Far-right eyes Europe vote surge and ditches German AfD
Far-right parties are gaining traction across Europe, and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is recognizing a pivotal moment.
“We are on the eve of a decisive election,” the Brothers of Italy leader says via video link to a packed hall in Madrid. In attendance are Marine Le Pen of France’s National Rally and Santiago Abascal, leader of Spain’s Vox party. “We are the engine of our continent’s renaissance,” Meloni declares, prompting a standing ovation from her audience.
The far-right has already secured electoral victories in Italy and the Netherlands, leads the polls in France, Austria, and Belgium, and holds positions in the governments of Finland and Slovakia.
In the upcoming European elections from June 6-9, they could capture more than 30% of the votes, potentially becoming a significant force in the European Parliament.
However, internal conflicts are threatening to undermine the far-right surge, primarily due to scandals involving Germany’s AfD.
As a result, the AfD’s allies in the EU have expelled the German party from their far-right Identity and Democracy (ID) group in the European Parliament. They are distancing themselves from a party whose top candidate, Maximilian Krah, has expressed controversial views about Adolf Hitler’s Waffen-SS and whose second-in-command is accused of accepting money from Vladimir Putin’s Russia—allegations he denies.
Marine Le Pen, in particular, wants to avoid such associations. She has spent years trying to cleanse her party of the extreme views espoused by her father, the founder of National Rally’s predecessor, who was convicted of trivializing the Holocaust.
The far right’s biggest success story in Europe, Giorgia Meloni, has big hopes too. Her ambition is to create a right-wing force that will take charge in Brussels.
“They will have many more people [in Parliament] and these people will be mainstreamed or normalized by their presence,” says Sabine Volk, a close observer of the far right at the University of Passau in Germany.
If Ms Meloni’s EU grouping, the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), does well in the elections there is a chance they could find common ground with the centre-right of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
Ms von der Leyen’s European People’s Party is likely to end up as the biggest group and she has left the door open to an alliance with the ECR as long as they are pro-Europe, pro-Ukraine, and in favour of rule of law.
The ECR includes not only Brothers of Italy but also Poland’s right-wing populist opposition party, Law and Justice, Spain’s Vox, Riikka Purra’s Finns Party – part of the Finnish government – and Jimmy Akesson’s Sweden Democrats, who work with the Swedish government without being in it.
It is hard to imagine them all signing up to Ursula von der Leyen’s demands, especially when some center-right parties in her group would not even countenance such an alliance. But if they did, then the European Parliament could steer policy in dramatically different directions, on green policies, migration, and asylum.
If the two far-right groupings – ECR and ID – were to somehow overcome their internal differences, then they could form a powerful bloc too.
Sabine Volk is very doubtful of “one mega-coalition” of far-right parties, as is Matthias Dilling, a European politics specialist at Swansea University.
“The far right in Europe has had a history of division,” he says. “I don’t know whether we would see a single far-right group as they continue to be, internally, fairly heterogeneous.”
The ID group, which is home to France’s National Rally, also includes Italy’s League, Austria’s Freedom Party (FPÖ), Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party in the Netherlands, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, and the Danish People’s Party.
