The news today from overseas is all about the big wins notched by far-right populist parties in elections for the European Parliament. How did they do?
European Parliament groups that hold a nationalist, anti-immigrant agenda will now likely control about 130 seats, a better showing than the last election in 2019.
That's suspiciously vague. How much better? Here's a breakdown:
Hmmm. The two right-wing populist party groups—Conservatives and Reformists and Identity and Democracy—went from 118 seats to 131. Add in a bunch of nonaligned German AfD members and you get to 146. That's a gain of 19 seats out of 720, or 2.6%.
This is about the equivalent of gaining 11 seats in Congress: a nice win but not a landslide. But I'm no expert on EU politics. Maybe this is a bigger deal than I think.
Macron has called for elections in France.
Identity and Democracy, the bigger threat from the right, expected to win 30 seats (of 81) in France, 8 in Italy, and none in three other large countries. Except for France, no significant shift right.
The new French election will be one to watch.
Worth noting, far-right results came in UNDER projected results based on polling.
That will be news to the Germans....
The non-aligned got a 36% boost. Just how non-aligned are these folks? How liberal, how conservative?
One can get a rather better understanding from The Financial Times:
Far right makes significant gains in European parliament elections
https://www.ft.com/content/14a7de75-150d-4064-93c8-986819b1753e
The results summarised as
https://www.ft.com/content/14a7de75-150d-4064-93c8-986819b1753e
In Germany, the three parties in Scholz’s coalition were all overtaken by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which came in second behind the conservative CDU-CSU opposition. Ultraconservative and nationalist parties also won or made significant gains in Austria, Cyprus, Greece and the Netherlands, exit polls showed.
From your FT link:
So, we're into semantics. From about a fifth to not quite a quarter. Is a rise of several percentage points "significant"? I'd say that's a fair descriptive. I'd also say Kevin's use of "modest" is likewise fair. I think the real question is: what's the trend from here? If the European right (especially the far right) continues to rise for the foreseeable future, the European Union is going to look like a very different place. It conceivably might not even survive. Or maybe we'll look back on 2024 fifteen years from now and note this was the right's high water mark.
Kevin's right that this was far from some kind of "wave", but the fact that these nutters have *any* kind of showing in the EU parliament is distressing. What's concerning about AfD and the Austrian Freedom parties in particular is that don't even really pretend any more not to be outright stooges of Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin. Russia may not be an EU member, but they effectively control about 1/4 of the votes in the parliament now, which is really not good.
The problem with European elections is voters see them mostly as an opportunity to express dissatisfaction with domestic governments. Very many aren't really voting FOR anything. Too much should not be read into them. As for France where I live, the far right scored less high than in the presidentials of 2022 (admittedly, in a more crowded field). I don't see them busting through their ceiling. Macron in calling for a snap parliamentary election is, I think, less worried about Le Pen than about his present situation with no parliamentary majority. His gamble is to try replicate what Chirac did on the right (and Hollande on the left), namely hold the center while being acceptable to the fringe. It may work. But I think the more likely outcome is him becoming dependent on the Socialists to govern, since they (unlike the traditional rightwing party Les Républicains) are recovering from the 2017 freak election that brought Macron to power.
Note that these elections in France will be the first parliamentary ones not immediately following presidential ones since the reform of 2002. Meaning they ordinarily would be preceded by horse trading between parties. Lots and lots of it. But there won't be much time for that and no one is prepared. The only two parties with real experience in that field are Les Républicains and the Socialists, and with the former still in disarray, I think the latter will do well despite their leader Glucksmann having the oratory talent of a sleeping pill.