Election lessons - a tale of two cities: both ducked the issue of Europe's ageing

Giles Merritt looks at the upsides and downsides of the French and British elections and warns that politicians have cynically avoided demographics.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” wrote Charles Dickens in his French Revolution novel ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ set in Paris and London. The line describes equally well the British and French snap general elections.

Now the dust is settling, the effects on the two sides of the English Channel are coming into focus. The positive result of both elections is that a strong majority of voters have rejected slick populist solutions to deep-rooted social problems.

It is good news, too, that the UK will have a stable government and that, paradoxically, France will enter a period of frantic debate. A less-appealing feature of Emmanuel Macron’s presidency has been the bland insistence that his policies are the only possible solutions to the nation’s problems. This has inflamed radicalism at both ends of the political spectrum, and now there’s a chance that the firebrands will be forced to find common ground.

There’s also good news for the European Union. The sullen and obstructive attitude to the EU of the discredited Conservative government is to be forgotten. Keir Starmer knows Brexit can’t be swept aside, and therefore pledged no return to the single market or the customs union, but he’s very keen on a constructive relationship. So, the opinion polls suggest, are most Britons.

The French connection with Brussels is more nuanced. President Macron’s wings have been clipped, so his encouragingly pro-EU stance on a range of issues will be diluted. On the other hand, Brussels is to be spared the full fury of the dangerously eurosceptic government Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) had hoped to lead. As it is, Le Pen has joined ‘Patriots for Europe’, the new hard-right bloc in the European Parliament that groups eurosceptic parties’ MEPs from ten countries.

So much for the brighter outcomes of both elections. Radical right-wingers in Britain and France have been stymied, just as they were in Poland last autumn. It remains to be seen whether this marks a turning point in the trend that brought them to prominence and sometimes power in Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Slovakia and Hungary.

On the threshold of the 21st century’s second quarter, the UK and French elections also presage the worst of times. Neither produced serious debate on the most troubling questions that loom ahead and must be addressed urgently. Ageing’s effects and how to counter them weren’t an issue in either country.

Yet the scale of Europe’s ageing, and its uneven impact on the young and old, on richer western Europe and the EU’s poorer members, is truly dramatic. For more than 20 years, international institutions like the IMF and the OECD, have warned Europe of the consequences of greater longevity coupled with waning fertility. Forget your fears of being over-crowded and ‘invaded’ by migrants, was their message, and look instead at the hard facts of labour shortages and snowballing social costs.

The European Commission has issued similar if more muted warnings; its concern to avoid straying into EU members’ politics seemingly prevents it from citing instances that might seem nationally explicit. Whatever the reason, Brussels has been timid and unimaginative on demographic change and everything it entails.

It has nevertheless noted that the ratio between European taxpayers and pensioners has already moved abruptly and, by mid-century, will be unsustainable. For many years, there were averagely four people in work whose taxes helped pay for a single pensioner. That has shrunk to a shade under three taxpayers per pensioner, and within 25 years it will be 1.8:1.

The EU workforce will have shrunk by 50 million, through deaths, retirements and fewer young people. The stagnating European economy of today is liable to be looked back on as a comparatively golden period. Healthcare costs will have soared, and the economic ‘magic wand’ of digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will, like all magic, have proved to be an illusion. The most likely scenario, say experts, is that these new technologies’ chief effect will be to widen the wealth gap between the haves and have nots.

This is the uncomfortable future that bitter ideological opponents in France and the UK have avoided. Apparently by common consent, politicians decided that evoking future difficulties has no relevance to present ones. That’s far from the truth, which is that tomorrow’s challenges demand pre-emptive sacrifices by today’s taxpayers.

The lesson from these two elections, and others elsewhere, is that short-term political advantage is trumping (so to speak) longer-term policy needs. But if Europe’s electorates don’t soon demand that this darkening outlook is addressed, it is they who will reap the whirlwind.

The views expressed in this Frankly Speaking op-ed reflect those of the author and not of Friends of Europe.