After the Bell: Why is the electoral power of the far right in Europe increasing?

It’s an amazing week in politics when not one but two European countries have elections that are clusterfucks. Although the UK election on Thursday and the French second round on Sunday have very different dynamics, they do have one thing in common: far-right parties are going to do well. Why is that?

I have a totally unoriginal theory that can be expressed in a single word: age.

The emergence of the “far right” has been a constant theme of European politics for years and it’s fair to say that European left-wingers and cultural elites are not only horrified but positively astounded about the trend in a mesmerised kind of way.

Take the French election on Sunday, for example. The French electoral system is remarkable in many ways, but it’s very deliberately designed to favour centrist parties. That’s achieved by the two-round system in which the 577 “deputies” of the National Assembly are elected in single-member constituencies. After the first round, only the candidates with the support of at least 12.5% of eligible voters move on to the next round.

Usually, in France, that means candidates in only two parties go forward. But occasionally, three parties go forward in what in France is called a “triangulaire” (as opposed to a ménage à trois). It’s a measure of how weird these elections have been that in 2017 there was one triangulaire and in 2022 there were eight. This time, there were 306 three-way and five four-way runoffs. WTF doesn’t quite capture it.

It’s a measure of the hatred and bile against the “far right” that the left-wing party, the New Popular Front, has pulled its candidates out of the races where, generally, it came third.

“Not a single vote for the National Rally (RN),” said Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the former leader of the La France Insoumise group. The French president and leader of the Ensemble grouping, Emmanuel Macron, whose ass is not on the line in this election and who was pilloried for calling the snap election in the first place, sort of joined the effort, but also sort of didn’t. But anyway, with third-place candidates from both left and right pulling out, there will only be about 108 triangulaires.

There are two reasons this happened: the top three parties got an unusually large proportion of the vote and the turnout was massive — 20 percentage points higher than last time. The reason turnout was high probably has something to do with the telegenic, social media savvy 28-year-old “far right” candidate Jordan Bardella.

Bardella, I suspect, is a function of a gradual adaptation of the “far right”, not dissimilar to Giorgia Meloni, now the prime minister of Italy. Her party, Fratelli d’Italia, was founded by supporters of the former fascist leader Benito Mussolini. Meloni has campaigned on the right but is governing more towards the centre. Likewise, Bardella’s party was once verging on anti-Semitic but has pulled the party towards the centre.

As it happens, with tactical voting, it is unlikely that the RN will win a majority, which is why French bonds have rallied recently. But that doesn’t change the fact that the RN won more votes this time than any other single party in either the national or presidential elections in living memory. The result confirms the outcome of the recent European elections rather than repudiating it, as Macron hoped it would.

What about the UK? The shocker of the current campaign is not that the Tories are likely to lose, but that they might even become relegated to the third-largest party. There is even a tiny outside chance they will become the fourth largest! This is quite an achievement for perhaps the most successful political party in history. Once again, WTF doesn’t quite capture it.

The leader of the “far right” in the UK, Nigel Farage, has a bloke-ish campaigning style, quite a contrast to the slickness of Bardella or even the young-mod attraction of Meloni. What unites them and other right-wing candidates comes down to a single issue: immigration. Their principal complaint, not totally illegitimate as it happens, is that the millions of legal and illegal immigrants that have flocked to Europe from the thug states of the Middle East over the past decade have not all magically signed on to the ideals of the European enlightenment.

Consequently, the RN wants to scrap the provision that children born to foreigners in France automatically become citizens. This is no small issue: about 20% of total births in Europe are from foreign parents. For European elites and left-wingers, the idea of being brutally awful to migrants is untenable — as it is to me. But when about 30% of your population is either foreign-born or has a single foreign-born parent, you can see why it’s a concern.

The irony is that Europe needs immigrants and European leaders know this.  European demographics are now close to becoming a serious economic problem, as a combination of natural ageing and longer lifespans become more pronounced. About 21% of Europeans are now over 65, and they are rightly worried about their state pensions.

These two elections might throw up unusual results, but this is just the start — global weirding has just begun. DM

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