Matt Steinglass attacks other foolish misreadings of election results. In this case, he is discussing the recent European elections as seen from Finland:

What happened in the elections was two things. First, support shifted away from the social democrats, and towards the Christian democrats. And second, a small right-wing party that’s descended from the 1950s-era agrarian/farmers party, whose main platform is anti-immigrant and anti-Europe, picked up a lot of votes, and in fact that party’s charismatic leader was the single largest vote-getter in the elections, pulling about 130,000 votes (which is huge in 5-million-strong Finland). But that party still isn’t actually in the government, and it has no positive governing agenda. And even if it did, that governing agenda would almost certainly have nothing to do with free-market economics.

This is an important point. With the exception of perhaps Vlaams Belang in Belgium, most anti-immigration, anti-Europe and “far-right” parties in Europe are not economically liberal, and the economically liberal parties are not anti-immigration or anti-Europe. Across much of Europe, as in this Finnish example, artisanal populist, peasants’ or farmers’ parties have tended to be equally skeptical of market liberals and the transnational European political project. Our populists, such as they are, tend to be wedded to our peculiarly continental nationalism, which in the European context would make them pro-Europe “federalists,” which is why it may be less surprising, if not less irrational, for most of our populists, especially on the right, to embrace market liberalism, while it is left to the fairly marginal decentralists, both right and left, to argue against political and economic consolidation.

There is some evidence that market liberals had some success in the European elections, but this is mostly because those parties also benefited from anti-incumbency sentiment. In Germany, for example, the Free Democrats almost doubled their share of the vote over the previous election, but this was, like so many other gains by smaller parties in the EP, a product of discontent with the CDU-SPD coalition government. Unlike the Finnish example, German voters interested in protesting against the government could not vote for either major party and many of them settled for one of the main opposition groups. It seems that most of the support that the Union lost went straight to the Free Democrats, but this does not exactly herald a massive rejection of Christian Democratic ideas about social solidarity.