A hundred people gathered on the morning of January 3 at the church of Saint-Ferdinand-des-Ternes, in Paris, to attend the funeral of a dark figure: Patrick Buisson, an ultra ideologue and once an influential councilor of Nicolas Sarkozy in the Elysee. The ceremony was attended by the most senior members of the French extreme right, from Marine Le Pen, president of the National Reunion (RN), to Éric Zemmour, leader of Reconquest, which in itself would be enough to establish the characterization of the subject.
Between 2007 and 2012 Buisson marked the ideological line of Sarkozy and pushed him towards the theses of the extreme right in matters of national identity, immigration and security. His dream was to gather all the right in a grand coalition with a radically conservative program. The late councilor had an ugly vice, in the absence of an original: recording conversations without his interlocutors knowing. So, thanks to a leak in 2014, it became public to what extent Buisson despised Sarkozy – whom he called “the little one” or “the dwarf” – and how he manipulated him as he wanted by making him toughen his policies.
The radicalization of the Gaullist right imposed by Sarkozy from the Elysée proved suicidal. Not only did he fail to get himself re-elected as President of the Republic, but, fifteen years later, his party is a shadow of what it was and has ceded all the ground to the extreme right, whose speech contributed decisively to normalization. In fifteen years, the republican right has gone from being the first party in France, with 45.6% of the votes and a comfortable absolute majority in the National Assembly (320 deputies out of 577), to being the fourth, with a 11.3% and 62 seats. Despite this, the new orientation of the Republicans under the leadership of Éric Ciotti – to the right at all costs! – persists in the same error.
Meanwhile, Marine Le Pen’s RN rose to third place in 2022, with 18.7% of the vote and 89 deputies, and polls predict it will become France’s first party in June’s European elections. Le Pen, who in the second round of the presidential elections two years ago managed to get 13.3 million votes, could end up taking her party – yes this time – to the Elysée in 2027. If anyone still doubts it, you only have to see how the RN is setting the political agenda in France, to the point of having dragged President Emmanuel Macron himself (you too, Brutus?) to approve – with his votes and his theses – a harsh law of Immigration.
France is not a rarity. Quite the opposite. In recent times, the traditional right has been approaching and adopting the ideas of the extreme right, mainly with regard to immigration, a matter to which the anti-woke culture war and climate skepticism have been added, in order to attract that rural world dissatisfied with the demands of the energy transition. As in a domino effect, the European right has all started running after the ultras like there is no tomorrow. It has been seen in the Netherlands, where finally the extremist Geert Wilders, of the Party for Freedom (PVV), put it in his pocket and won the November elections. It has been seen in Austria, in Belgium, in Finland, in Sweden… It is also being seen in Spain, where a PP without a north is losing its head to Vox.
In 2000, not so long ago!, the entry of the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), of Jörg Haider, into the federal government caused a political earthquake in Europe and the European Union reached to apply diplomatic sanctions – rather symbolic, it is true – in Vienna. Never before, since the end of the Second World War, had the ideological heirs of fascism and Nazism been integrated into the Government of an EU Member State. Twenty-four years later, it has become something most banal.
The extreme right and ultra-conservative populisms are on the rise today in Europe. They govern in Slovakia, Finland, Hungary and Italy, they are part of the majority that supports the Government in Sweden (what would have happened in Spain with Vox if they had added the majority with the PP) and they lead the vote intention polls in Belgium and France. In Germany, the increasingly radical AfD is in second place. And in Poland, despite losing the Government, they were the most voted in the October elections. There are those who do not hesitate to talk about mainstream, the dominant current.
The European elections called from 6 to 9 June will be a thermometer of the situation. And everything indicates that the temperature will rise a lot. The polls predict a remarkable rise of the radical right-wing forces gathered in the Identity and Democracy (ID) groups – which includes the parties of Le Pen and Wilders, Salvini’s League and the AfD, among others -, and European Conservatives and Reformists (CRE) – with the post-fascists Fratelli of Giorgia Meloni, the Poles of Law and Justice… and Vox – which together could reach 160 seats and, if they fail to forge an alternative majority with the popular , yes, they could perhaps constitute a blocking minority in the European Parliament. The leader of the EPP, the Bavarian Manfred Weber, has been flirting shamelessly for some time with agreeing with the second…
The extreme right is like a dangerous and gigantic amoeba in the process of phagocytizing the traditional right. In view of the banquet that is being given to the whole continent, it must be of one of the most lethal varieties, Naegleria fowleri. Also known as brain eater.
