From Marine Le Pen in France to Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Viktor Orbán in Hungary or Tom van Grieken in Belgium, the leaders of the far right are rubbing their hands in preparation for the European Parliament elections on June 9.
The polls predict a historic result that will be nothing more than a reflection – enlarged, because there is always a lot of protest votes in this event – ??of their growing presence in national parliaments and governments. Yes, the extremist tide will continue to rise and gain seats in the European Union, but it will not become a wave nor can they by themselves condition European politics. Although they could win 25% of the seats in the new European Parliament, polls suggest that the expanded version of the great European coalition (Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and Liberals) will resist.
Experience also indicates that, given their inveterate inability to collaborate with each other, they will not be able to translate their electoral success into political influence in the European Parliament. The novelty in the legislature may be that, for the first time, the European People’s Party (EPP) has an alternative majority to its right with which to pass laws. In a context of normalization of pacts with the extreme right at a national level (there are in Sweden, Finland, Italy and Croatia and, shortly, in the Netherlands), the social democrats demand that the EPP portray itself and explain itself to the voters ” “Where can your vote end?”
In the current legislature, far-right MEPs have been divided between two groups. On the one hand, Identity and Democracy (ID), the classic acronym of this ideology, which gravitates around National Regrouping (RN), Marine Le Pen’s party; Vlaams Belang (Flemish independence activists), Matteo Salvini’s League and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) are also active in it. On the other hand, European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), a group with parties that participate in governments at different levels founded by the British conservatives, which turned to the far right with the arrival of Law and Justice (PiS, Poland), now dominant; Here sit the deputies of Vox and those of Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, who after 9-J will occupy a position of greater leadership.
The latest projection of the national polls published by Europe Elect indicates that ID will obtain 86 seats, tied as third force with the liberals of Renew, while ECR will obtain 84, adding a total of 35 more representatives than in the current Parliament. But Le Pen’s calls for “Europe’s conservatives and patriots” to unite do not seem likely to bear fruit. Although at the beginning of each legislature one of Brussels’ favorite sports is to speculate on the possibility of ID and ECR joining forces, all the analysts and institutional sources consulted rule it out. Despite the apparent similarities, their internal ideological fractures are so wide that they see it as more likely that there will be three different groups, as between 2014 and 2019, than that they will merge into one.
“The differences between the parties of the two groups are too great. ID is pro-Russia, and ECR is pro-Ukraine. And that is a major ideological fracture,” although some are now trying to soften their past ties with Moscow, explains Sophia Russack, an analyst at the Brussels think tank CEPS, who points out other divisions, such as Atlanticism and free trade, which ECR supports.
The institution, Russack continues, applies a cordon sanitaire to ID that marginalizes them and prevents them from holding institutional positions or obtaining legislative dossiers, while they do cooperate with ECR. “It is a distinction that makes life easier for the institution, although now the composition of ECR ??is very different from the original,” he emphasizes. Defined by the defense of the national interest at all costs, the internal dynamics of both groups effectively prevent any effective cooperation between them. “Those from ID, sometimes, don’t even go to the polls. Both groups have a very national focus, and there is very little voting discipline,” says Russack.
A study of the votes of the last legislature prepared by the European Policy Center concludes that the votes of ID and ECR have been so disparate that they have ended up being “the least influential groups.” Its practically zero influence on European legislative action also derives from the “strikingly low” number of amendments registered. On the other hand, the ultras are, proportionally, the deputies who submit the most written questions to the European Commission, a formula often used for the purposes of national political agitation. “But if their ranks increase after the June elections, far-right parties could gain enough confidence to move from simply seeking publicity to influencing politics,” warn the study’s authors, Corina Stratulat and Levente Kocsis.
The fluidity of this type of groups is unparalleled in the European Parliament and it is very possible that their composition will vary after 9-J. A key unknown for the next legislature is what will happen to the Hungarian Fidesz party. Since he was expelled from the EPP in 2021, Orbán’s co-religionists are part of the non-registered group, but he aspires to join ECR. They would provide around a dozen seats and the Polish PiS awaits them with open arms. Meloni, on the other hand, does not seem enthusiastic (she is more interested in moderating her group than in radicalizing it), and Fidesz is not welcomed by parties such as the Czech ODS, to which the Prime Minister, Petr Fiala, belongs, or the N-VA (Belgium ), who would be delighted to join the EPP in the unlikely event that the PP forgave their support for Carles Puigdemont.
Considered themselves unusable by democratic and pro-European parties, the ultras also have their own undesirable travel companions, either due to their extremism or internal competition. The MEPs of Reconquista, Éric Zemmour’s party, are active in ECR because they cannot sit in ID with Le Pen. On the other hand, the growing radicalism and legal problems of the AfD are beginning to be a problem for its presidential aspirations.
In recent years, Le Pen has adopted a certain “Europragmatism” to mitigate fears of her anti-European positions, notes Eric Maurice, an analyst at the European Policy Center. “He understood well that something that scared certain voters was his position on the euro and the EU. Now you look at the RN program for the elections and it is very positive about Europe, but when you look at concrete proposals and see the implications, you are looking at ideas that would destroy the EU even though they present them as very positive for France and Europe.”
“The advance of the extreme right – and, to a certain extent, of the extreme left – is the expression of a significant part of the population of their dissatisfaction, or even anger, for different economic and social reasons, for feeling excluded from society or “unheard,” continues Maurice, who believes that this phenomenon “feeds back” on the climate of general violence that prevails in today’s society and that is not exclusive to Europe, dramatically evidenced with the attempted assassination of the Slovak leader Robert Fico. “In a polarized society, at any given moment those feelings can be expressed in a more violent way. Coming to power makes his speech more visible in the public sphere. The invectives of these parties against people or groups, be they the elites or the political class, accentuate the atmosphere of general tension and violence,” he concludes.
The extreme right, in short, will not win power in the tenth European legislature, but it will continue its growth of the last 20 years. The novelty, which in this context implies an enormous responsibility, will be in the position of hinge or kingmaker that the EPP will have, like the liberals in their day, on whom it came to depend if a legislation went ahead with a majority of left or right. This situation will lead to a less predictable legislature than previous ones, in which “we will have a weaker mainstream coalition hostage to the right wing of the EPP, which could block any legislation it does not like by threatening to ally itself with the extreme right,” says Professor Cas. Mudde in an article for Intereconomics.
For Iratxe García, the head of the socialist group in the European Parliament, the refusal of the EPP to sign the declaration agreed with liberals, greens and the unitary left against the “normalization” of the extreme right and any type of pacts with these parties, following the attack to German MEP Matthias Ecke, “clearly indicates that he is open to also formalizing the alliance with the extreme right if the numbers work for him on a European scale.”
Ursula von der Leyen, the EPP candidate for the European Commission and current president of the institution, has opened the door to collaborating with these groups. “It will depend a lot on the makeup of Parliament and who is in each group,” she said. His red lines are that the parties are “pro-Europe, pro-Ukraine and pro-rule of law”, a definition in which he seems to include Meloni’s party, with whom he has taken extreme care of the relationship. Her eventual confirmation vote – which will only occur if European leaders designate her as their candidate at the end of June – will be secret, but its outcome may give clues to where the next European legislature is headed.
