As the French hard right triumphs in EU elections, Macron calls snap vote

The elections to the European Parliament held on June 6th-9th have delivered a stinging rebuke from voters to some incumbents, most clearly in Germany and above all in France, where President Emmanuel Macron responded to his party’s routing at the hands of the hard right by dissolving the French parliament and calling a risky snap election.

The continued rise of populist parties in the EU’s two biggest countries, even though it was not matched in the rest of the bloc, will make it harder for centrist parties to run the union’s powerful institutions in Brussels without courting the support of nationalist politicians once considered beyond the pale.

In France the surge of the populist right was so strong that, to widespread surprise, Mr Macron announced that fresh elections to the National Assembly will be held on June 30th and July 7th. At the vote for the European Parliament, which had been expected to be the last nationwide ballot ahead of the presidential election of 2027, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) was projected to have scored nearly 32% of the vote—more than double the share secured by Mr Macron’s party, which it had beaten only narrowly five years ago.

Add to that another 5% or so for Reconquest, a migrant-bashing far-right outfit whose lead candidate is Ms Le Pen’s niece, Marion Maréchal, and the hard right now looks like the country’s dominant political force. Even before the result, opposition parties had demanded a dissolution of the parliament in the event of a defeat for the president’s centrist alliance. Mr Macron will now wager the rest of his political credibility on a gamble that could well leave him with a reduced minority and a thumping vote for the RN.

In Germany the ruling coalition also fared abysmally. All three of its component parties were beaten by the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD)—despite a slew of scandals enveloping the party and its top candidate during the campaign. (It was even, shortly before the election, kicked out of its EU-level alliance with the National Rally and others.) The Social Democrats of Olaf Scholz, the chancellor, fell to their worst score in a national election in almost 150 years of existence. The liberal FDP, a junior coalition partner, barely exceeded 5%. If the party falls below that threshold at next year’s general election it will fall out of parliament. The centre-right Christian Democratic Union, the main opposition, had a good night, especially for embattled centrists, topping the poll easily.

For all the drama in Berlin and especially Paris, the projections of a broader hard-right takeover of the EU do not appear to have materialised. The new parliament will lean further to the right, thanks in part to a poor showing by Socialists and especially Greens. But the wider shift to nationalist parties fizzled in many countries.

Projections on Monday morning were for the combined hard-right forces within the parliament, including the various allies of the AfD, the RN and of Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister of Italy, to increase their share of seats only slightly, from under 20% to around 22%.

That is well short of the polls that at one point saw them match the centre-right, which ended up with over a quarter of the vote. In many countries nationalists of various hues performed short of expectations.

Geert Wilders, the hard-right firebrand who won the most votes in national elections in November, lost to centrist adversaries this time. In Belgium the xenophobic Vlaams Belang failed to top the polls as expected. The Sweden Democrats, also on the hard right, had a rare bad night. In Hungary, the Fidesz party of Viktor Orban came first, but an ally-turned-rival of the strongman prime minister, Peter Magyar, won over 30% of the vote. In Spain and Portugal, the hard right fared less well than in recent national contests. In Poland, the centrist prime minister, Donald Tusk, edged out the Eurosceptic Law and Justice party. Ms Meloni’s party came top in Italy—but with the centre left close behind.

Despite the big impact the European elections will have on member states’ domestic politics, the actual point of the five-yearly EU elections is to appoint a new chamber of 720 meps based in Brussels. Though they have few powers compared with national parliamentarians, their support is essential to enacting key EU-level policies such as cutting carbon emissions to net zero by 2050, or continued assistance to Ukraine.

The first important task for the newly elected parliamentarians will be to approve EU leaders’ choice for the president of the European Commission, the bloc’s powerful executive arm. The incumbent, Ursula von der Leyen, will probably now be given the first shot at staying in the job after her centre-right alliance, the European People’s Party, came top and even increased its share of the vote compared to 2019. The EU’s 27 leaders will meet on June 17th to discuss their proposed candidate for the top job.

But even the modest increase in the seats going to the hard right may be enough to make it hard for the German to cobble a majority for ratification among MEPs, probably in July. The 400-or-so seats that will go to the parties that backed her in 2019 may still not be enough to secure 361 votes in what will be a secret ballot. The coming weeks were expected to be dominated by whether Ms von der Leyen could convince the likes of Ms Meloni to back her—and at what political cost. Now, however, all the attention will be diverted to France, where the most pro-EU major politician on the European stage may soon find his authority in tatters.■

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