French President Emmanuel Macron stands in front of voting booths during the European Parliament election, at a polling station in Le Touquet-Paris-Plage, France, on June 9.Hannah McKay/Reuters
The centre held in the European Union elections. What did not hold was the far right’s relative fringe status. Those parties, especially the ones in Germany, France and Italy, surged in Sunday’s elections, to the point that humiliated French President Emmanuel Macron dissolved parliament and called a snap election to force voters to choose who will control his country’s government – the far right or the liberal centrists.
The European far right has now gone mainstream, confirming a trend that has been evident for some time. It is hard to say exactly when it picked up momentum, but 2016 would be a good guess. That was the year of Brexit and Donald Trump’s win over Hillary Clinton in the U.S. election, each an indication of conservative nationalism and anti-globalism capturing the imaginations of angry voters.
The propellants of that swing to the right have been in place for years: a backlash against immigration, especially of the undocumented variety; concerns about the rising costs of meeting net-zero emissions goals; rising inflation and deindustrialization as Asian countries replace Europe and North America as the world’s manufacturing powerhouses; and concerns about sexuality and gender.
While the sensational rise in the EU elections of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, a once-inconsequential party with neo-fascist roots, was fully expected, less so was the utter trouncing of her counterparts in the other two Big Three economies of Europe, France and Germany.
Exit polls and preliminary voting data showed that, in Germany, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats were on course to finish a chastened third behind their centre-right rivals, dominated by the Christian Democrats, and the scandal-ridden, pro-Russia, Euroskeptic and nationalist hard-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD.
In France, Marine Le Pen, Leader of the National Rally party, won about 31 per cent of the vote, more than double that of Mr. Macron’s Renaissance party. When his party’s slaughter became known Sunday night, he immediately called an election, with the first round on June 30 and the runoff on July 7. “I cannot act as if nothing had happened,” he said.
Mr. Macron’s strategy is bold – and highly risky, given the sliding approval ratings of both his presidency and his party (no matter what happens in the National Assembly election, he can remain President until 2027, having been re-elected in 2022). Voters sometimes love kicking governments when they are on the downswing, as British voters did in the Brexit referendum, when David Cameron was prime minister. If Mr. Cameron (who is now Britain’s Foreign Secretary) were more popular, Brexit may not have happened – the “Leave” campaign’s victory margin was small.
Mr. Macron’s strategy was not clear. Maybe he is gambling that voters, confronted with a love-us-or-leave-us vote, will not lavish more support on Ms. Le Pen’s right-wing, nationalist, populist party with Euroskeptic leanings. Another theory is that he hopes the centre-right Republicans will join forces with his centrists to keep her National Rally from gaining control of the National Assembly.
Whatever his strategy, he may be wrong. Voters still have bitter memories of the gilets jaunes mass protests, triggered in 2018 by the government’s plan to raise fuel prices and widespread rage about economic inequality, and last year’s unpopular pension-reform effort, which led to tens of thousands of hospital workers and teachers walking off the job.
Collectively, the far-right parties won almost a quarter of the 720 seats in the European Parliament. While Ms. Le Pen’s victory was the most dazzling – her party won 30 of France’s 81 allotted seats – the far right also made gains in Spain, Austria, Hungary and Cyprus, as well as Germany and Italy.
Early results say the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), the home of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, not only retained its status as the Parliament’s biggest party but actually won 10 more seats (186 versus 176 in the 2019 election, according to live estimates from the European Parliament). But the EPP’s strong showing is not necessarily great news for Ms. von der Leyen, who is seeking a second term.
She needs the support of 361 parliamentarians to keep her job, meaning she will probably have to court the far right, notably Ms. Meloni’s party. The two women have been working more closely together on the migration file and others. Ms. Meloni’s role as possible kingmaker will give her a lot of leverage in the direction of the Parliament, all the more so since Ms. Le Pen is no supporter of Ms. von der Leyen.
Another take-away is the thrashing taken by the Greens, whose seat count is expected to fall to 53 from 71, bringing them close to fringe-party status. Their downfall reflects waning enthusiasm for the environmental movement and net-zero commitments – the EU aims to be climate-neutral by 2050 – which are seen as costly and damaging to traditional manufacturing jobs, such as those in the German, French and Italian auto industries. The European Green Deal of 2020, which was Ms. von der Leyen’s signature policy, may be in trouble as the net-zero backlash intensifies.
The rightward shift in the European Parliament is undeniable. But whether the parties of the far right will actually set the Parliament on a new course, including overhauling EU policy on Ukraine and shutting the borders to migrants, is an open question, for they are divided among themselves (the AfD is so radical that, in May, it was kicked out of Parliament’s far-right Identity and Democracy group, home to Ms. Le Pen’s party). Mr. Macron, for one, is gambling that their infighting could sabotage them in the upcoming election.