Why is Europe moving rightward?

ROME — In the run-up to the European Parliament elections this June, the nativist right seems poised to gain ground across the continent, especially in key countries. Though the chauvinist wave extends from Portugal to Scandinavia, it is being driven mainly by right-wing parties in five core EU members that rejected nationalism more than 70 years ago.

In Italy, a politician with a neo-fascist background, Giorgia Meloni, has been prime minister since 2022 and remains popular. In The Netherlands, the radical xenophobe Geert Wilders’s party came in first in the election last November and also remains popular (though it has failed to win enough support from other parties to form a government).

In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is the front-runner, with nearly 30 per cent approval. In Belgium, the far-right Flemish party Vlaams Belang is ahead and surging in the polls. And in Germany, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has emerged as the second-strongest party. Among the European Union’s original members, only tiny Luxembourg still boasts a strong centrist politics.

True, some of these parties have barely disguised racist agendas, whereas others have managed to establish respectable conservative reputations. Meloni has been pro-Western in her foreign policy and seemingly pragmatic in her day-to-day domestic dealings. Her strategy of moderation has been so successful that Le Pen is now openly emulating it. The AfD, by contrast, has doubled down on extremism.

Nonetheless, when asked recently about the common factors propelling right-wing forces across Europe, Meloni did not mince words: “Clearly, Europe’s answers to citizens are not working.”

But is this true? Immigration, economic hardship, and rising inequality are generally what drive voters to the extremes, but these problems have all subsided somewhat in recent years. Asylum seekers’ arrivals are currently well below the last decade’s average, and European societies welcomed millions of Ukrainian refugees without much controversy.

Nor do economic factors explain current opinion polls. Though inflation has dented purchasing power, especially in Italy and Germany, the EU experienced far worse economic conditions after the 2008 financial crisis. Employment today is at a multi-decade peak in most EU countries, including the founding members, and inequality has also somewhat moderated. In France, the Gini index (which measures income inequality) has been falling since 2010, and similar trends can be found across most other core EU countries.

There will always be reasons for economic and political dissatisfaction. In The Netherlands, some voters worry that immigrants will burden the welfare system and compete for scarce affordable housing. Italy has long suffered from economic malaise and weak growth, and Germany increasingly looks like the sick man of the world economy.

So, some other undercurrent must be propelling the nationalist right’s widespread appeal. One clue is that most of the hard-right parties — regardless of whether they are pro-Russia or not — started surging noticeably in the polls after Vladimir Putin ordered his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. That may have triggered a reaction beyond the immediate sense of insecurity, as Europeans awoke to the potential unraveling of the post-Cold War political order.

European political orders have always drawn their legitimacy not just from power or institutions, but also from shared values. At least since the Congress of Vienna (1814-15), the “unifying force” in European politics, as Henry Kissinger saw it, was the collective belief in the system’s ideals. Thus, the political order of Metternich’s Europe rested on monarchs who agreed on the need to suppress bourgeois ideals. Post-Versailles (1919) Europe, by contrast, never achieved much ideological unity or shared sense of legitimacy, ending in the absolute disorder of a world war.

After World War II, a unifying force returned to (western) Europe in the form of the Cold War, when the goal was to minimise Soviet influence and pursue continuous, albeit slow, economic integration. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, creating a united, and politically and economically liberal, Europe became the mission. Europeans even wagered that they could influence the rest of the world through the “Brussels effect,” a regulatory floor that attracts global compliance in the interest of simplicity. The bloc’s overall strategy reflected underlying values that gained traction among the public when it delivered stability and prosperity.

But now, Putin’s war on Ukraine, turmoil in the Middle East, and the prospect of Donald Trump’s return to the White House are weakening the pillars of European stability. Sensing a sea change, voters are turning to parties that don’t traditionally identify with the system. Fears that the post-1989 order is crumbling have led voters to ask themselves: “Are we really on the right side of history, as we were told? Were we lied to?”

Recent geopolitical changes thus have eroded the system’s perceived legitimacy. Russia’s assault on Ukraine made clear that Europe is only partly sovereign, and the vaunted “Brussels effect” has failed to materialize in the global net-zero transition. Other large countries ignore Europe’s claim to climate leadership, because they know that it lacks the necessary technological prowess. And on migration, the EU has consistently failed to find a common approach to addressing the issue vis-à-vis countries of origin.

True, nativists like Meloni sometimes appear to become more moderate once in power. But rather than embracing the system’s values, they may be subtly changing them. While presenting herself as reassuringly urbane, articulate, and supportive of Ukraine, Meloni has quietly staffed every bureaucratic post available with party loyalists. Moreover, she is pushing a constitutional reform that looks like a power grab (it would severely downgrade both the president and the parliament), as well as forging alliances with unsavory figures such the French xenophobe Éric Zemmour, and the Spanish far-right leader Santiago Abascal. She has also been on good terms with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, although she is critical of his pro-Russia leanings.

The Meloni model is starting to look like a template for the nationalist right to win office and then change the EU from within. But if geopolitical insecurity is indeed at the heart of Europe’s right-wing turn, those who oppose it must recognise that the EU cannot be defended on the basis of the status quo. They will need to make the case that security and sovereignty require even greater political integration.

Federico Fubini, an editor-at-large at Corriere della Sera, is the author, most recently, of “Sul Vulcano” (Longanesi, 2020). Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024. www.project-syndicate.org