ohOn Thursday, the Netherlands will be the first to go to the polls in the European Parliament elections, which technically are a collection of 27 national votes taking place over four days, from June 6 to 9. This is fitting, given that the shocking victory of the far-right in the last Dutch general elections in November 2023 has defined the storyline of the 2024 European Parliament elections “campaign.” The poll predicts It’s a major gain for the far-right, but given its deep divisions, the victory may prove a Pyrrhic one.
a Frequently cited reports The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) projects the far-right will win about a quarter of the new parliament’s 720 seats, which would represent a 4-5 percentage point increase in its support and is in line with longer-term trends: the far-right made major gains in the 2014 and 2019 European Parliament elections.
But while the far-right may be the political ideology best represented in the European Parliament, its political influence will probably be far from electoral influence. The reason is that EU politics is group politics, and the far-right is the most divided political “family” in Europe. In the outgoing parliament, it was mainly divided into two groups: Giorgia Meloni’s European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and Marine Le Pen’s Identity and Democracy (ID). Moreover, some far-right parties, such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party, belong to the “not affiliated” group.
The ECR was founded by British Conservative MPs, but is now led by the Brothers of Italy (FdI) and the Polish Law and Justice party (PiS). Most of the member parties are either radical conservatives (such as Poland’s PiS) or fundamentally far-right parties ( Sweden Democrats Although ID is featured in many media outlets, such as the Party for Freedom (SD) in the Netherlands or Vox in Spain, it is still often described and treated as a “conservative” group, i.e. part of the “mainstream” right. The term “far-right” mainly refers to ID and its member parties, such as Geert Wilders’s Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV) or Matteo Salvini’s Italian League. As a result, Brussels’ “cordon d’état” against the far-right, recently reaffirmed by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, is largely illusory, since it only applies to the “far-right” ID and not the “conservative” ECR.
The ECFR forecasts that the “mainstream” grand coalition government of the right-wing European People’s Party (EPP), the centre-left Social Democrats (S&D) and the liberal Renew Europe party will lose seats but retain a majority in the new parliament.
The European People’s Party (which includes parties such as Germany’s CDU/CSU and Spain’s PP) could also unite the far right to form a majority. This would be more difficult to organize, but the right wing of the EPP could still use it to pressure socialist and liberal MEPs to embrace more radical policies on issues such as the European Green Deal and immigration. These issues are central to the EPP’s campaigns, and the party has largely copied the far-right’s framework and policies on these issues.
But such a right-wing coalition would need the support of virtually all far-right parties, preferably neatly organized into one or at most two political groups. Le Pen proposed such a merger to Meloni last month, who has for now kept his option open. But even if the ECR and ID leaders reach an agreement, the divisions are far from healed. At Le Pen’s proposal, the ID, which is expected to become one of the five biggest factions in parliament, also kicked the Alternative for Germany (AfD) out of the group.
Fidesz is expected to join the ECR after the elections, sparking fierce opposition from several existing member parties, including the Czech Civic Democrats (ODS) and the Democratic Party of the Czech Republic (CDC). Sweden Democrats Both (SD) and Prime Minister Orban strongly reject his pro-Russian stance.
This means that while the far-right is almost certain to win another electoral victory in the European elections, it is likely to remain politically divided and its effectiveness will be limited. As a result, the new centre of power will not be the far-right, be it the ECR or the ID, but the far-right of the EPP, which will use the threat of a right-wing majority to push its traditional coalition partners further to the right, especially on issues such as the environment, gender and sexuality, and of course immigration.
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Cass Mudd is the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF Professor of International Affairs at the University of Georgia. Today’s Far Right
