Is Europe where the key risk is for 2019?

Best part of being a guest host on CNBC is I get to ask experts difficult questions. See link here

Professor Cedomir Nestorovic highlighted that EU Elections is likely the biggest risk of 2019. Far bigger than Brexit for the region and possibly trade wars globally.

Two very interesting quotes I read recently from VP of EU Parliament:

“It boils down to whether Europe is regarded as useful or not”

“While anti-Europeans -- populist and nationalist movements -- make up about a quarter of the electorate”.

The risk here is that participation in EU legislative ballots has been falling for 4 decades. With those turnout clouds hanging over the poll, political parties and EU institutions will be forced to divert limited resources away from substantial debates about Europe's future, in order to cajole people to the ballot box.

With centrist parties declining, Euroskeptics are grabbing more levers of power, including within centrist groups.

Harshly anti-EU rhetoric is now a regular feature in national government commentary about the EU, and has footholds in 4 EU political groups: the EU People’s Party (via Hungary’s Fidesz party), the EE Conservatives and Reformists (Poland’s Law and Justice party), Europe of Freedom and Democracy (Italy’s 5Star and League parties), and Europe of Nations and Freedoms (Marine Le Pen’s National Front). Plenty of individual far-left MEPs also harbor doubts about the EU.

Not least among these is the view that the bloc is primarily a self-serving, costly bureaucracy that, when it affects the everyday lives of ordinary people, does so by subjecting them to intrusive rules.

It’s a pretty harsh view and I think the real risk for the Europe in this context is complacency in correcting this view.