Specter that Worries Post-Election Europe

As Karl Marx might have put it, but did not, a specter is haunting Europe, the specter of the far right. This was the view expressed by many commentators after the elections to the European parliament of June 2024. Then, after the victory of the Labour Party in Great Britain on 4 July and the defeat of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement national in the second round of the French parliamentary elections, they calmed down. Matters were more complicated than that. The British Labour Party is hardly “left,” it is very much in the center and has repeatedly declared itself to be “pro-business.” In France, in the second round of the parliamentary elections, Emmanuel Macron’s supporters, obviously “centrist” or “center- right,” had more seats than Le Pen’s Rassemblement national. In Poland, in 2023, the right-wing populist Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość) was defeated by the centrist (or right-of-center) coalition led by Donald Tusk. Perhaps one should stop trying to find general trends in a continent made up of so many states, so many parties, and such different electoral systems.

Yet, taking the long view, it seems obvious that the right, the populist right, the “far” right, call it what you want, in the few decades since the fall of communism, has advanced throughout Europe becoming an acceptable part of the political scene. Sometimes it will advance. Sometimes it will not –like other political forces.

In the 1990s, many in Italy were horrified when Berlusconi invited into his coalition Alleanza nazionale (AN) the heir to the fascistic Movimento Sociale Italiano and when AN had obtained over 13% in the 1994 elections. AN eventually became Fratelli d’Italia. Its leader, Giorgia Meloni is now prime minister, and her party was the first party in the 2022 elections with 26%. The Lega, part of the Meloni coalition with what’s left of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, should also be regarded as a right-wing populist party, though it lost terrain to Fratelli d’Italia. The Partito democratico, heir to the Communist Party (which, at its height, in the 1970s, had one-third of the vote), has just under 20%, more or less what its previous incarnation had obtained in 1994.

In Great Britain there were no parties of any significance to the right of the Conservatives until recently. Now Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform Party is the third party in terms of votes, though has very few seats because of the absurdities of the British electoral system. At the last elections, the combined support for Labour and Tories hits lowest point since 1918.

In Austria, the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (Freiheitliche Partei Österreich, or FPÖ) won nearly 27% in the 1999 elections, almost on a par with the center-right (Christian Democratic) ÖVP. The FPÖ reached 26.0% in the 2017 elections, although it crumbled to 16% in 2019. It is now topping the polls in view of the elections at the end of September. The net effect was to make the ÖVP shift well to the right. The social-democratic party of Austria, long one of the two dominant parties (with 50% of the vote in the 1970s) has not been in power for ten years and is reduced to just over 20%.

In the Netherlands, in 2006, Geert Wilders’s anti-immigration Party for Freedom (PVV) had less than 6%. By 2010, the party had climbed to 15%. It dropped a bit in 2017, but by 2023 it had become the first party (23.49%) doubling its seats and entering the governing coalition.

In Scandinavia, for long the model of what intelligent social-democracy should look like, there has been an increased legitimation of right-wing populist parties. In some cases, such as Denmark, they were weakened by splits and infighting. The right-wing Danish People’s Party, formed in 1995, became the third largest party in 2007 and 2011 and was instrumental in supporting the centrist liberal government. In Norway, the Progress Party surged to over 22% in 2009 and soon afterwards entered the coalition government; it then declined and is now in opposition with just over 11%. In Sweden, the Sweden Democrats, once regarded as too extreme (some of its original leaders had been pro-Nazi), cleaned up its image and by 2010 have reached, after the 2022 elections, an agreement with the centrist Moderate Party, having become the second party in Sweden with 20.5% of the vote, just ahead of the Moderate Party.

In France, the advance of the right has been even more significant. In the presidential elections of 1988 and 1995, Jean Marie Le Pen obtained around 15% of the vote. In 2002, he forced Lionel Jospin, the socialist candidate, into third place compelling all those opposed to his Front National to rally round Jacques Chirac who won with over 80%. His daughter and successor, Marine Le Pen, having moderated her act, fought the subsequent presidential elections reaching almost 18% in the first round of the 2012 elections. By 2017, she managed to get in the second round and obtained 33.90% and, in 2022, 41.45% (both elections won by Emanuel Macron). In the 2024 parliamentary elections, called by Macron as a response to Marine Le Pen’s huge advance in the European elections, the Rassemblement national (RN) emerged as the first party in the first round. A coalition of the left succeeded in forcing RN into third place, but while the right is relatively compact, the left is divided as is the center.

Germany too has witnessed a major shift to the right. Once thought to be vaccinated from to the far right by its past, the country is now witnessing the decline of the once strong Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which pushed the SPD into third place in recent European elections. Federal elections are just a year away. The traditional parties have, so far, refused to cooperate with AfD, but this might change, particularly if the party moderates itself to advance outside its strongholds in the former DDR.

In Eastern Europe, right-wing populist parties emerged, such as the Law and Justice Party in Poland and Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary. In Slovakia, the party known as the Direction – Social Democracy (SMER), led by Robert Fico (who recently survived a serious assassination attempt), is more difficult to classify since it regards itself as social-democratic while being strongly nationalistic, very critical of the USA and “soft” on Russia. But that is also true of Fidesz and of the Law and Justice in Poland: somewhat left-leaning on economics and right-wing on social issues. They are not neo-liberals, but then neither were Mussolini’s Fascist Party or Hitler’s Nazis in the 1930s.

The fall of communism was not followed, as many had hoped, by the emergence of the kind of political configuration that dominated Western Europe after 1945. Social democratic parties of significant strength did not replace the former communist parties. In fact, it was what one might call the western model that entered into a crisis. This model consisted of a two-party system, or a two-bloc system, divided between, on the one side, moderate center-right conservatives and moderate social-democrats. The moderate right was often inspired by Christianity (as in Italy and Germany) or by nationalism (the Gaullists in France or the conservatives in the UK), while the moderate center-left, having long abandoned the goal of ending capitalism, did its best to reform it and improve it, as was evident with the Scandinavian social-democratic, but even more so with Mitterrand’s Socialist Party elected in 1981 on a leftist platform. These two moderate blocs are now in crisis. Perhaps William Butler Yeats, the great Irish poet, got it right in his poem “The Second Coming”:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

We now have, in many countries, three blocs: the left, the center, and the right. In all countries, notably in France, some of these blocs are divided. The center, as usual, is wobbly, undecisive, and unreliable. But so are all the blocs. In Great Britain, the kind of leftist positions (exemplified in France by Mélenchon) has been soundly defeated by Starmer’s “new, new Labour.” If Starmer fails, there will be a revival of Labour radicalism, but it will be in opposition where it is always easier to be more radical.

The key development will be, as ever, in the USA. When it comes to political drama, the USA, the country of Hollywood, is unbeatable. On January 6, 2021, we witnessed the attack on the Capitol building in Washington DC, following Donald Trump’s refusal to accept he had lost the 2020 presidential elections. This was followed by his numerous convictions. Then we had to witness Joe Biden’s gaffes and mental problems followed by his reluctance to desist from standing again. The whole thing was crowned by Trump’s surviving an assassination attempt, raising his fists and his bloodied face shouting “Fight, fight, fight” – a remarkable theatrical performance. Finally, Biden gave up, and now Trump will have to face Kamala Harris. Though she was regarded as incompetent by many, she is likely to be far more of a threat to Donald Trump than Biden could ever be. Not a difficult enterprise. When Biden opened his mouth, Democrats trembled because they did not know what to expect. Now it is Trump who is the “old, white, male” minority in America. Harris is a middle-of-the-road liberal, which means she is OK on abortion (an issue over which the president has hardly any powers) but a hawk in foreign policy (so far, she has simply repeated the standard American clichés), follow the anti-China line of many in the West (above all of Trump and his followers), but she might be a little less pro-Israel than the arch-Zionist Biden. Trump and J.D. Vance (candidate for the vice-presidency who is a fundamentalist Christian) will try to depict her as a leftist, after all they even suggested that Biden was a “Trojan horse” for Marxists and that Kamala Harris is “far-left.”

In the USA (as well as in Europe), the terms “right” and “left” are no longer so clear. Once the left tended to be pacifist in foreign policy and state interventionist in domestic policy. Now those who want a peace settlement between Russia and Ukraine tend to be on the right of the political spectrum. Years ago, the Eurosceptics were on the left, now they are on the right. And what we hear from the vice president selected by Trump, J.D. Vance, speaking at the Republican convention in July, could have been said by some on the left: “We are done, ladies and gentlemen, catering to Wall Street. We’ll commit to the working man… We are going to fight for American citizens and their good jobs and their good wages… We need a leader who is not in the pocket of big business, but answers to the working man, union and non-union alike, a leader who won’t sell out to multinational corporations, but will stand up for American corporations and American industry.” This, of course, could be all pre-electoral bluster. After all, many of California big techs millionaires immediately lined up to support Vance while Vance denounced globalization and promised tariffs. The American right is certainly not neo-liberal, certainly not pro-NATO. Maybe today there is no longer a “left,” only different kinds of “right.”