Next week's elections for European Parliament are likely to be treated as irrelevant by most European voters, with considerably less than 50% expected to turn out at the polls.  Nonetheless, they are watershed elections, even though you wouldn't know that by reading the European press. Both the press and most politicians strenuously avoid discussing what is really at stake in European politics.  Instead, they conjure up doomsday predictions of the rise of supposedly anti-European "nationalists" and "populists."  In fact, the "nationalists" are anything but anti-European.  Expected to win between a quarter and a third of the vote, few if any of them want to leave the European Union, and in most ways, they are much more representative of traditional European values than the Brussels elites and the mainstream media would have you believe. What they are really unhappy about are key concerns that the elites...(Read Full Post)