After the European Elections, the Center Is Carrying out the Far Right’s Agenda

As results of the European elections trickled in on Sunday night, the New York Times breathed a sigh of relief: “the center holds,” proclaimed a headline, while acknowledging that “the Far Right still wreaks havoc.”

This is misleading. In the run-up to the vote, the so-called center — the conservative, social democratic, Green, and liberal parties that together hold more than 400 of the 720 seats in the European Parliament — increasingly adopted the Far Right’s agenda. In other words, the center is moving right. 

Far-Right Advances

The elections saw a continent-wide shift rightwards. But particularly in the European Union’s leading imperialist countries, France and Germany, voters used the opportunity to punish their national governments. 

In France, perpetual far-right challenger Marine Le Pen trounced the party of president Emmanuel Macron, with 32 percent to 15 percent. A map of the results shows virtually the entire country painted brown, representing vast wins for Le Pen’s National Rally (RN). In Germany, the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) secured second place with 16 percent — even after its lead candidate had defended the Nazi SS in an interview, earning reprimands from Le Pen’s RN and the AfD itself. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) of chancellor Olaf Scholz got its worst result ever, at just below 14 percent, while his coalition partners got similarly miserable results.

In elections five or ten years ago, the Far Right was often seen as an existential threat to the European Union, with forces like Le Pen and the AfD proposing “Frexit” or “Dexit.” Yet last weekend’s elections represent a step toward mutual reconciliation between xenophobic nationalists and the technocratic apparatus in Brussels. This is best represented by Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s post-fascist prime minister. She has been able to implement her virulently homophobic and anti-immigrant agenda at home without serious obstacles from Brussels; in exchange, she has adopted pro-EU and pro-NATO positions like a true Transatlanticist, supporting the endless spending for war against Russia. 

Ursula von der Leyen, head of the EU’s authoritarian Commission and the lead candidate of the EU’s traditional conservatives, has been engaged in an ongoing flirtation with Meloni, much to the dismay of her center-left coalition partners. Von der Leyen’s hope to integrate post-fascists into a European coalition is part of a general shift to the right by centrist forces.

Anti-Immigrant Agenda

Over the last year, the EU’s centrist parties passed a migration pact that essentially abolishes the right to asylum. The conservatives and neoliberals did this with enthusiasm, while the social democrats and greens claimed to do so reluctantly — but all these self-described “democrats” joined hands to implement a central pillar of the Far Right’s agenda. Their theory is that voters will see no need to vote for racist parties if the mainstream parties themselves carry out racist policies. Naturally, the exact opposite is happening: the more so-called centrists speak of immigration as an existential threat to Europe, the more voters turn to the parties with the most consistent record of xenophobia.

In Germany, Scholz proclaimed from the cover of a major magazine: “We have to deport people more often and faster.” Just a few days before the election, he adopted the AfD’s demand to start deporting people to Afghanistan. In France, Macron warns about “Islamo-leftists,” citing Le Pen’s trademark bugbears, while even at times accusing her of being “soft on Islam.” These centrist leaders claim to be listening to “concerned citizens.” Yet by aping the language of the Right, these governments got their worst-ever results. Voters who are scared of immigrants will vote for the original anti-immigrant party, rather than for cynical opportunists who adopted the same slogans only recently.

Macron has now dissolved France’s National Assembly, hoping to win some kind of mandate by forcing everyone into a “Republican Front” with him against Le Pen. This is an enormous gamble, and a possible precursor to Le Pen finally entering national government. It is another example of how the center is paving the way for the Far Right.

Europe’s “extreme center” has been in agreement about terribly unpopular policies. The economic war they proclaimed against Russia has imposed huge costs on the continent’s consumers, especially farmers. Enormous increases in military spending, including for weapons shipments to Ukraine, have been financed with austerity, which can be seen in the continent’s crumbling schools, hospitals, and train networks. Most EU governments have consistently supported Israel’s genocidal assault against Gaza, while repressing protests.

The center’s insistence on policies rejected by their voters (in the name of democracy, no less!) allows the Right to present itself as a reasonable — and sometimes even rebellious — alternative to the capitalist status quo. Many working-class and poor EU citizens are being drawn to right-wing parties who claim to support the “little guy” against an elite and unaccountable EU bureaucracy. Most disturbingly, far-right parties were particularly successful among people under 25.

Fundamental Contradictions

The success of right-wing forces is not the cause of the EU’s crisis. Europe has been stumbling since at least the 2008 economic meltdown. The EU represented an attempt to turn European imperialism into a global power — yet despite this supernational bloc, capital remains stubbornly divided into competing nation-states. The contradictions between European states are accentuated at a time of global crisis, as U.S. hegemony continues to falter and new protectionist measures threaten neoliberal globalization.

Every European government called on voters to “vote against the Right” — with notably little effect. Even the millions of people who took to the streets of Germany against the AfD earlier this year at most shaved a few percentage points off their results. All the “defense of democracy” proclaimed by the center is of little value when they are attacking the right to protest and building new detention camps to “deport more often and faster.”

Europe has seen a number of important strikes in the last year, yet this has not yet had a political expression. A decade ago, a wave of workers’ struggles with its epicenter in Greece was channeled back into the bourgeois-parliamentary arena, with the electoral breakthroughs of Syriza and Podemos. These neo-reformist parties promised to transform the EU from the inside — and only showed the impossibility of fundamentally changing this imperialist bloc.

To stop the Far Right, we will need independent mobilizations of the working class, women, youth, and immigrants. As revolutionary socialists, we call for a fundamental alternative to the Europe of Capital. We need a Socialist United States of Europe, based on workers’ governments that attack the power of capital. In that spirit, the Revolutionary Workers Current (CRT) in Spain ran for the European elections for the first time, with a program against the genocide in Palestine and against Fortress Europe. Their results were relatively modest, but they were able to present socialist ideas to many thousands of people in Madrid, Barcelona, Zaragoza, and other cities. This is a small example of how to fight for a Workers’ Europe.