Right Gains Ground in Europe

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

In 2024, far right parties in Europe may win elections in both Austria and Belgium, while Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) leads the polls in France and the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) is running a strong second in Germany.

Even French President Emmanuel Macron is said to believe that it will be Le Pen who will occupy the Elysée Palace after presidential elections in 2027. In Germany, the AfD continues its climb, and the barrier around mainstream collaboration with the party is likely to be breached this year.

And, if 2023 closed with the surprise victory of Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party (PVV) in the Netherlands, the year ahead promises more of the same. The Austrian Freedom Party (FPO) is likely to win the parliamentary election in the autumn.

In Belgium, which holds parliamentary elections in June, the New Right Flemish Interest (VB) currently seems likely to win Flanders, the larger and richer of the country’s two regions. Both it and its closest rival, the New Flemish Alliance(N-VA), seek independence from Belgium to form a separate Flemish state. The symbolism of the rise of the New Right, in the state which hosts the European Union’s own capital, cannot be missed.

In all of the 27 nations which constitute the EU, at least one new or far-Right party is now active. In several (Finland, Italy, Slovakia, Sweden), they form part of a coalition government of the Right. In three (Hungary, Italy, Slovakia), they lead the government.

Alice Weidel, the AfD’s leader since 2022, maintains her party wants to reform EU institutions to curb the power of the European Commission and address what she sees as a democratic deficit. “If a reform isn't possible, if we fail to rebuild the sovereignty of the EU member states, we should let the people decide, just as Britain did,” she said.

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.

A report from the Centre for American Progress released last December, “The Nexus Between Green Backlash and Democratic Backsliding in Europe,” highlights recent instances where rising far-right populism, threats to democracy, and growing resistance to climate policies have intersected in Europe.

It concludes that European far-right groups “frame environmental policies as elitist while stoking economic anxiety and nationalism, which erodes trust in democratic institutions and further distracts from genuine environmental concerns.”

If the right-wing populist parties come into government, they will use their power to hinder the institutions that are meant to accelerate the energy transition, according to Mahir Yazar, a researcher at the Centre for Climate and Energy Transition at the University of Bergen in Norway. “Populist far-right parties portray fossil fuel phase-out as a threat to traditional family values, regional identity, and national sovereignty.”

But 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 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 (SVP) announced that a petition to ensure the country’s population does not exceed 10 million before 2050 has crossed the 100,000-signature threshold needed to initiate a nationwide referendum in record time.

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.