(*This opinion / analytical article was written by Ivan Dikov for The European Views website.)

The fact that the 3.5-year-long “life support” of “EU Britain” is finally about to be “unplugged” already at the start of 2020 is a good enough cause for optimism for the new year.

With so much gloom for Europe at the end of 2019, the start of 2020 warrants a bit of a “lighter” piece.

Make no mistake, the gloom is very justified, and doesn’t bode well for the continent and the European Union countries.

For example, the gloom is justified, as I just argued in the very days of 2019, with respect to the Ukraine War conundrum and Franco-Germany’s failure to cope with Russia for all the leadership claims of both Angela Merkel (now on her way out), and Emmanuel Macron (whose Napoleonic-scope leadership ambitions seem to be yet to unfold) –

As well as with respect to the seemingly highly sustainable surge of the far right throughout the EU in 2019 (truth be told, in all of its very diverse reincarnations, from neo-Nazis to the pro-democracy conservatives) – which some commentators have mistakenly disparaged at least to some extent because of some not very consequential political gains of the Greens.

Precisely in order not to be that gloomy at the start of 2020, this piece will abstain from full-fledged forecasts.

Although with respect to the two above-mentioned very crucial topics the forecast writes itself:

1. There won’t be any major breakthroughs in the “frozen conflict” war in Ukraine – unless Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky decided to make some huge concessions to Moscow, in which case his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin would score a very substantial geopolitical victory, and Zelensky himself might be ousted or at least face mass protests of outraged Ukrainians.

2. The far right will keep growing steadily throughout the EU in 2020 and beyond because it is highly unlikely that its twin root causes will be eliminated in any tangible way: first, the skyrocketing inequality continuing to enrich the One Percent beyond any imagination (even in a relatively more egalitarian-minded Europe compared with the US of A) while annihilating the European middle class and boosting the lumpenization of the lower classes; and, second, the irrational ubiquitousness of the dominant anti-democratic, anti-free speech political correctness paradigms – which, in all fairness, might not have been that evil and might have made sense 20-30 years ago, in the time of the post-Cold War economic boom and before “multiculturalism’s” “quantitative accruals led to qualitative changes.”

From time to time, I prefer to abstain from forecasting for fear of actually forecasting correctly some negative developments. For example, back in 2009, arguing with some of the panelists at a forum in New Bulgarian University in Sofia, I did forecast Russia’s future encroachments against Ukraine (which materialized in 2014)…

Read the rest of this article on The European Views website here

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