Europe’s extreme right is always trying to close ranks, as here in 2019 in Milano, Italy.
Photo: Pierre Teyssot/Maxppp
A few days before the Italian parliamentary elections in Italy, Giorgia Meloni reaffirmed her European program: “The fun is over,” the leader of the far-right Fratelli d’Italia party threatened Brussels. Italy will now also defend its national interests. After all, the other EU countries did the same, said Meloni, who will become head of government in Rome after the victory of the legal alliance she is leading.
Europhobia has always been a hallmark of practically all right-wing parties in the EU – and these forces can now be found in almost all member states. “There is a trend towards strengthening right-wing neo-fascist parties throughout Europe,” estimates Walter Baier, who for a long time was a member of the left-wing think tank “Transform! Europe« and intensively followed the development of the party landscape in Europe. The right-wing parties do not generally question the existence of the EU, although they criticize the often unspecified paternalism of the »bureaucratic monster EU«. The most important substantive bracket of the right-wing parties is the rejection of the migration and asylum policy of the EU, which appears to the right-wing interpreters as too soft and which should focus more on isolation and deportation. Meloni is also on a confrontational course with the EU in this policy area. During the election campaign, she announced that she would crack down on migrants coming across the Mediterranean.
With the rejection of immigration and calls for tightening of the asylum law, the party-political extreme right has grown in Europe. A pioneer in this direction was the Rassemblement National (formerly Front National) in France, which will be celebrating its 50th birthday next week and whose leader Marine Le Pen is almost regularly in the run-off election for the presidency. But not only right-wing forces in the Mediterranean countries are successfully riding this wave, but also Scandinavian parties such as the Sweden Democrats or the True Finns. The fact that the right-wing parties are gaining support for their course of making »foreigners« the scapegoats for the distortions of neoliberalism has the same reasons across Europe. Baier sees three main factors: “The first is the social insecurity of the middle class.” The second factor is abstention from voting, since large parts of the population have lost confidence in the parliamentary system. Finally, Baier sees the third element in the normalization of right-wing radical discourse: “Right-wing radicalism is accepted as part of the normal social spectrum.”
Although the emergence and strengthening of European right-wing parties have the same roots, their cooperation across national borders has repeatedly failed. The last symbolic appearance dates from December 2021. Among others, the Polish PiS boss Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen and the Spanish Vox boss Santiago Abascal had gathered in Warsaw to discuss closer cooperation in the European Parliament and an agreement to be agreed when voting. It wasn’t enough for more, let alone forging an alliance.
That’s not surprising. It must be a paradoxical project to form an international of nationalists, says Baier. The spectrum of right-wing parties, i.e. their degree of radicalization, is also very broad. It ranges from the openly fascist Golden Dawn in Greece to the parliamentary AfD in Germany to Fidesz (Hungary) or FPÖ (Austria), which are also rooted in the middle-class milieu and have or had government responsibility. Above all, however, it is about the money – from the EU pots. And that’s where the right-wing friendship ends. While the True Finns and Sweden Democrats, for example, demanded that EU funds should no longer be used to support the have-nots, Italy is dependent on around 200 billion euros from the reconstruction fund.
In any case, the danger for Europe lies less in an alliance of right-wing parties than in their influence on the EU via the European Council. This body of governments is still the ultimately decisive one. The Council acts as the EU’s de facto legislator, setting policy guidelines and coordinating them. A qualified majority is required for the adoption of resolutions, which means that 15 countries, which also represent at least 65 percent of the total EU population, have to vote for them. Four countries with 35 percent of the total EU population are enough to prevent a decision.
Even today, states with right-wing governments can shape the entire EU policy through coordination and decision-making processes in the European Council. With the populous Italy, the right wing in the Council is now being further strengthened. The politics professor Daniela Braun, who deals with European issues at Saarland University, sees a “creeping change” in the EU: “Right-wing positions will influence European politics in some way in the next few years – through a multitude of Elections, not only in Italy.«
