Eurosceptics sympathize with Putin and oppose immigration and free trade - expert

In an interview with Real Clear World, Marc Leonhard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations think tank, discusses trends in European politics and the role of the Eurosceptic movement within it: "We've seen the emergence of parties rebelling against the political establishment. We've identified 55 of these parties across all EU member states. Some come from the far right, some from the far left, some from the center. Some are over 100 years old, and some have emerged online in the last 12 months," he notes.

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“Europe’s neighbors are irreversibly changing it. They are, after all, less interested and less aware of what the European Union really is, and bring into it their own values ​​and institutions, chaos, refugees. This develops a defensive style of thinking among Europeans and they become much more focused on their own European exclusivity rather than on universals such as European values, European norms, etc. Therefore, it turns out that instead of developing towards more and more close union, the EU is falling apart,” Leonhard explains his point of view

According to his observations, Eurosceptics today are hostile to immigration and free trade.

“They tend to be quite anti-American in particular, opposing American interventionist policies in the Middle East; and they are often quite sympathetic to [Russian President] Vladimir Putin; they are very skeptical about NATO. They are against free trade. And most importantly, they all try to move the political debate away from battles between left and right towards the struggle of cosmopolitans, that is, the struggle between untouchable elites who run countries with a new kind of people who are organized and mobilized on different principles,” Leonhard writes.

“That's why one of the things that almost all of these parties like to talk about is direct democracy and referendums. We found that these parties are calling for 34 different referendums on entry or exit from various EU-related states or entities across the 18 member states of the European Union. What they are doing is a real counter-revolution,” he notes.