Europeans rebuke the European Union

Voters across the 27-country bloc elected 720 members of the European Parliament. Votes still were being tallied as we published, but it’s clear that parties of the right have performed particularly well. The biggest winner is likely to be the European People’s Party, the EU-level coalition of national center-right parties such as Germany’s Christian Democratic Union and Spain’s Popular Party. The EPP is on track to form a plurality in the incoming parliament, as it did in the last one.

The other winners are the hodgepodge of parties and politicians often (and often misleadingly) described as far right or populist right. France’s Marine Le Pen is the star of this show. Her National Rally won nearly one-third of the vote, more than the combined share of President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance and the Socialist Party’s coalition. The drubbing led Mr. Macron to call a snap legislative election, which may end with him governing alongside a majority for Ms. Le Pen’s party in the parliament.

This result is triggering the usual hyperventilation that wins for such parties herald the march of fascist jackboots in the streets. European voters are smarter than that.

Parties of the right that won did so by moving toward the center on many issues. Ms. Le Pen no longer vocally opposes the euro currency. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy, another politician whose party is expected to fare well at the European level, has transformed into a centrist leader since taking office, including support for Ukraine.

Parties that didn’t make this shift, such as Alternative for Germany (marred by recent scandals about its leaders’ alleged sympathies for actual Nazis), failed to gain as much ground as their peers who did. Dutch voters narrowly preferred their center-left to Geert Wilders’s party after handing that quintessential populist a big victory only last November, apparently a sign they intend to impose some moderation on him.

What voters do want is a European Union that solves pressing problems. Immigration was a central issue in the campaign. Europe has never figured out how to manage the millions of migrants former German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed in 2015, or the millions who have arrived since. Voters are angry at a bureaucracy that seems paralyzed in the crisis and a legal system that makes it all but impossible to deport illegal migrants.

Voters also are growing weary of virtue-signaling flights of fancy such as net-zero carbon emissions at the expense of stagnating economies or skyrocketing energy prices. Green parties were among the biggest losers this weekend, and Brussels already had started to dial back some of its most onerous climate commitments as it saw the electoral freight train coming in recent months.

Now the newly victorious parties and politicians have to deliver. Some, such as Ms. Meloni, will be in a position to appoint members of the European Commission to oversee the bureaucracy. The new parliament will get a vote on the new leader of the commission, a post currently held by Ursula von der Leyen, and expect the policy horse-trading over that appointment to be a sign of their level of savvy. Governing hasn’t always been a happy experience for insurgent parties.

All of this sounds like the cut and thrust of normal democratic politics rather than the descent into fascism conjured by alarmist elites on the left. If that seems strange and unfamiliar for the European Union, all the more reason the EU deserves the rebuke voters have delivered.