How the
far right is tightening its grip over the EU – from the inside
The
centrist coalition that traditionally shaped EU laws is now colluding with MEPs
from the AfD and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally
Tue 18
Aug 2026 05.00 BST
The EU
exists because its nations swore never to repeat the past. European integration
is the insurance policy against the oldest temptation of power: that a
majority, however large, decides who does not belong. So countries across the
continent agreed to share power across borders, and to answer to laws that none
of them individually controlled.
The
European parliament is where that promise is meant to be kept. Directly elected
by nearly 360
million citizens, it co-writes the EU’s laws, elects the president of the
European Commission and can dismiss the closest thing Europe has to a
government – the commission itself. For decades, a grand coalition of
centre-right parties and socialists, later joined by liberals and greens, governed
it on that premise. They were committed to closer cooperation, the
rule of law and maintaining a firewall against the far right.
In June,
in Strasbourg, that promise was broken by the parliament itself.
“Send
them back! Send them back!” The chant rose
from rightwing MEPs pumping their fists, as the chamber approved
the harshest
migration law in EU history. The “return regulation”, as this law is
called, does exactly what European integration was designed to prevent: it lets
a majority decide who does not belong, putting them beyond the law’s reach –
and after Ceuta, Europe’s leaders are demanding it
should be applied faster. The regulation allows EU countries to deport people
to detention centres outside EU territory, placing them further from judicial
protection, media scrutiny and public accountability.
Approval
of this law was not a rightwing putsch. It was the clearest sign of a quiet
shift within an institution that, however overlooked, shapes what kind
of union Europeans get to live in.
The
political coalition that shaped EU legislation for decades hasn’t formally
collapsed, but its largest group, the European People’s party (EPP) – home to
Germany’s governing Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and political “family” of the
commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen – now operates with two rival
majorities. The legacy centrist majority gives it control of Europe’s principal
institutions. A second, formed with Giorgia Meloni’s European Conservatives and
Reformists (ECR), Marine Le Pen’s Patriots
for Europe (PfE) and the more extreme Europe of Sovereign Nations
(ESN), led by Germany’s Alternative
für Deutschland, increasingly enables it to shape Europe’s laws. When
socialists, liberals or green MEPs resist its terms, the EPP can turn to the
right and pass legislation without them. When it needs centrist votes to
control the commission and parliament, however, it turns back to them, and they
continue to provide those votes without conditions. The EPP therefore pays no
political price for crossing its supposed firewall.
0:48
Rightwing
MEPs chant ‘send them back’ after controversial deportation plans are passed –
video
Since
2024, the EPP has voted with the far right more
than 20 times. In June alone, a far-right group was decisive
in one in five final votes.
The
return regulation passed through precisely this alignment. On one of the
defining questions facing Europe, conservatives in the EPP – as well as a
majority of MEPs from the centrist Renew group – chose not
only to accommodate the hard right, but to make it part of its governing
majority. This new majority is driving the most sweeping rollback of EU
protective standards across migration, climate, corporate accountability and AI
that Europe has seen. Under the banner of “simplification”, common European
rules are being weakened, their scope narrowed and regulatory power returned to
national authorities and private actors.
This is a
different Europe, one that is coercive at the border and permissive towards
corporate and environmental harm. It is being built by hollowing out the union
from within, using European law to repeal European protections. The far right didn’t
need to take over Europe’s institutions to do this; it only needed to find a
mainstream party willing to translate its priorities into European law.
The
hypocrisy is structural, and events in Ceuta exposed it. When tens of thousands
of people tried to reach the Spanish exclave in late July, and at least 88
drowned in the process, national
leaders raced each other rightwards. Meloni introduced border checks
on third-country nationals arriving from Spain, 22 governments blamed Madrid,
and Manfred Weber, who leads the EPP in the European parliament, demanded
migrant deportation centres in Africa and the accelerated
implementation of the return regulation.
At home,
the EPP’s German members – Friedrich Merz’s CDU/CSU alliance – still invoke
the Brandmauer,
the firewall against cooperation with the AfD. In Brussels, its European
political grouping breaches the firewall whenever hard-right votes are useful.
Nor is the alliance confined to legislation. In July, the EPP joined the far
right to block
a criminal referral concerning €276,000 (about £236,300) in irregular
spending by the PfE, allowing the group to repay the money and close the file.
Days later, PfE MEPs helped shield
the EPP’s Matej Tonin from prosecution sought by the Slovenian
authorities.
None of
this works without the complicity of the pro-European mainstream. Socialists,
liberals and greens provide the EPP with the votes that enable it to control
the commission and the presidencies of parliament, and therefore allowing it to
present itself as Europe’s responsible centre. Yet their support does nothing
to prevent the EPP’s rightward turn. It only provides a useful cover. The EPP
can govern from the right while running Europe under the guise of legitimacy
provided by the centre. Granted, walking away would not automatically defeat
the rightwing majority. But it would force the EPP to choose and to bear
responsibility for the coalition on which it increasingly relies.
The first
test will come in January 2027, when parliament elects its president. Roberta
Metsola, from the EPP, is seeking a third term, although the socialists say
they should get the presidency under a 2024 power-sharing agreement. The PfE
has offered
Metsola its votes in return for greater institutional recognition. The
socialists, liberals and greens should refuse to support her unless the EPP
commits to not forming legislative or institutional majorities with the hard
right and accepts that any breach will end its institutional cooperation.
Without these strings attached, another agreement would cost the EPP nothing to
break. Polls already show that
the centrist forces that have dominated European politics since the second
world war are, for the first time, projected to fall short of a European
parliamentary majority.
The fists
raised in Strasbourg belonged to the hard right. The power and authority that
turn its reactionary demands into European law are still supplied by the
centre. In January, Europe’s socialists, liberals and greens can either let the
union stray further away from the values they cherish, or end the agreement
that has allowed this drift in the first place.
- Alberto Alemanno is the Jean
Monnet professor of EU law at HEC Paris and the founder of The Good Lobby
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