You're viewing a single thread.
Austria could have gone worse, despite the FPÖ up. In Germany you have this kind of cordon sanitaire, the other parties have an agreement of sorts to never cooperate with the AfD, the CDU/CSU has been a bit flimsy on that though.
Meanwhile in Austria, the FPÖ has been around forever and used to represent some liberal politics way back when so they didn't have that cordon sanitaire, including coalition governments between the ÖVP (the equivalent of the CDU/CSU but imbroiled somehow in more political turmoil in recent years) and FPÖ on numerous occasions. And what happened in this election is that basically three seats went from the ÖVP straight to the FPÖ.
Basically Austrian representation in the EU probably got marginally worse for all it matters, but in turn the CDU/CSU saw that any cooperation with the AfD would just lead to voters of theirs just going to the AfD in the long run, strengthening the case for a cordon sanitaire.
At least I hope that's how they'll interpret it. The other Austrian shift was one from the Greens to the heavily pro-EU NEOS, as much as I'll disagree on some of their domestic policies when it comes to their EU politics they're a bit more palatable.
Germany is being interpreted as a disaster, but the only hard right party is the AfD and they're up around 5% it looks like... and there are 13 other parties about to represent Germany in the EU parliament. France is looking terrible though, at least the RN has at least pretended to cut off ties to the AfD. And the equivalent of the CDU/CSU in France is near death, so it's not like voters in the middle had anywhere to go other than Macron or RN.
Nevertheless, 16% for a Nazi party is more than 16% too much.
I think germany could have gone worse, and people are quick to see that the AfD has the second most votes and cry disaster, but reality is that left wing votes are just split between more parties. Overall "cdu and further right" seems to bd about evenly split with "left of cdu".
But still, compared to both the previous EU election and the most recent national election, it got quite a bit worse. CDU and AfD combined were at 36% in the last national election, they're up by about 5% each, and that while the CDU has been getting closer to the AfDs position in recent years.