What to Make of Europe’s Far-Right Spike

That will reverberate into national politics, especially in Germany and France where the far-right’s EU election results are challenging centrist leadership. The result is shocking because of the power and influence that these countries have in Europe (which also means they have a lot of parliamentary seats to give). But the results are also not exactly that shocking: the polls and political moods in these places long forecasted this outcome. 

Le Pen’s party steadily widened her lead against Macron’s Renaissance in France in the months before the elections. Macron has struggled in his second term, as he is beleaguered by protests and a low approval rating. Macron is almost as unpopular as Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz. 

Scholz leads a “traffic light” coalition of his Social Democrats, the Greens, and the liberal Free Democrats, and all are facing headwinds right now because governing with three quite different parties is difficult, and that has contributed to a sense among voters that the government is dysfunctional and failing to address important issues, like the cost-of-living crisis. That put the center-right Christian Democratic Union in a position to clean up in the EU elections, which it largely did. 

Meanwhile, the far-far-right AfD has tried to capitalize on the disillusionment with Germany’s political establishment. The AfD had dipped from its polling peak earlier this year after the party was connected to a plot to mass deport foreigners, but it was still sitting at around second place in the polls despite mass civil society protests against the party and the revelations that one of its European Parliament members took money from China and Russia. Not to mention the fact that Le Pen kicked the AfD out of her far-right coalition in the European Parliament because they were too crazy even for her. 

“People are looking for a symbol against the established parties, as the AfD calls it, but they still think it’s not going to do any harm,” said Laura-Kristine Krause, Germany Director at More in Common, a nonprofit that focuses on polarization, before the vote. (I spoke to Krause, along with other experts and officials, as part of a delegation of journalists observing the EU elections in Germany and the Netherlands, hosted by Friedrich Ebert Stiftung.) 

Which also means, even though these are Europe-wide elections, the results aren’t divorced from domestic political dynamics. There is no neat, one-size-fits-all narrative when 27 very different countries vote. The far-right did okay in places like the Netherlands just months after a stunning election win, but it did not do so great in places like Portugal. In the Nordic countries, the left gained, including in Sweden where the anti-immigration party lost ground. In Hungary, Viktor Orban’s Fidesz won, of course, but it still underperformed against a new opposition. Volt, a pan-European party, won five seats total from the Netherlands and Germany.

Experts and elected officials – even actual candidates or members of the European Parliament – tend to call European elections “second-order” (or even third-order) elections. Voters see them as less important than national, and sometimes local, elections. The stakes don’t feel as high. That may make voters more likely to stay home or make them feel loose enough to cast a protest vote, something they might be less willing to do in a national contest. 

Exactly how real that phenomenon is in these elections is a bit hard to say, but, again, national frustrations echoed out in the final European results, bolstering the far-right in some places and undermining it a bit elsewhere. There are certain trends brewing in Europe, as in other democracies: a frustration with the high cost of living, especially energy in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Migration is an issue, though it’s a bit complex: some places people are worried about newcomers, but others, including in southern Europe, are more distressed about people leaving, while some countries are concerned about both. Far-right parties have weaponized themes like migration and climate, and as long as they feel it’s working for them – and the mainstream parties seem to believe that is the case — it may only get harder to overcome. 

Frans Timmermans, the leader of the GroenLinks-PvdA, said after the elections that the results revealed that “a majority in the Netherlands wants to strengthen Europe and certainly not destroy it.” Tens of thousands of people across Germany joined demonstrations to protest the AfD on the Saturday before European elections, urging people to vote against the far-right.

And most did, in the Netherlands, and Germany, and across the continent. But Europe’s established parties, particularly on the left this time around, are struggling to vanquish these parties. The risk in Europe – and elsewhere – is ceding influence to the far right, rather than figuring out how to convince voters from flirting with the fringes. 

Europe’s democratic center remains intact. The question is how solid it actually is.