Nigel Farage imagines he is a true Brit, the man who said what the establishment prohibited and so allowed Britain to shed noxious European influence. In truth, he is a true European, member of a fast-growing insurgent pan-European right, surfing the same anti-immigrant, anti-liberal, anti-democratic constitution tides as politicians of his ilk are doing across the EU. Almost every European country now has a Faragist making the political weather — with one key difference. None wants to repeat Britain’s disastrous experience and leave the EU. Unintentionally, Farage has done the European cause one great service.
Yet, as Spain’s Vox, with its roots in Franco’s fascism, hopes for success in the imminent elections, echoing what Giorgia Meloni, with her Brothers of Italy’s comparable roots in Mussolini’s fascism, achieved last year by becoming prime minister, mainstream European politics quivers. Liberals and the left are in retreat before parties that celebrate the primacy of family and faith, oppose same-sex marriage, want a crackdown on immigration and multiculturalism, do not believe in climate change, critique all things “woke,” and, above all, believe their nation is more special than any other. Parties in almost every country in Europe repeat the refrain, climb in the polls and are either in national or regional government (Finland, Denmark, Austria, Sweden, Poland, Italy, Hungary) or soon could be (Germany, France, Holland, Spain).
More ominously, if they could lift the constraints, they would follow the lead of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and reinvent their democracy to allow only their party to rule, eliminating an independent judiciary and a free press, all in service of the right-wing cause.
Poland’s Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Mateusz Morawiecki are trying to copy Orban and take Poland back to its Catholic conservative roots.
However, whatever the populist right’s attack on the basic constructs of a democratic order or their passionate view that they and only they are right, nobody adds leaving the EU to their program.
That is reinforced by the Ukraine war. Both French nationalist Marine Le Pen, who won more than 40 percent of the presidential vote in 2022, and Meloni were once happy to fawn over the Russian despot. After all, Russian President Vladimir Putin regards homosexuality as a sin, claims to venerate Christianity, takes the toughest line on Muslims, and celebrates the blood and mystic sanctity that constitutes the Russian nation state.
However, his barbarous invasion of Ukraine has turned him from the right’s moral soulmate into a political leper. When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy calls for NATO help, it makes no political or security sense for even an extreme-right EU politician to refuse it. Equally, Ukraine’s insistence on wanting to join the EU to reinforce potential NATO membership, so completing its formal membership of the West, underlines — even to the right — that the EU treaty architecture they live within has to be upheld. Orban only pushes his pro-Putin views so far: he might need Russian energy, but he needs EU money more.
Putin and Brexit have become the two hard rocks that define the limits of the populist right’s political ambitions. The good news is that the EU is to hold together and Putin is to be opposed, as long as the German center can hold the line against the Alternative for Germany, the extreme right-wing insurgent. Here, the powerful constitution can save both Germany and Europe from neo-fascist ambitions.
However, that still leaves the continent as a kind of playpen — strong enough to continue, but too weak to stop democratic principles and values from being flouted.
Take Meloni. She has read the runes and is pro-EU, pro-NATO and anti-Putin, a stance for which, given her background, she wins plaudits.
However, that only gives her political cover to prohibit efforts to search for stricken immigrant boats, entrench symbols of Italian nationhood and culture, attack same-sex marriage and sack those suspected of being liberal sympathizers in the public broadcaster. It is baby-step fascism that prefigures more. Her manifesto declared that Europe should be a confederation of “homelands.”
Britain had its right-wing spasm in Brexit, with its roots in disaffection at loss of control, social neglect, appeal to old glories and ache for system change; now Britons confront the protracted clearing up of the economic and social debris. The populist moment, former British prime minister Boris Johnson aping Orban in challenging the Supreme Court in the name of the people, has passed.
However, the direction of European politics is to continue to affect Britan. Europe’s right-wing lurch and a weakened EU center means the already slim chances of getting a better trade deal in 2026 are growing slimmer. The immigration pressures that forced the recent collapse of the Dutch government over the rights and wrongs of limiting asylum seekers are not to lessen.
However, for all that, ultra-right-wing politics is to retreat. Ultimately, people want prosperity, security and fairness, not performative politics aimed at regression. The right are poor at running modern capitalist economies well or facing the reality that the climate and environment are degenerating before people’s eyes. Truth will out. Hard-won personal freedoms are not to be relinquished: Women across Europe are not to give up abortion rights, nor gay people the right to marry. Hating the other burns out eventually. Ways to be found to manage immigration with decency.
Here Britain, curiously, could emerge as something of a model. Neither neo-fascism nor social conservatism has widespread appeal. The British prime minister might be British Asian, but few care: what matters is what he does. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has the opportunity of a generation: to turn the economy around, meet today’s grand challenges while retaining the great liberal open culture. Success means defeat for Europe’s right: democracy and capitalism shown to work. It is to be a ticket for Britons to be readmitted to the heart of what is still to be a great club that can emerge stronger, if battered. What we are living through is all part of the process: building Europe. Take heart.
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