As voting draws near, the parties of the center-left, liberals and Greens have sought to energize their own electorates by arguing that ballots for their side would serve as a roadblock to the hard right.
They have pledged to oppose any coalition within the E.U. Parliament that includes extreme parties and regularly chastise mainstream conservatives who signal that they might deal with the likes of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Rally party, which is running well ahead of President Emmanuel Macron’s liberal alliance.
“The problem is that the traditional right is not confronting the far right,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said in an interview after addressing the Cercle d’Economia conference in Barcelona (where I gave a talk). “The risk is that the anti-European forces, parts of the far right, will get the keys.”
Nonetheless, Sánchez, a Socialist, expressed hope that a sufficiently strong showing by center-left parties would renew the long-standing alliance against right-wing forces.
At a campaign rally last weekend in the Nou Barris neighborhood, Javier López, a Socialist member of the European Parliament seeking reelection, hit the right-wing threat hard. “For 70 years, cooperation among the center-left, center-right and the liberals meant we were building Europe,” he told me. “This is the first time when we could see cooperation between the center-right and the far right.”
While many mainstream conservatives in Europe would prefer to keep working with moderate parties to their left, Ursula von der Leyen, who will seek a second term as president of the European Commission, has alarmed liberals and the center-left by welcoming support from Meloni, whose party is rooted in a post-World War II neo-fascist movement. Von der Leyen argues that the Italian prime minister’s willingness to support Ukraine aid and thus distance herself from the hardest right is a signal of her pro-Europe credentials.
On the other hand, von der Leyen said she wants no help from Le Pen, whose party she characterized as “puppets and proxies” for Russia’s Vladimir Putin. As von der Leyen seeks to split the hard-right parties, they are doing some splitting on their own. Le Pen broke with the extreme Alternative for Germany party after one of its leaders declared that the “SS were not all criminals.”
Liberal and center-left politicians say they are willing to torpedo von der Leyen’s reelection bid if she makes an alliance with Meloni. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a Social Democrat, reflected the view across his European political family by insisting that a new European Commission “must not be based on a majority that also needs the support of the far right.”
There is little doubt that center-right, center-left, liberal and Green parties will easily outnumber far-right parties in the 720-member Parliament. The key questions are whether they’ll win a truly workable majority, and whether the Greens will even be asked to join the traditional centrist alliance.
European elections are an ideal setting for protest ballots because many voters see the stakes as low. “They’re less worried about voting for the extreme right because it will have no consequences for how their own countries are governed,” Laurence Nardon of the French Institute of International Relations told me.
José Manuel Martínez, provost of Pompeu Fabra University’s School of Management who has written widely about the E.U., noted in an interview that the far right has gained ground by “microtargeting resentments” on a range of issues, from immigration and crime to various cultural questions. E.U. ballots are the “perfect way out” for low-cost messaging.
But the center-left and liberal parties are now urging middle-ground voters to send messages of their own against extremism.
The elections will also reshuffle the forces in the middle and on the left. In France, for example, Macron’s large electoral deficit is partly due to the dynamic candidacy of 44-year-old Raphaël Glucksmann, a writer and E.U. parliamentarian who is lifting up the formerly moribund Socialist Party. “Glucksmania” is pulling votes away from the left end of Macron’s centrist coalition and might push Macron’s party into third place.
Glucksmann, a moderate, joined with other European social democratic politicians to issue the Paris Pledge to “defend our principles and our open societies with infinitely more vigor,” “build a strong barrier against the far right,” combat “hatred, racism and xenophobia,” and “defend and fight for democracy, not take it for granted.”
So while the E.U. elections might mark a high point for the extreme right, they could also set in motion a revival of the forces required to contain it. The imperative of the moment is to match the far right’s fervor with comparable boldness on behalf of democracy and inclusion.