, rail etc; hostile to the power and privileges of the rich, hostility to the banks and support for an NHS free of privatisation.
 
Voting patterns are never the simple transfer of one bloc of voters to another and, of course, a substantial minority of Reform UK voters align with or take further reactionary Conservative standpoints. But a substantial part of its appeal is a response to the immiseration of working-class communities and a lack of alternatives offered by the parties of the Westminster consensus.
 
But — except on the questions of immigration and some aspects of the contemporary culture wars on which both media baron and Tory politicians prefer to fight — Reform UK voters are not that far from the rest of us.
 
Thus, among millions of people in our continent, the contours of a division of opinion on the vital questions of wealth, power, work and war are emerging along class lines.
 
Economic crisis is the context in which disruptive narratives of immigration, inflected with diverse expressions of racist thinking, negate any sense that a revival of social democratic consensus politics is possible.
 
Since the seismic shock of 2008, capitalism has been faltering, and where the left has been forced to the margins this is only incidentally due to the vagaries of election systems and more to do with the now diminishing capacity of capitalism to find new sources of profit and news ways of extracting value from the labours of the working class.
 
But that working class is growing on a global scale as it is reconstituted by the export of capital and the mobility of labour.
 
The deployment of capital — and the deployment of military power in its service — is the hidden hand that drives the flow of migrants. In Britain, only a fraction arrive on small boats. The rest arrive with official sanction to upscale the extraction of profit.

As every NHS patient can see, developed capitalist countries plunder the labour force of other countries to satisfy domestic labour market demands
 
French migration is mostly from its former colonies some of which are constitutionally part of metropolitan France. Germany’s 13.7-plus million immigrant population — those born abroad — was recruited by Angela Merkel substantially from Middle Eastern middle classes with a large part fleeing Nato’s wars and making up about 17 per cent of the population. With their first-generation families, immigrants make up about 30 per cent of the German population.
 
Mass immigration is not an accident of history it is an essential element of modern capitalism.
 
‘No borders’ is no solution
 
For socialists, politics in the modern era is about finding ways in which the fundamental interests of the working class can be asserted.
 
If detaching working people from the political and ideological influence of the ruling class is the immediate task for the political left then finding a common language to address their real concerns is essential.
 
In Britain, this, of necessity, entails engaging with Reform UK’s electoral base not only in foregrounding their basic class and economic interests but by challenging and subverting their views on race and immigration.
 
The immigration policies of Germany’s Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance need investigation. Are they racist as their critics state or do they raise important issues about integration, human trafficking (state-sponsored and criminal), social dumping, organised crime, lack of education, jobs, welfare support etc?
 
What would constitute the safe and humane passage for asylum-seekers rolled out as the solution to Fortress Europe and Fortress Britain? Is that an actual solution? We need to clarify alternatives to the anarchic, liberal, ultra-left “open borders” approach to immigration that appears as a response to the racism of the EU (and Britain’s) immigration policies.
 
That this cannot be effected from a position of apparent moral superiority is obscured only to people who have no contact with actually existing workers.

Bringing home to workers in imperial Britain the roots of racism and the causes of migration in the capitalist character of the economy and its contemporary nature forged in colonial exploitation is a big challenge.

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com.