Yesterday, the President of the Council of Ministers of the European Union, Donald Tusk, addressed the Maltese Parliament. This article is written before President Tusk’s speech to Parliament, but it would surprise me greatly if the theme of what he said last night did not focus on the single most important subject confronting Europe today.

It is one to which President Tusk returns repeatedly. This is the need to lift Europe’s disillusion and to shore up its liberal values against the threat from populism.

As Europe’s crisis-manager-in-chief, Tusk has the unenviable task of managing the European responses to an endless series of exigencies – from Ukraine,to Greece’s bail-out, to the immigration and refugee emergency. He has to dothis without any real power, except that of persuasion.

His view is that the liberal centre must “be tough and determined not to become more like the right-wing populists, but to protect Europe against them”. This is hardly an original thought in a European Union afflicted by Marine Le Pen in France and Victor Orban in Hungary, and others.

Born-again Robespierre populist upstarts are re-shaping Europe’s political map. The head of the Left Front party in France vies with the far-right National Front party, using rhetoric that would have sounded familiar in 1789. Both say they are determined to “purify” the political system through “a big sweep of the broom”, to purge France of its elite, tainted by charges of corruption.

Support for the EU in France has plunged to an even lower level than in the UK – and that’s saying something. On the far right, le Pen predicts gleefully that the EU will collapse “like the Soviet Union” under the weight of its own contradictions.

Poland has just elected the right-wing, anti-immigrant Eurosceptic Law andJustice Party. “Pirate” parties in Sweden, Finland and elsewhere, stand-up comics in Italy, billionaires in Austria and formerly fringe parties, such as the UKIP in the UK, are becoming mainstream, with startling effect.

None more so than in Germany – Europe’s pillar and the fount of European integrationist ambitions – where Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), an increasingly xenophobic party which calls for the euro to be abandoned, has tapped into deep-seated scepticism about the euro.

AfD’s policies have seemingly little in common with Eurosceptics elsewhere in Europe. Unlike many in the UK (where polls show a swing towards Brexit), it wants to stay in the EU.

Unlike the Freedom Party in the Netherlands, its driving force is not resentment of Muslims and immigrants. Unlike the Five Star Movement in Italy or the Left Front in France, it does not seek to smash the corrupt political class.

The poisoning of domestic politics right across the Union has hampered decision-making by governments

Most importantly, AfD taps into a mood of resentment in Germany at the broken promise that the country would never have to stand behind the debts of others in the eurozone. In echoes of the debate in the UK, AfD’s leaders highlight that the German people were never asked if they wanted the euro, or indeed any other European Union treaty.

But most worryingly of all, the failure of the euro has exposed a gaping democratic deficit throughout the EU.

Populists of the far left and far right are on the rise as anger at the handling of the economic crisis deepens among ordinary people whose livelihoods and way of life have been adversely affected and sometimes destroyed by harsh austerity measures. The prolonged, acute unemployment is alarming. Fears of a political backlash are high and rising.

To compound the economic gloom, there are more refugees in Europe, and seeking to get into Europe, than any time since 1945. The economic crisis has been further inflamed by the burgeoning refugee and immigration powder keg of the last year, which has led to Eurosceptic, anti-immigration parties emerging virtually in all the countries of the Union.

Angela Merkel’s worthy plans to welcome Syrian refugees to Germany in early September may have been hailed asan enlightened moral act of leadership, but can now be seen as the result of muddled thinking.

The arrival of a tidal wave of refugees has placed the most enormous strains within her Grand Coalition government, and opened up divisions in her own conservative party with the sister party in Bavaria. German cities have seen the spread of right-wing protest movements, such as the anti-Islamic Pegida, which have flourished as migrants flock from the Middle East.

These upheavals present the EU with an unprecedented challenge to its identity, its administrative capability and its ability to combine a humanitarian response with hard-headed realpolitik. The crisis has hit the continent’s weakest economies hardest. It is exacerbating anti-immigrant extremism and has stymied the EU’s efforts to muster an effective and coordinated plan.

To its critics, the EU was born in sin, a project devised by and for the elites, lacking democratic legitimacy. All attempts to make good the ‘democratic deficit’, a term first coined in the 1970s, have failed.

Direct elections to the European Parliament? Turnout has fallen virtually every year since they were instituted in 1979. Give the assembly real power?

The European Parliament has never had more clout, yet trust in the EU is at an all-time low. A contest to elect the next President of the European Commission? A damp squib.

The EU is not a country. The Commission is not a government. It has the near-exclusive right to propose new legislation, to be approved by both the Council of Ministers (representing governments) and the European Parliament.

But it is also a powerful civil service, policeman of the single market and competition watchdog. The Commission has acquired greater powers to scrutinise national budgets and economic policies.

It also has the power to recommend sanctions against dilatory countries.

But neither the Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker, nor President Tusk of the Council, and certainly not President Schultz of the European Parliament can decide the issues European voters most care about.

Voting against austerity in the European Parliament cannot alter the laws of economics. Widespread disagreement between 28 disputatious states has led to the EU appearing weak and divided and its voters disillusioned.

The EU is a hybrid. Part international organisation and part federation. There are no neat solutions to the democratic deficit. A directly elected President of Europe would only make sense in the highly unlikely event that the Commission were granted federal authority.

But for the foreseeable future, and perhaps forever, European politicians will never trump national ones in terms of legitimacy and public support.

The sense of alarm is palpable. Francois Hollande has described the rise of populists, nationalists and Eurosceptics as leading to “regression and paralysis”.

The poisoning of domestic politics right across the Union has hampered decision-making by governments.

However, as President Tusk will surely have stressed in our parliament, it is for national leaders to lead the fight against Eurosceptics and populist extremists.

They should stop blaming the EUfor its ills. They should defend thebenefits of the Union (short of the unattainable goal of actual union) and fixits flaws by making the bold andwide-sweeping reforms needed to tackle the instability caused by the refugee crisis, to secure its frontiers and to mend the eurozone.

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