The Spanish elections last week did not unfold as many predicted. The coalition of the centre-right People’s party and the far-right Vox failed in its bid for power, largely because the Vox vote plummeted, while the incumbent prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, and his social democratic Spanish Socialist Workers party (PSOE), fared better than expected.
Do the Spanish results tell us something more profound about European politics and the fate of the far right? Over the past year, the far right has seemed to be on the march across Europe. Last October, Giorgia Meloni became Italy’s prime minister after her Brothers of Italy party, with historical roots in the post-Second World War neo-fascist Italian Social Movement, won most seats in the general election. In Finland, the reactionary Finns party is now part of the governing coalition, while the Swedish government depends for its survival on the support of the equally reactionary Sweden Democrats.
In Greece, the newly formed neo-Nazi Spartans, directed from prison by the former leader of the now-defunct Golden Dawn, won 12 seats in the June elections, and are one of three hard-right parties in parliament. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won, for the first time, the equivalent of the mayoralty in the eastern town of Sonneberg. In Austria, the far-right Freedom party (FPÖ) is surging in the polls and is predicted to win next year’s elections. In France, few discount the possibility of Marine Le Pen becoming president after the 2027 elections. In Hungary and Poland, national populist parties have long been in power.
For some, all this raises fears of fascism returning to Europe. For others, the failure of Vox exposes the limits of the far right. “The narrative about Europe lurching to the far right is overdone,” argues the political risk consultant Mujtaba Rahman.
Europe isn’t on the edge of fascism. Nevertheless, we should not underestimate the impact of the far right on the continent’s political landscape. They have moved from being despised, marginalised groups to being central to European governance and policymaking.
Far-right ways of thinking, particularly about immigration and identity, have seeped into the mainstream. On immigration, many key far-right tenets – the militarisation of border controls, the mass detention and deportation of undocumented migrants, the insistence that refugees must request asylum only from outside the EU – have been turned into policy, and not just in the EU. “The positions which were once condemned, despised, looked down upon and treated with contempt are becoming jointly held positions,” Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán told reporters in 2016. “And people who stand up for these positions are today being welcomed as equal partners.” Seven years on, that is even more true.
Far-right tropes, from the “great replacement” – a conspiracy theory that the elites are replacing white Europeans with migrants – to the belief that mass migration is pushing white Europeans out of their “homeland”, to fears about the falling birthrates of “indigenous” Europeans, are now recycled by respectable figures on the mainstream right. At the same time, many on the far right have begun to shift some of their views to appear more respectable, dialling back on their Euroscepticism and downplaying support for Vladimir Putin.
The cordon sanitaire that once denied the far right the aura of respectability has all but disappeared. When, in 2000, the FPÖ entered government in Austria in coalition with the centre-right ÖVP, other European nations cancelled diplomatic visits and threatened sanctions. “Europe can very well do without Austria. We don’t need it,” was Belgian foreign minister Louis Michel’s withering response.
Today, few think like that, as far-right parties become an accepted part of governing landscape. Last month, the European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister whose coalition government later collapsed over immigration policy, accompanied Meloni on a trip to Tunisia to strike a deal to curb migratory flows across the Mediterranean. Under Meloni, Italy has become the EU’s lead in shaping immigration policy.
It might seem paradoxical that the EU, an organisation defined, both for supporters and critics, by its attachment to cosmopolitanism, should look to the far right in shaping policy. That cosmopolitanism was, however, always shallow. In his forthcoming book, Eurowhiteness, Hans Kundnani, research fellow at Chatham House, suggests that, for the EU, what it means to be “European” has from the start been viewed in ethnic and civilisational terms. “The European project,” he argues, “was defined not only in opposition to Europe’s past, but also in opposition to non-European Others.”
This was made clear when von der Leyen was elected president of the European commission in 2019. One of her first acts was to rebadge the vice-president responsible for migration policy as the “commissioner for promoting our European way of life”, making clear her sense that migrants posed an existential threat to European culture and identity. For Le Pen, von der Leyen’s move “confirms our ideological victory”, the EU having been “forced to admit that immigration poses questions about the future of Europeans’ way of life”.
The irony in all this is that post-Brexit Britain, some argue, now appears to be “the last liberal nation in Europe”. Ukip and the Brexit party have both all but disappeared. Populist sentiment, insofar as it has flowered, has done so largely within the confines of the two main parties. This follows a historical pattern in which the strength of the Conservative and Labour parties has limited the prospects of both fascist and communist parties.
Yet the distinction between Britain and the rest of Europe is fuzzier than one might imagine. The Rwanda deportation scheme and the Illegal Immigration Act reveal the degree to which policies that a decade ago would have been confined to the margins are now espoused by the mainstream. And, from the view that Europe is “committing suicide” to demands that Britons must produce more babies, many of the themes that derive from the blurring of the lines between the mainstream right and the far right are visible in the UK too.
The paradox is that the public in Britain is more liberal today about immigration than are most politicians. Yet the timidity of the Labour party in challenging reactionary claims, or in articulating an alternative vision, has allowed the right to frame the debate and to pursue unconscionable policies. The far right does not need to be in power for its ideas to percolate more widely, even within societies that think of themselves as “liberal”.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
