Europe edges to the right, but it’s not a simple picture

Last weekend, the European Union’s electorate of more than 400 million went to the polls to elect 720 members of the European Parliament. There are seven political groups representing dozens of parties, plus 100 MEPs who belong to no faction, so drawing conclusions from the results is an intricate task.

Two developments dominated the elections: the surge of the far-right in some parts of the EU but not in others, and the relative buoyancy of the center-right.

Europe is experiencing a populist surge. Parties dubbed “far-right” have won enough support to form or support governing coalitions in Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland and Croatia, while others have grown in popularity in France, Germany, Portugal, Belgium and Austria. Every country has its own story and its individual context, but a common thread is the rising level of migration, particularly from the Middle East and North Africa. This combined with the fragile economic landscape following the pandemic to create substantial, and exploitable, voter anxiety.

Radical change is not at first obvious from the headline results of the elections. The largest group in the European Parliament remains the center-right European People’s Party (EPP), home to Germany’s Christian Democrats and the People’s Party of Spain, and overall it lost only a single seat. The moderate left-wing Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats — the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the Dutch Labour Party, the French Socialists and their like — sustained more losses and is now 51 seats behind the EPP. The two dominant groups in the parliament retain nearly half its seats.

It is at the margins that things become interesting. Renew Europe, a liberal and centrist grouping that includes President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance, lost a fifth of its seats, while the group comprising green and regionalist parties also slumped. The European Conservatives and Reformists, to the right of the EPP and containing some “far-right” parties like Brothers of Italy, the Sweden Democrats and Spain’s Vox, saw a modest increase in numbers, as did France’s National Rally, Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Netherlands’ Party for Freedom and the Freedom Party of Austria.

The question is how to parse this fissiparous collection of parties. The far right is by no means united; Germany’s AfD was recently excluded from the Identity and Democracy group at the behest of Marine Le Pen, the driving force behind France’s National Rally (formerly the National Front), while Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is presenting herself and her Brothers of Italy as a mainstream right-wing party of government. Although there is a potential right-wing coalition in the European Parliament, it is not yet clear if it can be mobilized.

There has already been one dramatic consequence. President Macron’s liberal Renaissance party sits in the European Parliament as part of an alliance called Ensemble!, which lost 10 of its 23 seats. The National Rally jumped from 23 to 30. Before the results had even been confirmed, Macron announced the dissolution of the National Assembly, with new legislative elections to be held on June 30 and July 7. He hopes to shock the French electorate into contemplating a government formed by the National Rally, and hopes they will turn away.

This is a colossal gamble. The most recent opinion poll shows the National Rally leading comfortably with 31 percent, a hastily assembled left-wing New Popular Front with 28 percent and Ensemble! a distant third with 18 percent. That could give Le Pen’s party as many as 270 seats in the new assembly, with 289 needed for a majority.

The National Rally is tantalizingly close to power for the first time in its history. Macron’s term as president lasts until 2027, but his last three years could be torture.

Germany is different. Two of the parties of the governing coalition, the SPD and the Greens, lost seats, while the main opposition, the Christian Democratic Union, held its ground and is now comfortably the largest party in Germany’s representation. The far-right AfD rose from 11 to 15 MEPs, but could have expected more success. It has suffered a series of scandals recently, and less than a month ago Björn Höcke, one of its founders, was convicted and fined for using a Nazi slogan at a public rally. Some will wonder if AfD has reached a natural ceiling.

The European Parliament is now broadly a right-wing legislature, with around 370 MEPs identifiably on the right and something like 320 on the left. But that is only the starting point. German conservative Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission since 2019, wants a second term and therefore must assemble a coalition of at least 361 MEPs. Her task is in effect a microcosm of that facing the European political establishment.

Acknowledging the rightward shift is required. It makes no difference whether the European electorate voted from deeply held conviction or as an angry protest.

There are essentially two ways forward now, for von der Leyen and everyone else. The defensive approach would be to seek a coalition clustered around the mythical center ground, with “moderate conservatives” and “moderate socialists and liberals” defined by a cordon sanitaire that excludes so-called extremists. That might work this time, but there is no guarantee it would work in 2029.

The more ambitious and more demanding option is to understand why a sizable chunk of Europe’s electorate has chosen the far right, analyze those concerns and address them. That may mean tougher rules on immigration and nationality. If it is done successfully, however, those voters may return to their old party allegiances, and the organizations of the far right may be defanged.

It will not work everywhere: France’s National Rally is here to stay. But it may succeed in enough places to stop a collapse of the traditional political order.

Eliot Wilson is a freelance writer on politics and international affairs and the co-founder of Pivot Point Group. He was senior official in the U.K. House of Commons from 2005 to 2016, including serving as a clerk of the Defence Committee and secretary of the U.K. delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.