Money Week

The rise of the hard right

Nationalis­ts did well in recent EU elections. Matthew Partridge reports

Nationalis­t and rightwing parties won major gains in last week’s European elections, says Bruno Waterfield in The Times. They punished France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Olaf Scholz, “badly weakening” and even “humiliatin­g” the two leaders “who were at the heart of running the EU”. Indeed, Macron’s results were so bad that it prompted him to make the “unpreceden­ted” move of calling snap parliament­ary elections (see page 4). Similarly, Scholz’s SPD party came third, behind the centre-right CDU and the hardright AfD – its “poorest result in a nationwide election since reunificat­ion”. Elsewhere, there was “a continuing consolidat­ion, and overall gains for euroscepti­cs and hard-right parties”.

Stinging rebuke

European voters in Germany and France clearly delivered a “stinging rebuke” to the incumbents, says The Economist. However, the broader hardright takeover of the EU predicted by some does not appear to have happened. The new parliament will “lean further to the right”, but the wider shift to nationalis­t parties failed to materialis­e in many countries. In Holland, Geert Wilders, for example, the “hard-right firebrand” who won the most votes in national elections in November, “lost to centrist adversarie­s”, while the far-right nationalis­t Vlaams Belang party failed to top the polls in Belgium.

Further evidence that this was a “vote against incompeten­t mainstream parties that promise much but deliver little”, rather than a “pro-right surge across Europe”, comes from the fact that socialists won the largest share of the vote in

Malta, Romania and Sweden, says The Telegraph. This has helped the centre-left retain its position as the parliament’s secondlarg­est group, albeit as a far weaker player than in the 1990s. Overall, the far-right bloc seems to have increased its number of seats only slightly, with pro-EU centrists, greens and socialists still holding on to a majority of seats. This “boosts the chances of Ursula von der Leyen securing a second term as European Commission president”.

An emboldened right

The populist, far-right parties could still have a bigger hand in European policymaki­ng over the next five years, however, says Karen Gilchrist of CNBC on MSN. Centrist parties will now be more dependent on the right for key votes in the 720seat European Parliament, and we can expect an “emboldened” ID party, the far-right grouping in the EU, to apply pressure on contentiou­s issues. This obviously includes immigratio­n, expected to be “front and centre of the policy agenda in the next parliament”, but might also affect green policies, industrial strategy, defence and EU enlargemen­t.

The rise of the hard right not only “greatly complicate­s getting united, decisive action from the EU on issues such as the green transition”, but also poses a threat to Ukraine, says Timothy Garton Ash in The Guardian. The right is divided on this issue – Italy’s Giorgia Meloni is a supporter of Ukraine – but the “net impact of these results will be negative”. Scholz’s party is already showing signs of wanting to “appease”’ the quarter of Germans who voted for parties that want to end the war.