French President Emmanuel Macron, left, and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier attend a ceremony to mark the 80th anniversary of the massacre of 643 persons by Nazi German forces, in Oradour-sur-Glane, France, on June 10.Ludovic Marin/The Associated Press
Timothy Garton Ash is professor of European studies at the University of Oxford and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
A Europe that just celebrated the 80-year-old D-Day beginning of its liberation from war, nationalism and fascism now again faces fascism, nationalism and war.
Please don’t be reassured by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s complacent statement that “the centre held” on June 9, what we might call E-Day – when the results of 27 different national elections to the European Parliament were announced. That’s true in the aggregate distribution of seats between the main party groups in the European Parliament. But the EU is run by national governments even more than by its directly elected parliament, and E-Day produced hard-right successes in core member states that range from the significant to the shocking.
None of these Euroskeptic parties will be so stupid as to advocate following Britain’s Brexit. Instead, they will continue to pull the EU to the right from inside, with an even harder line on immigration, determined opposition to the green measures urgently needed to address the climate crisis, reduced support for Ukraine and clawbacks on national control from Brussels.
Most dramatic is France. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally scored a stunning victory, winning more than 30 per cent of the vote and trouncing Emmanuel Macron’s liberal centrist Renaissance. Then, Mr. Macron, whose extraordinary self-confidence is now visibly tipping into hubris, announced that he was calling fresh parliamentary elections for June 30, with a second round on July 7. This is a huge gamble, counting on voters in most constituencies to prefer another candidate over the National Rally one in the system’s decisive second round. But given the depth of popular anger, there’s a serious risk that just three days after Britain almost certainly gets a government of the pragmatic, very cautiously pro-European centre-left in its July 4 election, France may get a government of the Euroskeptic hard right, binding the hands of Mr. Macron, the continent’s leading advocate of a stronger Europe. If so, this would be France’s Brexit moment, although without the resulting exit.
In Germany, the centre-right CDU-CSU was the clear winner, but the extreme right Alternative for Germany (AfD) came second, with just under 16 per cent of the vote, more than was garnered by any of the three parties in the country’s governing coalition, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats. The AfD is a party so extreme that even Ms. Le Pen decided she did not want to be in the same European parliamentary group with it, after Maximilian Krah, its charming lead candidate, said that not all members of the SS were criminals.
Meanwhile in Italy, the Brothers of Italy of postneofascist Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni came out on top, as did the far-right Freedom Party in Austria. In the Netherlands, the Party for Freedom of the Islamophobe Geert Wilders performed only slightly less well than the centre-left. Most worrying of all, many of these parties do particularly well among young voters, especially young men.
Yes, there are more encouraging results from Poland and Hungary. But if the lesson from those countries (as from Britain) is that you must actually have your populist nationalists in power for some years before they start to be rejected, that’s small consolation.
These results will greatly complicate getting decisive action from the EU on issues such as the green transition. Most urgently, it will become even more difficult to make an essential upward step-change in military support for Ukraine at a moment when that country is in serious danger of eventually losing the largest war in Europe since 1945. Although the hard-right parties are divided over Ukraine, with Ms. Meloni among the embattled country’s strong supporters, the net impact of E-Day’s results will be negative.
All this is before we get to the most important election for Europe this year. A victory for Donald Trump in November would weaken and most likely further divide Europe, as hard-right populist nationalists, quite possibly including Ms. Meloni, would line up as the European party of Mr. Trump.
So is it time to despair and emigrate? Certainly not. There’s still a large majority of Europeans who don’t want to lose the best Europe we’ve ever had. But they need to be mobilized, galvanized, persuaded that the Union really does face existential threats.
I now await with some dread the weeks of horse-trading in the EU: Fiddling in Brussels while Kharkiv and our planet burn. What Europeans need is a combination of national governments and European institutions that deliver the housing young people cannot afford, the jobs, the life chances, the security, the green transition, the support for Ukraine.
Will Europe wake up before it is too late?