The standard headline stories for the Indian and European Parliament elections have been a triumph of democracy against Narendra Modi’s increasing autocracy and the surprise surge of right-wing nationalist parties in Europe.

Those first takes are only half the story. The other half could have serious concerns for Australia – and in the European case, provide comfort for Peter Dutton.

The flip side of the Indian story is how the embarrassed Indian president will react to failing to obtain the landslide he expected, failing to get the numbers he wanted to be able to change India’s constitution.

The optimistic view is that Modi’s sectarian BJP will play nicer to try to win more hearts and minds. The alternative is that it will decide to go even harder, not being satisfied with what India’s (reduced) level of democracy has delivered.

Greens plunge

The flip side to the rise of the hard right in Europe is the slide of the Greens. Make that the plunge of the Greens. The Green vote in Germany crashed from 20 per cent in 2019 to 11.9 per cent.

Looking for some comfort against the surge in right-wing nationalism, the standard story has been relief that the “centre” has held in Europe.

The diminishment of the Green vote though means a change to the forces swaying the centre and the tone of environmental policy.

That has mostly been overlooked, but not by Professor Adam Tooze who brings a historian’s perspective to his Chartbook publication.

“The elections have tilted the European political balance against the green agenda, which has served as an important reference point for politics in Brussels for the last five years,” writes Professor Tooze.

“The far-right and the progressive-green parties do not compete for the same voters. But the balance between these two blocs matters, because they sway the course taken by centrist parties – Christian Democrats and Social Democrats.

“Even if Ursula von der Leyen succeeds in her bid for a second term as commission president, she will not be pursuing the full-throated green-forward policy that launched the Green Deal in 2019 and Next Gen EU in 2020. This does not mean that the EU will adopt a climate-sceptical position. But priorities will shift and difficult trade-offs will be avoided.

“There is a groundswell of opinion in Europe that is preoccupied with the cost of living, wants to keep its internal combustion-engined cars and sympathises with farmers in their opposition to green regulation. That grouping will now have a much louder voice.”

French hope

Just as state elections don’t necessarily reflect federal voting intentions in Australia, the European elections are different from national elections – as French President Emmanuel Macron hopes in calling a national election in trying to get out the left and centre vote to put the hard right back in its place.

But the German European vote coincides with record-low satisfaction with the governing coalition that includes the Greens. In 2019, polling of what concerned Germans most had climate/environment in first place with 23 per cent. Now it’s in third place with 14 per cent, behind 26 per cent for peace and 17 per cent for migration.

“With German elections due in 2025, the chances of another green-inspired progressive coalition look slim indeed,” reports Professor Tooze.

The global cost-of-living issue and the Ukraine war have diminished climate’s ranking.

The Greens reportedly have been particularly damaged by taking a hard line on a law last year regulating domestic heating, demanding mostly renewable energy for new buildings and old buildings in some areas.

Encouragement for Dutton

Our fossil fuel-minded LNP will take heart from the European experience. It’s not only the Trump party that the Dutton Coalition draws its policies from.

The Coalition’s climate change and energy spokesman Ted O’Brien is now saying Peter Dutton did not mean he would pull Australia out of the Paris Agreement when he said on the weekend that he would scrap our binding 2030 Paris targets. Like migration reduction and nuclear power, nobody really knows what the LNP means when Mr Dutton is talking to grab headlines without offering any details.

But a less-Green Europe, especially a less-Green Germany, could make Australian backsliding less potentially painful.

In the aftermath of the Indian election, optimism continues to triumph over experience on the path Narendra Modi’s BJP will take.

Triumph of optimism

If arresting opposition leaders, shutting down unsympathetic media outlets, whipping up Hindu nationalism and anti-Muslim fervour, cowering courts, using police to intimidate independent candidates and the odd assassination in Canada and Pakistan weren’t enough to grab greater power to fashion India, what might the BJP try next?

The Economist Intelligence Unit ranks India as a “flawed democracy”, America’s Freedom House calls it a “partially-free democracy” while the Swedish V-Dem Institute is the harshest judge, labelling India as an “electoral autocracy” and one of the worst “autocratisers”, ranking its democracy at No.104, between Niger and the Ivory Coast.

On the upside, as The Economist opined, the economic concerns of the majority overcame the chauvinism of the BJP.

Unemployment, poverty, concern about Modi’s cronyism and potentially scrapping affirmative action for lower castes and minorities overcame the promotion of the BJP’s “Hindutva” goal.

While the Indian economy overall is growing strongly, the growth is not evenly spread. Big business, none bigger than the Adani Group, has done well out of the BJP. The immediate stockmarket reaction to Modi’s weaker-than-expected election win was to wipe $68 billion off the value of the Adani Group.

The concern for Australia and its political leaders is that pretending all was rosy and sweet-smelling with the Modi government was already hard enough. Should the BJP go harder to suppress its opposition, that would become impossible.

A common feature of autocracies or anocracies (I’d suggest the correct term for Modi’s India) is looking for a foreign threat or complaint to distract and rally the population.

The US, and therefore Australia, has been encouraging India to become an even bigger military power. It already has the world’s fourth-biggest military budget, up 13 per cent this financial year to $111 billion – a vast amount of money for a country where the government’s own survey found 36 per cent of children under five are stunted; 19 per cent are wasted and 32 per cent are underweight.

It has several million excess young men frustrated by their lack of opportunity, either unemployed or underemployed, itself a potentially destabilising factor.

Despite occasional unarmed skirmishes and a very small war over their disputed Himalayan border 62 years ago, China and India are not natural enemies, that Himalayan border mattering little in practical terms.

The last thing Australia or the world needs is a more chauvinistic and militaristic India.