A Right-Wing Surge in Europe?

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

A report released Jan. 24 by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) confirmed what other polls have suggested: far-right parties will make big inroads in the European Union parliamentary elections this coming June, when 400 million people across the EU are eligible to send 720 MEPs to Brussels.

Polls have suggested that a backlash against immigration, LGBTQ rights, abortion, and support for Ukraine is unfolding across the continent. The right-wing surge in the polls seems bigger and bolder, with one predicting the nationalist right and far right could pick up nearly a quarter of the seats and roll back left and centre-left parties.

“We’re going to see a really significant shift to the right,” according to Simon Hix, a professor of comparative politics at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, referring to the June elections. The European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) bloc and the Identity and Democracy (ID) bloc could together arguably become the major grouping in the European parliament.

Hix forecast that the far-right ID grouping, which includes Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France and the German far-right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD), will gain 40 seats in June. This would give them 98 lawmakers, vaulting them from their current sixth place into the third place currently occupied by the Liberals.

Then, if the current fifth largest grouping, the 67-member right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, the home of Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) and Italy’s ruling Brothers of Italy parties, also grows by some 18 seats, as Hix predicts, it could become the fourth largest group, surpassing both the Greens and the liberals.

Add the 12 members of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party, who are politically homeless, and the ECR and ID together could muster 25 per cent of the seats in the next European Parliament.

Orban has for years dreamed of building an illiberal bloc that could redirect the EU, and he has appeared to be excited by the signs of growing support for nationalists and the far right across the EU.

Such a rise in right wing representation could make the Parliamentary approval process for people like center-right leaning European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who runs the bloc’s executive arm and is rumored to be seeking another term, a difficult one.

The European Parliament always has blocked members of the far-right from holding any influential positions, such as chairing committees, involvement in negotiations or sitting in the bureau of top MEPs which deals with the institution’s internal affairs and its two billion Euro annual budget.

“The risk of an ungovernable Europe is pretty real,” Stéphane Séjourné, the new French foreign minister, who leads the centrist Renew Europe group of MEPs, warned.” “If the populist parties ever manage to have a blocking minority in the European parliament, the risk is that it will be very difficult to compose a majority.”

Hans Kundnani, author of a book called Eurowhiteness, who has written about the possibility of a far-right EU, said: “The far right can win without winning if what happens is the center-right takes on all of their rhetoric and their policies, especially on these questions about their policies, about identity, and immigration and Islam.”

Maximilian Krah, an AfD leader, hopes this comes to pass. “I want to break out of the cordon sanitaire, and I want to use the opportunities of this Parliament in a constructive way,” he said, referring to the firewall principle under which democratic parties agree not to cooperate with anti-democratic forces. “I’m not here to destroy.”

Why are so many millions of Europeans in the working and lower-middle classes, the larger part of whom had historically voted for parties of the Left, now giving their vote to the New Right?

The parties they now support used to disagree on whether to support leaving the EU, Brexit-style, or staying to fight. Now, they’ve coalesced around two key issues: the strengthening of the borders to keep out those fleeing the Global South, and opposing the Green energy transition.

Working-class concerns rest first and foremost on their opposition to mass immigration. Indeed, the support the far-right parties have received is due to their taking this position, even as the traditional parties of the Left and moderate Right continued to broadly support the free flow of labour and generous refugee programmes.

Even Switzerland, though not an EU member, worries about this, as it is in the Schengen Area -- countries that have officially abolished border controls at their mutual borders. The conservative Swiss People’s Party announced that a petition to ensure the country’s population does not exceed 10 million before 2050 crossed the 100,000-signature threshold needed to initiate a nationwide referendum in record time.

The far right’s gains in June could prompt some EU member states to adhere more closely to foreign policy decisions which could negatively impact financial and military backing to Ukraine.

All over Europe, we see a coming together of the centre right and the far right on questions around identity and immigration. Until recently, such a thing would have seemed remote. But the EU itself has increasingly come to see itself as defending an imperiled European civilization. And if the European right has developed one shared concern, this is it.