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| EU: Multinational Lobbyists have taken over |
Among the cheeses are tomme from Savoie, crottins de chèvre from Aveyron, and great roundels of brie from nearby Meaux, alongside case upon case of chablis, Pouilly-Fumé, Nuits-Saint-Georges. And today, in amiable conversation with a local cheesemaker, there is Aymeric Chauprade, academic, author, consultant, and leading candidate in the European elections for Marine Le Pen's freshly fumigated Front National.
Here's the problem, explains an immaculately suited Chauprade, who besides degrees in maths and international law has a doctorate in political science from the Sorbonne: all this – he gestures around him as the throng prods, nibbles, squeezes, swills and swallows – is at risk.
"American farmers and 'big food' will rule; our regulations and standards will count for nothing," Chauprade continues. "This is an EU that has no respect for national specificities; it's an EU of bureaucrats, of ever greater normalisation, in the service of big banks and corporations. It is not the EU we want."
Understandably, this message plays well here. But not only here.
Across the EU, insurgent parties from right and left are poised to cause major upset, finishing at or near the top of their respective national votes. As a result, rejectionist parties look set to send their largest contingent of anti-European MEPs ever to the European parliament: perhaps 25% of the assembly's 751 members. (Down from 766 in the current parliament.)
Disillusion with the EU, certainly, is at record highs across the continent. The surveys are unequivocal: 60% of Europeans "tend not to trust" the EU now, against 32% in 2007; in 20 of the 28 member states a clear majority feels the EU is going "in the wrong direction"; for the first time, Eurosceptics outnumber supporters by 43% to 40%.
"In our analysis, the real turning point came in the late 1980s, when the big industrialists started laying down the plans for the future of Europe," says Dennis de Jong, a leading MEP from the impeccably leftwing but fiercely Euro-critical Dutch Socialist party. "Until that moment, the EU seemed like a logical post-war development. But industry, not ordinary people, has driven much of what's happened since, from opening internal borders to the euro.
This EU – the EU of multinationals, of harmonisation – makes people uneasy. People like difference. They like identity."
Read more: The enemy invasion: Brussels braced for influx of Eurosceptics in EU polls | World news | The Guardian
