Game of EU Thrones: A New Political Order

The European Parliament elections that concluded on May 26 turned out to be a Game of Thrones replay - a long and complex story with a surprising and, for many, unsatisfactory outcome. As with Game of Thrones, some fans are calling for a different ending. They would like to sack the authors and rewrite the script.

The anti-Europeans, who looked for a moment as if they might be shepherded by the populist triumvirate of Italy's Matteo Salvini, Hungary's Viktor Orban, and America's Steve Bannon to a triumphant conquest of Brussels, were beaten back.

Pro-Europeans supporting the European Union's establishment parties also lost out.

And the politicians who invented the Spitzenkandidaten process in an attempt to influence the choice of the next head of the European Commission looked ridiculous, as bits of the old EU parties were hacked away. In short, conventional expectations were disappointed all round.

One obvious outcome of the election was clear long before the results were announced: Europe's long-standing duopoly of center-left and center-right forces is definitely over.

This duopoly had been most apparent at the national level, where a slightly conservative party and a slightly socialist party typically fought over the level of pensions, wage policy, the extent of social transfers, and similar matters.

Each party then needed to moderate its position in order to attract the median voter. The systems they produced in national politics were quite stable, and some hoped that the same mechanism might translate to the European level.

That left-right dichotomy broke down in Italy as long ago as the early 1990s. It ended in France more recently, with the 2017 presidential election, in which neither old-left nor old...