Just How Dangerous Is Europe’s Rising Far Right?

 

Just How Dangerous Is Europe’s Rising Far Right?

 

Anti-immigration parties with fascist roots — and an uncertain commitment to democracy — are now mainstream.

 

Roger Cohen

By Roger Cohen

Roger Cohen, who has worked at The New York Times for over three decades, reported from Paris and eastern France.

May 5, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/05/world/europe/europe-far-right.html

 

Jordan Bardella, 28, is the new face of the far right in France. Measured, clean-cut and raised in the hardscrabble northern suburbs of Paris, he laces his speeches with references to Victor Hugo and believes that “no country succeeds by denying or being ashamed of itself.”

 

That phrase, at a recent rally in the eastern town of Montbéliard, brought a chorus of “Jordan! Jordan!” from a crowd that had lined up for hours to see him. Cries of “Patrie” — homeland — filled the hall. Bardellamania is in the air.

 

Mr. Bardella, the son of Italian immigrants and a college dropout who joined the National Front party (now National Rally) at 16, is the protégé of Marine Le Pen, the perennial hard-right French presidential candidate. Moderate in tone if not content, he is also the personification of the normalization — or banalization — of a party once seen as a quasi-fascist threat to the Republic.

 

Across Europe, the far right is becoming the right, absent any compelling message from traditional conservative parties. If “far” suggests outlier, it has become a misnomer. Not only have the parties of an anti-immigrant right surged, they have seen the barriers that once kept them out crumble as they are absorbed into the arc of Western democracies.

 

In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has political roots in a neo-fascist party, now leads Italy’s most right-wing government since Mussolini. In Sweden, the center-right government depends on the fast-growing Sweden Democrats, another party with neo-Nazi origins, for its parliamentary majority. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, who has called Moroccan immigrants “scum,” won national elections in November at the head of his Party for Freedom, and center-right parties there have agreed to negotiate with him to form a governing coalition.

 

In France, Mr. Bardella, as president of the National Rally, is leading his party’s campaign for the elections in June to the European Parliament, a relatively powerless institution, but one still important for being the only directly elected body with representatives from all European Union countries.

 

Precisely because the Parliament is relatively weak, the election is closely watched as a measure of uninhibited popular sentiment, where voters register their discontent with potentially powerful downstream effects on national politics.

 

This year the far-right surge across the continent looks dramatic. The latest polls show the National Rally with a clear lead, set to take some 31 percent of the vote in France compared with about 16 percent for the centrist Renaissance coalition of President Emmanuel Macron. Mr. Bardella is the only politician among France’s 50 “favorite personalities,” according to a recent ranking in the Journal du Dimanche newspaper.

 

The result is that anti-immigrant parties may win as many as a quarter of the seats in the 720-seat European Parliament. This could lead to a hardening of immigration regulations Europewide, hostility to environmental reform, and pressure to be more amenable to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

 

For France, it means that a party that is nationalist, xenophobic and Islamophobic may well emerge reinforced — accepted, legitimized and eminently electable to high office in a way that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago.

 

France used to call its barrier to the hard right “la digue,” or the dam. The floodgates are now open in France, but also beyond. Mr. Macron’s successor in 2027 — he is term limited — may well come from a party whose founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, called the Holocaust a “detail” of history.

 

Could this resurgence of parties with fascist roots really overturn European freedom and democracy? The optimistic view is that they are no more than pale descendants of history’s tyrants, constrained by the existence of a European Union that was created to guarantee peace among its members. That is a lulling view. The language of these parties may be less incandescent than former President Donald J. Trump’s invocations of “bloodshed,” but as they whip up support by scapegoating immigrants, and even move to lock in systems that could perpetuate their power, the threat to the postwar order seems real enough.

 

Not a Monolith

Historical lessons, it seems, fade after three generations. Warnings of the disasters that engulfed 20th-century Europe under fascist governments tend not to resonate with 21st-century supporters of xenophobic nationalist movements that have none of the militarism of fascism, nor the personality cults of its dictatorial leaders, but are fed by hatred of “the other” and jingoistic hymns to national glory.

 

Europe’s collective cataclysm between 1914 and 1945 seems like ancient history to many people, even if the blood shed in the trenches of Ukraine summons images of that time. “You can no longer rely on saying, ‘This is evil, because look what happened in the fascist past,’” said Nathalie Tocci, a leading Italian political scientist. “You have to have an argument for why those ideas are bad today.”

 

The post-fascist or fascist-lite European right of today is not monolithic. At the most menacing end of the spectrum stands the Alternative for Germany party, founded in 2013 and now polling as high as 20 percent. It contains about 10,000 extremists, according to the country’s domestic intelligence service. Plans for mass deportation of immigrants and even a plot to overthrow the government have been linked to it.

 

The National Rally in France began life in 1972 as the National Front, the creation of Mr. Le Pen, who described the United States as a “mongrel nation” and the Nazi-puppet Vichy regime in France as not “especially inhumane.”

 

As for Ms. Meloni, she got her start in the postwar Italian Social Movement, founded in 1946 by Mussolini supporters bent on defending the legacy of fascism. It had violent strands into the 1970s, but it eventually folded and its leaders broke off to start new more moderate parties, though still proud of their lineage. The symbol of the Brothers of Italy is a tricolor flame, previously used by a neo-fascist party, and its hostility to immigrants remains firm.

 

The path to power, or the brink of it, by the far right has been a long one. Over the almost 80-year arc of the postwar period, the once-dominant center-left and center-right — represented in France by the Socialists and the Gaullists, and in Germany by the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats — have seen the foundations of their support (labor unions for the left and the church for the right) gradually erode.

 

This accelerated with globalization after the end of the Cold War and the onset of atomization with the arrival of the smartphone (that prodigious generator of status anxiety), leading to more unequal, more polarized, more fretful societies. The political commons shrank. The definition of truth wobbled. Parliaments and parties grew more marginal as political heft shifted to social media.

 

Increasingly, with major ideological disputes over the place of the state in the economy settled, moderate right and moderate left began to feel indistinguishable to many people. They had no answers to mass migration. The working class, long the cornerstone of socialism in Europe, migrated en masse to the anti-immigrant right as an expression of frustration at growing inequality and stagnant paychecks.

 

The core confrontation in Western societies is no longer over internal issues. It is global vs. national, the connected living in the “somewhere” of the knowledge economy vs. the forgotten living “nowhere” in industrial wastelands and rural areas. There lies the frustration, even fury, on which a Trump, a Meloni, a Wilders, a Le Pen could build.

 

Progressive changes in social mores have offered a new rhetorical weapon to these leaders. For them, as for Mr. Putin, it has been easy to present a simplistic portrayal of the West of liberal urban elites as the decadent locus of cultural suicide, the place where family, church, nation and traditional notions of marriage and gender go to die.

 

“There is a disproportionate sense of disappointment in our societies,” Thomas Bagger, the state secretary of the German Foreign Office told me. “We lost our trust that we had figured out the long arc of history and that it bends toward democracy. Russia lost its idea of the future, and Putin turned to the past. We are in danger of falling into the same trap.”

 

Normalized, but Still Extreme

The hard right in Europe has moderated and prepared itself to govern. It has abandoned calls to leave the European Union — the disaster of Brexit made sure of that — and to leave the shared euro currency. It has toned down, but not eliminated, outright racism, even if Islamophobia lurks everywhere.

 

Mass immigration — some 5.1 million immigrants entered the European Union in 2022, more than double the number the previous year — is the core issue behind the changing nature of the right in Europe. It is widely resented, particularly because aging populations have put enormous financial pressure on the cherished social safety nets that they, and previous generations, have long paid into. Overlooked are the benefits that immigrants can bring to societies with shrinking labor forces and tax bases. Instead the focus is on migrants benefiting from handouts.

 

“We have to make our country less attractive to a form of immigration that sees us as a social cash machine,” Mr. Bardella said. “The vocation of France is not to support all the world’s misery! Social assistance and child benefits must be reserved for French citizens.”

 

Quiet-spoken and methodical, he is no demagogue. But in its last election program in 2022, the National Rally called for a referendum to amend France’s Constitution. One proposed new article read: “Foreigners must respect France’s identity and way of life, and not engage in political activity contrary to national interests. Their presence must not constitute an unreasonable burden on public finances and the social welfare system. Family reunification of foreigners may be prohibited or limited.”

 

The program also envisaged the expulsion of undocumented immigrants. “Because they are sovereign, and the only sovereign, the French people have the right to make decisions considered necessary to remain themselves,” it said.

 

Another serious question that looms over these movements is this: If elected, would such parties ever leave office?

 

Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, who has been in power for a total of 18 years and is an ally of Mr. Trump, has established a template for the new right. Demonize migrants and neutralize an independent judiciary. Subjugate much of the news media. Create loyal new elites through crony capitalism. Energize a national narrative of victimhood and heroism through the manipulation of historical memory. Claim that the “people’s will” overrides constitutional checks and balances.

 

The upshot is a form of European single-party rule that retains a veneer of democracy while skewing the contest sufficiently to ensure that it is likely to yield only one result.

 

In Italy, Ms. Meloni has proposed a constitutional change that would automatically give the party with the highest number of votes (right now her Brothers of Italy) 55 percent of the seats in Parliament. She says it would make Italian governments more stable, but her opponents fear that it could also create opportunities for a future autocrat.

 

Following the Orban playbook would face strong constitutional pushback in France, with its fierce attachment to freedom and human rights as embodied in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. But if the National Rally controlled the presidency and Parliament, all bets would be off.

 

“The normalization of the right does not necessarily make it less extreme,” said Ms. Tocci, the Italian political scientist. “If constraints loosen, perhaps with the return of Trump as president in November, Meloni will be more than happy to show her true face. If Trump and Orban agree to force Ukraine to surrender, she will not think twice.”

 

That said, the right’s ascendancy is not universal, uniform or assured. Poland, through a protest movement, led the liberation of Europe from the Soviet imperium, culminating with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Last year, in a November election, Poland ousted its nationalist governing party, Law and Justice, which had led an assault on the rule of law. The party had also propagated xenophobic hatred, portrayed the country as eternal victim and distanced Poland from the European Union.

 

“Poles said, ‘We have a more positive vision to put in the place of a dark view of human and national life,’” Mr. Bagger, the German state secretary, said. “They pulled themselves back from the brink.”

 

Underestimating the resourcefulness and resilience of democracies is always dangerous. But so, too, is discounting the unimaginable. As Mr. Bardella’s beloved Victor Hugo wrote, “Nothing is more imminent than the impossible.”

 

Roger Cohen is the Paris Bureau chief for The Times, covering France and beyond. He has reported on wars in Lebanon, Bosnia and Ukraine, and between Israel and Gaza, in more than four decades as a journalist. At The Times, he has been a correspondent, foreign editor and columnist. More about Roger Cohen