As the French hard right triumphs in EU elections, Macron calls snap ...

The elections to the European Parliament held on June 6th-9th have delivered a stinging rebuke from voters to some incumbents, most clearly in Germany and above all in France, where President Emmanuel Macron responded to his party’s routing at the hands of the hard right by dissolving the French parliament and calling a risky snap election.

The continued rise of populist parties in the EU’s two biggest countries, even though it was not matched in the rest of the bloc, will make it harder for centrist parties to run the union’s powerful institutions in Brussels without courting the support of nationalist politicians once considered beyond the pale.