Munich (Special to Informed Comment) – After the results of the elections to the European Union parliament were announced on the night of June 9, a common reflection in many political analyses was that the center had held. The far-right advanced but not as much as some polls had predicted. The resistance of the center is, at least numerically speaking, true. The combination of the center-left Social Democrats, the free-market Renew, and the center-right European People’s Party (EPP) will control around 57% of the seats in the parliament (the numbers could change slightly if some national delegations join or leave these three traditional groups).
But the comfortable majority of the center has experienced significant changes. Firstly, it has shrunk by around 20 parliamentarians out of the 720 that make up the parliament. Secondly, it has moved to the right. The Social Democrats experienced limited losses, Renew lost more than a fourth of its members, and the European People’s Party (EPP) won 13 seats. And thirdly, and more importantly, the idea that these three parties represent a solid center that will not reach agreements with the far-right belongs to the past.
On the campaign trail, Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission President and main candidate of the EPP, announced that she would accept the votes of the far-right party Brothers of Italy to be re-elected in her position by the European Parliament, which cannot propose candidates but can turn them down. Brothers of Italy is the party of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
Both von der Leyen and the leader of the EPP, her fellow countryman Manfred Weber, have been engaged in a long-running campaign to portray Meloni as a moderate leader. They have been relatively successful, partly because the EPP’s movement to the right has bridged the gap with the far-right. Before the European elections, the EPP approved a manifesto calling for tripling the staff of Frontex, the European border agency accused of multiple human rights violations. In a proposal that echoes Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda Plan, the EPP also announced it wants to transfer asylum seekers in the EU to so-called “third safe countries”, where their asylum claims would be processed.
Hans Kundnani, the author of the book “Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project” (a very recommendable work reviewed here for Informed Comment), provides a sharp analysis of this change. As he explains, “to understand the influence of the hard right on the EU, it is necessary to go beyond the raw numbers and to look at the way that it is shaping the agenda of the centre right. There has always been a way that the hard right could win without winning.”[1]
Two main reasons have turned Meloni’s Brothers of Italy into an attractive partner for the center-right, and none of them is related to the party’s supposed moderation. The first is that Brothers of Italy is the strongest political force in Italy, and Meloni’s 24 parliamentarians in Brussels will hold considerable leverage in a context where comfortable majorities will be difficult to assemble.
The second is that Meloni, contrary to other far-right leaders such as the Hungarian Viktor Orbán, subscribes to trans-Atlanticism and the continuation of military support for Ukraine. The recent publication of a video by an undercover journalist in which some leading members of Meloni’s party give fascist salutes should belie Meloni’s moderation, in case the politician’s self-declared admiration for Mussolini in her youth years was not sufficient. But in an EU that is becoming increasingly militarized, support for NATO turns far-right politicians into moderate conservatives. This helps explain why von der Leyen’s European Commission is delaying the publication of a report on eroding press freedom in Italy.
Von der Leyen might eventually not need Brothers of Italy’s votes to stay as Commission President, especially if she convinces the European Greens to vote for her. But a new damn has been broken in the normalization of the far-right in Europe, and we can expect the EPP to vote more often together with the far-right in the coming parliament. At the same time, the EPP might use the threat of reaching out to the far-right to tone down proposals coming from its left on topics such as combating climate change.
In the European Parliament, the far-right is divided into two groups. The Conservatives and Reformists faction includes Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, the Spanish party Vox, and the Polish Law and Justice, which was voted out of office in 2023 after causing major damage to the rule of law. Meanwhile, the Identity and Democracy faction includes Le Pen’s National Rally or Salvini’s Lega, the other far-right party in Italy’s ruling coalition.
The combination of the two far-right groups has increased its presence in the European Parliament by 23 seats. This figure, however, fails to capture the magnitude of their rise. The far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) finished second in a German-wide election for the first time in history and is sending 15 parliamentarians to Brussels. The AfD won the elections in eastern Germany and received the second most votes in the south of the country.
During the 2019-2024 period, the AfD parliamentarians belonged to the Identity and Democracy group until they were expelled shortly before the European elections. Le Pen had long sought to dissociate herself from the AfD because the German party hurt her efforts to present a supposedly moderated image. The trigger for the AfD’s expulsion was an interview by the AfD main candidate in the European elections, Maximilian Krah, with the newspaper La Repubblica. In the interview, Krah said that not all members of the SS, the Nazi elite group responsible for the concentration camps, could be considered criminals.
One of the biggest winners in the European elections was a party whose leader, Herbert Kickl, made very similar statements about the SS in 2010. Kickl leads the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), for which the European elections represented their first win in an Austria-wide election. They collected 25.4% of the votes, closely followed by the main center-right and center-left parties. Austria will celebrate national elections at the end of September, and the FPÖ is currently leading the polls.
Journalist Paul Lendvai’s recently published book “Austria Behind the Mask: Politics of a Nation since 1945” provides valuable insights to understand Austria’s recent history, and why the far-right might be able to appoint a chancellor in the Alpine country before the end of 2024. The FPÖ, founded in 1956, was first led by Anton Reinthaller and then, until 1978, by Friedrich Peter. They were both former SS officers.
It was under the leadership of Jörg Haider in the 1990s that the FPÖ consolidated its results in successive parliamentary elections over the 20% mark. About Haider, Lendvai writes that he “catered to the shrinking group of old Nazis and the steadily growing group of radical xenophobes.”[2] In the Austrian parliament, for instance, Haider referred to Nazi extermination camps as “punishment camps”. In 1999, the FPÖ finished second in an election to the Austrian parliament for the first (and until now, only) time and entered the government as the junior partner of the center-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP). Haider stayed away from government positions to minimize the international anger against the new coalition. This did not prevent the EU from imposing temporary sanctions on Austria.
Such a strong response might have been counter-productive, as it contributed to the FPÖ self-portrayal as political outsiders, argues Lendvai. What is clear is that the irate EU reaction from 2000 was not repeated when the ÖVP and the FPÖ established a new coalition government in 2017. Under the coalition agreement, “the FPÖ succeeded in winning, among other things, such key portfolios as the interior, foreign and defence ministries, control over all secret services and the post of governor of the National Bank.”[3] The coalition collapsed after a corruption scandal was revealed in 2019 involving Heinz-Christian Strache, the FPÖ leader. This notwithstanding, a new coalition between the center-right and the far-right is a very real likelihood after this year’s election, and this time the FPÖ could be in the leading role.
The recent elections to the European Parliament, as well as the Austrian case, show that the far-right is not in a position to reach absolute majorities in proportional representation systems. This might be different in the French parliamentary elections that will start this weekend, where the two-round system in 577 constituencies could facilitate the achievement of a parliamentary majority for Le Pen’s National Rally.
The far-right has been increasingly normalized both discursively and in the coalition politics of center-right European parties. The EU sanctions against Austria in 2000 after the entry of the FPÖ into the Austrian government were perhaps a strategic mistake in the long-term, as Lendvai argues. Still, they were a manifestation of the feeling that an Austrian government including the FPÖ needed to be treated differently, that a red line should be drawn. When Meloni became Prime Minister of Italy in 2022, or when, last month, Geert Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) managed to form a coalition government in the Netherlands, the red line drawn in 2000 was nowhere to be seen.
[1] Hans Kundnani, “Confronting the New Europe.” The New Statesman, June 11, 2024. https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2024/06/confronting-the-new-europe.
[2] Paul Lendvai, “Austria Behind the Mask: Politics of a Nation since 1945” (London: Hurst & Co., 2023), p. 62.
[3] Ibid., p. 73.
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Featured image by Marc Martorell Junyent.
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