Farage believes that UKIP could win enough seats in the next parliamentary elections (held in May 2015) to be able to provide external support to a minority government led by Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservatives. However, UKIP would support Cameron if he agreed to hold the EU referendum in 2015 instead of 2017. The Tories have been losing popular support to UKIP, and two parliamentarians have defected to Farage's party in recent weeks. (On Oct. 9, a Tory defector won UKIP's first seat in Westminster in a by-election.)
Labor has also been losing votes to UKIP. Recently, party leader Ed Miliband said that Labor would support stricter conditions for foreigners applying for welfare benefits in Britain — a flagship proposal of UKIP that Cameron also has adopted. In March, Miliband said that a referendum about Britain's membership in the European Union would be "unlikely" under a Labor government, but confirmed plans to hold a referendum should Brussels demand more sovereignty from London.
With more than seven months to go before the next general elections, an alliance between the Conservatives and UKIP seems improbable but not impossible. Farage's rapid rise in British politics has moved the entire British political spectrum toward more Euroskeptical positions, and no major party is impervious to UKIP's influence. Britain's political fragmentation could lead to a hung parliament after the general elections and make UKIP a key player in post-election negotiations. In any case, Britain's traditional party system dominated by the Tories and Labor will undergo a tough test in 2015.
In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel is dealing with a relatively similar situation. Members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union have been pushing for some local electoral agreements with the rising anti-eurozone Alternative for Germany party. However, Germany will not hold any significant elections next year, so Merkel can withstand these pressures in the short term. Cameron, on the other hand, will scramble to accommodate the United Kingdom's growing Euroskepticism as the election date nears.
The Five Star Movement's Position
If Farage is the man of the hour in the United Kingdom, Grillo is not so lucky in Italy. The Five Star Movement performed spectacularly in the general elections in February, when it became the single most voted-for party in Italy. However, the party has since dealt with internal divisions and defections. The arrival of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi early this year improved the popularity of the ruling Democratic Party, which had a strong performance in May's elections for the EU Parliament. This forced Grillo to relaunch his party — this time with a stronger Euroskeptic element.
The Five Star Movement was originally a protest party, with a heavy focus on criticizing Italy's ruling elites and only vague anti-eurozone elements. Grillo's decision to adopt a more Euroskeptic stance is a signal that he is trying to recover the ground he lost this year, but it also indicates that he believes that Italy offers a fertile ground for parties that criticize the common currency and the elites who rule the European Union. Italy's membership in the eurozone is not at the top of the list of concerns for the Italians, who are still mostly worried about high taxes and rising unemployment. However, recent opinion polls show that the Italians are becoming increasingly disappointed with the common currency.
Smaller parties in the center-right and the far right also have adopted anti-euro and anti-German elements in their political platforms. Grillo initially tried to portray the Five Star Movement as an outsider that could not be defined within the traditional left-right divide. However, the party recently has moved to the right. Grillo offered to work with the separatist Northern League on the anti-euro referendum — breaking another promise that his party would never cooperate with traditional Italian parties.
Grillo's referendum probably will not be held, because the Italian Constitution does not allow popular referendums on international agreements. But the anti-eurozone sentiment will play a big part in Italian politics in the future, independent of the fate of the Five Star Movement. This will force the Italian government to keep pushing for more flexible deficit targets and more investment from the European Union — which means that Rome and Berlin will keep clashing over these issues, and political fragmentation will remain a defining feature of Continental politics.
Changes Across the Continent
In recent years, shelves of Italian books have been written criticizing the German leadership of Europe, the austerity policies backed by the European Union and the common currency. In the United Kingdom, there has been a long debate about the future of the European Union and its evolution from a free trade agreement to a supranational structure in which member states lose national sovereignty. The same happens in smaller countries like Portugal and Greece, where economists, politicians and journalists criticize the status quo and propose radical changes in Europe. The European crisis is altering the traditional party systems significantly across the Continent as new actors emerge and challenge the old order.
However, when Farage proposes to withdraw the United Kingdom from the European Union, and when Grillo promises to hold a referendum on Italy's use of the euro, they are appealing to both rational and emotional elements in the heads of their voters — and national pride is not a secondary element of the equation. Italy and the United Kingdom are much larger countries and therefore much more confident that they can successfully challenge the current political and institutional order. This makes Euroskepticism in Britain and Italy (and France as well) particularly dangerous for the future of the European Union.
