FIVE YEARS ago right-wing populist parties held office in only a couple of EU member countries. Today they have a share of power in eight, and expect to make gains in the European Parliament elections between June 6th and 9th. Some of these hard-right outfits have been banging away for decades. Others are relative newcomers. What unites them are the things they hate: immigration, Islam, climate-change regulations and the power of the EU over its member states. Most also dislike feminism, and gay and trans rights. Each adjusts the message to suit its circumstances.
Western Europeans like to think they set the continent’s trends, but the wave of hard-right success started in the east. Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party won power in Hungary in 2010 and took over the courts and the media. Poland’s Law and Justice party imitated those moves while in office from 2015-23. Europe’s migrant crisis of 2015-16 was a gift to both parties, but they fell out over Mr Orban’s friendliness to Russia. That split runs throughout Europe’s hard right: in Poland, the Baltics and the Nordic countries, nationalists see the Kremlin as an enemy; in the Balkans and elsewhere, things are more ambiguous.
The new factor is the hard right’s strength in western Europe. In France, which has western Europe’s biggest Muslim minority, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (formerly the National Front) was substantial but marginal in the 1990s. It is now the right’s main party and leads in the polls. Jordan Bardella, the 28-year-old frontman of its European campaign, is running on take-back-control themes, bashing migrants and promising economic sovereignty. He wants fewer rules for farmers (a perpetual bête noire in France). The smaller Reconquest party, launched in 2021, is even further to the right.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) once looked as if it would pull off the biggest shift in the elections. It arose because of the euro-zone and migrant crises of the 2010s, first attacking EU aid packages for indebted Greeks and later the asylum policies that let in more than a million migrants in 2015-16. It is strong in Germany’s formerly communist east, and opposes aid to Ukraine. Last December polls gave the AfD over a fifth of the vote. But its popularity fell sharply after scandals over its ties to racists and neo-Nazis. In May the leader of its European campaign suggested that not all SS officers were war criminals. He was sacked and the party was kicked out of its group in the European Parliament.
Italy has had a hard-right government since 2022, led by Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy. The party, which descends from neo-fascists who never repudiated Mussolini, was once considered the most right-wing major one in the country. Ms Meloni made her name bashing multiculturalism and praising traditional gender roles. But she has proved pragmatic in power, supporting Ukraine against Russia and working within the EU system to craft tougher common policies on migration. That is popular: the Brothers are doing far better than Italy’s other big hard-right party, the more Russia-friendly League.
Like Ms Meloni, many hard-right leaders are softening their messages to win power. Most used to call for leaving the EU; now almost none does. Ms Le Pen dropped her demand that France scrap the euro years ago. The Sweden Democrats, a party with neo-Nazi roots, spent years purging its hotheads and now supports a centre-right government.
Geert Wilders, an anti-Muslim populist, came first in a Dutch general election last November after a conciliatory campaign that led the press to dub him “Geert Milders”. In May his party struck a coalition accord full of concessions to centrists. On May 28th the coalition declared that the new prime minister will be Dick Schoof, the top civil servant at the ministry of justice. As a technocrat leading the first Dutch government to include the radical right, he will help test whether Europe can learn to govern with its populists. ■
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