Europe by Numbers

If you held a national vote and two-thirds of the electorate turned out you would be elated, wouldn’t you? In order to win the Brexit referendum, 72% of British voters cast their ballot and despite all the best efforts of Project Fear, 52% of them - 37% of the total eligible – carried the day. In the UK the Conservatives gained a majority in Parliament with 37% of the 66% turnout. The UK is now governed by a party which gained a majority with the expres support of just 24%, give or take a point, of the total eligible electorate. It’s legitimate; the election date was known years in advance.

In Hungary 98% of the 43% who actually voted agreed with the motion to reject immigration quotas. That’s 42% of the total electorate, but it failed to meet the required 50% turnout for a mandate. Not because people were not bothered, but because the opposition knew they couldn’t possibly win, so opted to stay away in order to force a no-vote. Fair play, using the rules of the game but sometimes gamesmanship looks like nothing so much as sour grapes.

The simple fact of the matter is that Orban’s view is the prevailing one. 42% of the eligible vote would be a landslide political parties would kill for and who knows what they would have scored if everybody with the right had actually voted. Hungary should have the power to decide whether or not to resettle migrants, wherever they come from. And then they should be able to decide how many, set criteria for their selection and insist that later they either move back to their country of origin or else integrate and accept Hungary’s culture, law and customs in their entirety.

But that’s not what will happen, is it? Once in, they’re largely in for good and being muslim in the main, once they reach a critical mass – which is single-figure percentages – they demand special treatment. What is it with the political elite and those in their thrall that they can call an overwhelming declaration of support for a policy invalid, yet uphold the right of a tiny minority to overturn hundreds of years of tradition? Because this, undeniably, is islam’s ambition.

Just another form of vermin...

One of the hallmarks of a civilised country is to settle disputes at the ballot box, not on the battlefield but this continued enforcement of unrestricted immigration is rapidly turning all of Europe into a potential killing zone. I can’t see any of this ending well and Mrs Merkel’s may well be one of the first heads paraded on a pike, given her reception in Dresden. You can play the numbers game all you like but in the end they all tell much the same story. It’s time somebody turned Europe off and then turned it back on again. The resurgence of the right may very well do exactly that.