The European Parliament Elections Show that Right-Wing Populism Is Surging
It is realigning the continent’s politics in an illiberal direction
Elections to the European Parliament are often a sleepy affair. This year, they have produced a political earthquake. In France, they have inspired Emmanuel Macron to call snap elections for deputies in the Assemblée Nationale in a desperate—and likely ill-fated—gamble to save his crumbling presidency. And across the continent, they have demonstrated that the “populist moment” is here to stay, with far-right parties gaining as many votes as the members of any other single political family.
When voters headed to the polls across the continent on Sunday, most of them did not cast their vote to influence the way the European Parliament is going to vote over the next five years, or even to determine who should be the next president of the European Commission. Rather, they were making moves in a series of loosely-connected national dramas, rewarding the few governments that are popular and punishing the many that are not.
This helps to make sense of the results in some of Europe’s biggest countries, from the humiliation of Macron in France and Olaf Scholz in Germany to the comparatively strong results for Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Donald Tusk in Poland. And yet, these highly heterogeneous election results point to two major transcontinental trends.
The first of these is the rise and rise of the populist right. The far right once represented a small fringe of the electorate. As it expanded its share of the vote over the course of the 2000s and 2010s, many observers continued to put faith in the idea that the “populist moment” would prove to be fleeting. When the effects of the Great Recession, or the shock of the migrant crisis, or the impact of Covid finally wore off, they promised, the far right would start to fade.
It is time to give up on that tired piece of wishful thinking once and for all. The far right is no longer a marginal movement; in many European countries, it has become the largest political faction. In some countries, right-wing populists now dominate the political scene: there, it is but a small exaggeration to say that they are to this political epoch what, in the postwar period, Social Democrats were to Sweden or Christian Democrats were to Italy.
Results in France, where Le Pen’s National Rally took about twice as many votes as Macron’s second-placed Renaissance, are the most stark representation of this trend. But the far right also topped polls in Italy, in Austria, and in the east of Germany, among others. For now, the various streams of the far right are split between different political factions in the European Parliament; if they were to unite, they would rival the center-right European People’s Party as its single largest parliamentary block.
Remarkably, these developments are fueled, not slowed, by young voters. In Poland, a plurality of voters under the age of 30 supported the far-right Konfederacja. In France, the National Rally did a little better among voters under the age of 35 than it did in the population as a whole. In Germany, the young are now significantly more likely to vote for the far right than the old, with the AfD out-polling the Greens among those who are younger than 25.
There are many reasons for the growing strength of the far right. But it is clear that one reason outweighs the others: Voters simply don’t trust mainstream parties to control immigration. And that concern is now especially pronounced among the continent’s young people, who are more accustomed than their elders to living in a genuinely diverse environment, but also more directly exposed to the problems that flow from a lack of integration.
The second of these trends is in part a result of the first: The era of ideologically cohesive government has, for the time being, come to an end. Throughout the postwar era, there were two clear and recognizable blocs in most European countries: Labour and the Conservatives in Britain, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats in Germany, Socialists and Republicans in France. From time to time, awkward political coalitions needed to be assembled to secure a majority (as when left and right competed for the support of the economically liberal FDP in Germany) or different branches of government were in the hands of different ideological families (as when French presidents had to bear the humiliation of cohabitation). But for the most part, elections had a clear structuring logic: They presented voters with a choice to put either the left or the right in charge, and allowed incoming governments to pursue their political program with some modicum of coherence.
Over the past decade, the rise of populist movements has added a second political cleavage to the politics of the continent: The distinction between insurgents and the establishment is now as important as that between left and right. On both sides of the political spectrum, this double cleavage has effectively placed ideologically coherent governments beyond electoral reach. The places in which establishment parties on either the left or the right have an independent majority of their own are few and far between.
It is these changes that have hamstrung Macron’s presidency over the last two years, and are likely to cripple it for the remainder of his presidency. In 2022, Macron’s party failed to secure a majority in the Assemblée Nationale, and was forced to cobble together an unstable minority government reliant on support of deputies that span the ideological gamut from the outer edges of the center left to the outer edges of the center right. He now appears to hope against hope that a new round of voting, held in the shadow of Sunday’s humiliation, will break the gridlock and strengthen his party’s standing.
To be sure, it’s too early to predict the outcome of the new vote Macron has called. His political instincts have often proven to be more astute than his detractors imagined. It is, as recent elections in India remind us, always a mistake to believe you know what the people will do before they have cast their votes. But for what it’s worth, all the signs currently point in the opposite direction: the new Assemblée will likely see a big increase in the strength of the far right; it’s even imaginable that the representatives of establishment parties could fall below a 50 percent share of the seats. Like many other parliaments across Europe, the Assemblée Nationale is slouching towards ungovernability.
A storm has long been brewing over France. Now, the clouds are about to burst. The torrential rain is likely to wash away what remains of Macron’s presidency. And in the wake of the next presidential elections, scheduled for 2027, Marine Le Pen may well be taking up residence in the Elysée Palace.
This is a version of a piece that was previously published at Persuasion.
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Oh lord, here we go again. "Experts" like this writer have been beating "The Rise of the Far Right" and "Europe's in crisis" drum for a couple of decades. The situation has always been more mixed. For example, just in these EP elections the far right didn't do so well in eastern Europe, including in Hungary and Poland, see https://www.dw.com/en/eu-elections-no-hard-right-turn-in-the-east/a-69326021 Other media outlets have led with a storyline of "The center holds." If would have been helpful if Mounk had at least attempted to take on those narratives and show why he thinks they are wrong. But when you are cherry picking info to attract attention, counter-factual narratives get ignored.
Also, EP elections are a very different animal than national elections, voters often use them to "send a message" and have been doing that for many years. When I wrote my book "Europe's Promise," I was amazed at how many writers like Mounk continually wrote off Europe, warning about the rise of the right (remember Haider and Fortuyn?), or sounded Europe's death knell. Here are just a few of the brassy headlines trumpeting imminent demise:
“The End of Europe”; “Europe Isn’t Working”; “Will Europe Ever Work?”; “What's Wrong with Europe”; “The Decline and Fall Of Europe”; “Old Europe Unprepared for New Battles”; “Reforms in Europe Needed”; “Is Europe Dying?”; “The Decline of France”; “Why America Outpaces Europe”, ad nauseum.
Europe has its share of challenges., what country in the world, including the super power US, doesn't? But this kind of cherry picking doesn't really help us understand the true nature of those challenges.
How do you quantify which parties belong to which “political families” (to paraphrase your first paragraph)? You talk later on about the left/right dichotomy seen throughout Europe, but it’s not clear whether that’s the same thing.