Just how dangerous is Europe’s rising political far right?
PARIS
Jordan Bardella, 28, is the new face of the far right in France. Measured, clean-cut and raised in the hardscrabble northern suburbs of Paris, he laces his speeches with references to Victor Hugo and believes that “no country succeeds by denying or being ashamed of itself.”
That phrase, spoken at a recent rally in the eastern town of Montbéliard, brought a chorus of “Jordan! Jordan!” from a crowd that had lined up for hours to see him. Cries of “Patrie” — homeland — filled the hall. Bardellamania is in the air.
Bardella, the son of Italian immigrants and a college dropout who joined the National Front party (now the National Rally) at 16, is a protege of Marine Le Pen, the perennial hardright French presidential candidate. Moderate in tone if not content, he is also the personification of the normalization — or banalization — of a party once seen as a quasi-fascist threat to the Republic.
Across Europe, the far right is becoming the right, absent any compelling message from traditional conservative parties. If “far” suggests outlier, it has become a misnomer. Not only have the parties of an anti-immigrant right surged, they have seen the barriers that once kept them out crumble as they are absorbed into the arc of Western democracies.
In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has political roots in a neofascist party, now leads Italy’s most right-wing government since Benito Mussolini. In Sweden, the center-right government depends on the fast-growing Sweden Democrats, another party with neoNazi origins, for its parliamentary majority. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, who has called Moroccan immigrants “scum,” won national elections in November at the head of his Party for Freedom, and center-right parties there have agreed to negotiate with him to form a governing coalition.
In France, Bardella, as president of the National Rally, is leading his party’s campaign for the elections in June to the European Parliament, a relatively powerless institution, but one still important for being the only directly elected body with representatives from all European Union countries.
Precisely because the Parliament is relatively weak, the election is closely watched as a measure of uninhibited popular sentiment, where voters register their discontent with potentially powerful downstream effects on national politics.
This year, the far-right surge across the continent looks dramatic. The latest polls show the National Rally with a clear lead, set to take some 31% of the vote in France compared with about 16% for the centrist Renaissance coalition of President Emmanuel Macron. Bardella is the only politician among France’s 50 “favorite personalities,” according to a recent ranking in the Journal du Dimanche newspaper.
The result is that antiimmigrant parties may win as many as one-quarter of the seats in the 720-seat European Parliament. This could lead to a hardening of immigration regulations Europewide, hostility to environmental reform, and pressure to be more amenable to President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
For France, it means that a party that is nationalist, xenophobic and Islamophobic may well emerge reinforced — accepted, legitimized and eminently electable to high office in a way that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago.
France used to call its barrier to the hard right “la digue,” or the dam. The floodgates are now open in France, but also beyond. Macron’s successor in 2027 — he is term-limited — may well come from a party whose founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, called the Holocaust a “detail” of history.
Could this resurgence of parties with fascist roots really overturn European freedom and democracy? The optimistic view is that they are no more than pale descendants of history’s tyrants, constrained by the existence of a European Union that was created to guarantee peace among its members. That is a lulling view. The language of these parties may be less incandescent than former President Donald Trump’s invocations of “bloodshed,” but as they whip up support by scapegoating immigrants, and even move to lock in systems that could perpetuate their power, the threat to the postwar order seems real enough.
NOT A MONOLITH
Historical lessons, it seems, fade after three generations. Warnings of the disasters that engulfed 20th-century Europe under fascist governments tend not to resonate with 21stcentury supporters of xenophobic nationalist movements that have none of the militarism of fascism, nor the personality cults of its dictatorial leaders, but are fed by hatred of “the other” and jingoistic hymns to national glory.
Europe’s collective cataclysm between 1914 and 1945 seems like ancient history to many people, even if the blood being shed in the trenches of Ukraine summons images of that time. “You can no longer rely on saying, ‘This is evil, because look what happened in the fascist past,’ ” said Nathalie Tocci, a leading Italian political scientist. “You have to have an argument for why those ideas are bad today.”
The post-fascist or fascist-lite European right of today is not monolithic. At the most menacing end of the spectrum stands the Alternative for Germany party, founded in 2013 and now polling as high as
20%. It contains about 10,000 extremists, according to the country’s domestic intelligence service. Plans for mass deportation of immigrants and even a plot to overthrow the government have been linked to it.
The National Rally in France began life in 1972 as the National Front, the creation of Le Pen, who described the United States as a “mongrel nation” and the Nazi-puppet Vichy regime in France as not “especially inhumane.”
As for Meloni, she got her start in the postwar Italian Social Movement, founded in 1946 by Mussolini supporters bent on defending the legacy of fascism. It had violent strands into the 1970s, but it eventually folded and its leaders broke off to start new, more-moderate parties, though still proud of their lineage.
The symbol of the Brothers of Italy is a tricolor flame, previously used by a neo-fascist party, and its hostility to immigrants remains firm.
The core confrontation in Western societies is no longer over internal issues.
It is global vs. national, the connected living in the “somewhere” of the knowledge economy vs. the forgotten living “nowhere” in industrial wastelands and rural areas. There lies the frustration, even fury, on which a Trump, a Meloni, a Wilders, a Le Pen could build.
Progressive changes in social mores have offered a new rhetorical weapon to these leaders. For them, as for Putin, it has been easy to present a simplistic portrayal of the West of liberal urban elites as the decadent locus of cultural suicide, the place where family, church, nation and traditional notions of marriage and gender go to die.
“There is a disproportionate sense of disappointment in our societies,” said Thomas Bagger, the state secretary of the German Foreign Office. “We lost our trust that we had figured out the long arc of history and that it bends toward democracy. Russia lost its idea of the future, and Putin turned to the past. We are in danger of falling into the same trap.”