Remember Wag the Dog? It was an hilarious film that came out in 1997, almost at the end of the Clinton era, when the President was busy telling us that he had not had sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky, when in fact he’d been in a sexual relationship with her for 18 months. In Wag the Dog, a spin doctor and a Hollywood producer cook up a war in Albania to cover up a presidential sex scandal that threatens to break in the final days before a presidential election.

The upcoming European Parliamentary elections kicked off on Thursday 6 June and won’t wrap up until Sunday 9 June with voters in 27 countries of the European Union electing 720 lawmakers to the European Parliament for the next five years.

Already there’s a corruption scandal that has been running for 18 months. Members of the centre-left Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, the second biggest group in the parliament, have been caught up in Qatargate, a cash-for-lobbying scandal that erupted in December 2022.

Even without the sordid spectacle of self-professed socialists sticking their snouts in Qatar’s bottomless Islamist trough of loot, voters have been moving to the right driven by the EU’s failure to secure its borders and deliver safe, controlled migration, and its deranged Green Deal that made no sense even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. With the abrupt termination of Russian gas supplies on which Europeans relied to prop up their renewable energy delusions, voters have become painfully aware of the high cost of unreliable energy. Only those countries that have not shut down their coal-fired plants or have abundant hydro and/or nuclear power have cheap energy as the EU continues to phase out its coal-fired power stations and Turkey becomes the EU’s largest coal-fired electricity producer.

In recent weeks, there have also been allegations of Russian influence peddling with the Belgian public prosecutor investigating whether European politicians have been paid to spread Russian propaganda.

Yet while a fake war in Albania provided a convenient distraction from a presidential sex scandal in Wag the Dog, the same cannot be said of a real war in Ukraine that is punishingly expensive in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis driven by the woeful mismanagement of the Covid pandemic.

So what’s a voter to do who despairs of the lunatic policies of the Brussels elite? Some are turning to the parties that are grouped as the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR). This includes Poland’s eurosceptic Law and Justice (PiS) and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy). Others are turning to the parties grouped under the Identity and Democracy (ID) grouping. It includes Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) which looks set to be one of the big winners in the elections.

In Hungary, Viktor Orbán, who has been in power for 14 years, is the EU’s longest-serving leader but his party, Fidesz, has not been aligned with any European parliamentary grouping since 2021 when it broke with the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP). Fidesz will benefit from the rise in support for the right in the European Parliament and will presumably align itself with those parties after the elections. It will also take over the EU’s rotating presidency in the second half of the year giving it significant influence as the key issues of migration policy, energy and climate policies, and the EU policy on the war in Ukraine are hammered out. Orbán’s rallying cry of ‘Occupy Brussels! No migration, no gender, no war’ is likely to continue to resonate with voters despite the emergence of a popular challenger, Péter Magyar, in recent weeks and Fidesz is expected to continue its dominance of the Hungarian political scene.

The only other contender is the Two-Tailed Dog party, yes, you read that right, which is challenging Fidesz in the under-30 age group. It promises free beer, eternal life, and siestas for all. The Two-Tailed Dog party’s candidate Gergely Kovacs was unexpectedly successful in the local government elections in Budapest in 2019 and is now determined to stay the course. As he told balkaninsight.com, ‘Unfortunately, I have not fulfilled all my electoral promises, so I need to be re-elected. I promised to earn a lot of money, pave the road in front of my house and erect a grand statue of myself. But only the road is done so far.’

Central Europe, or at least the Czech Republic, has always thrown up those who greet the prospects of politics and war with a wry sense of humour. One thinks of the absurd black comedic novel, The Good Soldier Švejk, about a soldier who, in civilian life, is a dealer in stolen dogs that he sells back to the owners as exotic breeds by dying their hair and giving them bizarre coiffures. Švejk fights the war in the same spirit cheerfully changing uniform and fighting for the other side when he is captured. The word Švejk has become a part of Czech, and indeed English. To Švejk is to behave like an unlucky simpleton when oppressed by higher authorities but nonetheless outwit them with your subversive idiocy.

The Two-Tailed Dog party seems to operate in a similar vein. Kovacs says he is a bit worried about what the party should do if they get elected to the European Parliament. Then he says, ‘Perhaps we should lobby for Hungary to join the EU once again. This would give us twice the EU funds, right? And we could even afford to be kicked out once…!’

Responding to Orbán’s pro-peace policy on the war in Ukraine, the Dog party put up posters asking the question, ‘Where would you rather do the dishes? In Berlin or Vladivostok?’ And when Orbán campaigned on the slogan, ‘Stop Brussels!’, the Dog party adopted the slogan, ‘Stop Brussels. They should stop sending us money.’

The Dog party doesn’t have a hope of winning a seat in the European Parliament. A Transylvanian colleague of Kovacs who went on a 15-minute hunger strike was equally unsuccessful. Sweden’s Ond Kyckling party, the Evil Chicken party, will be happy if it garners 100 votes; that would almost triple the 39 votes it won in the recent Swedish national elections.

Bizarrely, the German joke party called Die Partei, The Party, did win a seat in the European Parliament. Martin Sonneborn is seeking a third term with a commitment to cap the prices of beer and kebabs and rebuild the Berlin Wall. Perhaps the Germans are trying to prove, in their solidly Germanic way, that they do have a sense of humour, but Sonneborn did some serious work in the last parliament attempting to expose how the European Commission negotiated its Covid vaccine contracts with Pfizer.

As Europeans contemplate who will lead them in the next parliament and perhaps into war or peace, let’s hope Hungary’s two-tailed dog does a little of the wagging.