Patrick Costello sees some signs that the far right is losing momentum
For over a decade, the far right has been on the march. In Europe, a cursory look suggests that the marchers are about to storm the citadels. In France and Germany, the two historic “motors” of EU integration, far-right parties (Rassemblement National (RN) and AfD) are leading in the polls. A Le Pen or Bardella presidency after next year’s French election is looking ever more likely and Chancellor Merz is looking vulnerable as regional elections risk bringing the AfD to elected office for the first time.
Elsewhere on the continent, Italy’s Georgia Meloni looks set to become the first Prime Minister since the foundation of the Italian Republic to see out a full term in office. In Romania, on 5 May, social democrats broke the firewall and voted together with the far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians to bring their own coalition government down. Cooperation between the centre-right EPP and the far right groups in the European Parliament is becoming commonplace, even on key pieces of legislation. What emerges is a picture of a slow but inevitable march to victory of the European far-right, backed by their friends in Washington and Silicon Valley, and with an agenda to paralyse and eventually dismantle the rules and regulations of a ‘woke’ European Union.
But look again. In France’s local elections in March, Le Pen and Bardella did not make the great breakthrough that they had been trumpeting in advance and, despite a low turnout, the traditional parties held onto many of their strongholds. The overwhelming rejection of Viktor Orban in Hungary in April showed that a well-coordinated opposition coalition can win big even when the scales have been heavily tipped against them. In Italy, Meloni invested a lot of personal capital in a referendum on reforming Italy’s judicial system. She lost. In fact, the only country where the far right has been showing consistent growth this year has been Germany. So at the very least, we can say that the march of the far right through Europe’s halls of power is faltering and that their victory is starting to look a little less inevitable. The unpopularity of Trump’s Iran war has made the far right’s ties with MAGA a political liability and that in turn creates new opportunities to defeat them.
At a recent conference in Brussels, Cas Mudde, one of the leading academics researching the far right, made a presentation that offered important pointers to how to achieve that defeat. He pointed out that, across Europe, what has been happening politically in the last decade is not an overall shift to the right. It is the result of fragmentation within both of the two big left and right blocs of voters, the overall size of which have remained largely unchanged. Within the right bloc, a generation of voters no longer living in the shadow and memories of World War 2 see no great distinctions between centre and far right. Long-standing taboos about voting for them have eroded. Where centre right parties move into far right territory to try and recapture those votes they merely speed up the erosion of those taboos by legitimising the far right’s agenda. This goes a long way to explaining why AfD support is rising in Germany: Merz’s attempt to defeat them by shifting his party to the right on migration has played into the AfD’s hands.
Meanwhile, within the left block, Mudde explained that the big fragmentation of voting behaviour is away from parties who are or have been in government, seen by many as part of the problem, towards parties who can offer new and popular policies which are untested in government. Where left parties are able to work together around common candidates and common platforms, they can win, as the New Popular Front (NPF) demonstrated in France’s legislative elections two years ago. It is the fracturing of the NPF that has made a Le Pen/Bardella win likely, not the rise in the far right vote.
As is almost always the case, what applies to continental Europe applies on the other side of the Channel. The rise of Reform is more about the decline of the Tories than an overall shift to the right in British politics, and Farage’s vote is also faltering when compared to last year. Whether the UK ends up with a Reform or Tory/Reform government will depend fundamentally on whether the now fragmented British left is capable after the next election of working together to build a stable alternative government with a clear programme. It may be too late in the day for France’s Presidential election, now less than a year away, but there is enough time in the UK, provided the preparatory work starts now.