It is true that there is every reason to be afraid. There is a whiff of pre-war in the air, but have we really returned to the 1930s?
With Ukraine and Gaza as a backdrop, we would have, if American voters had not refused Donald Trump a second term three years ago, if the Poles had not just ousted a reactionary right-wing from power, if the Spanish had not preferred to reappoint the Socialists rather than hand over the reins to a hard right, if Geert Wilders could count on a parliamentary majority rather than just a quarter of Dutch MPs, or if Javier Milei had the means to implement his programme to dismantle the Argentine state, which neither Parliament nor the regions want.
The importance taken by the new extreme right in Europe and the rest of the world is already sufficiently worrying for us not to believe them and to say that they are irresistible when they are not. On the contrary, they are incoherent and contradictory because, whether or not opposed to the evolution of morals and the right to abortion, they are sometimes libertarian and sometimes conservative, and in addition, they are divided between supporters of complete freedom for the market and defenders of an economic role for the state.
These new extreme right-wingers have even been unable to unite in the European Parliament, where they have formed separate political groups: Identity and Democracy, the common home of the Italian Lega and the French Rassemblement National, and European Conservatives and Reformists, which includes the Polish PiS and Georgia Meloni’s party. What these two groups have in common is their xenophobia, their hatred of the left, their rejection of laws and treaties protecting human rights and, therefore, their hostility to the constitutional courts responsible for upholding them. This is what places them both on the far right, but while the former remains profoundly Europhobic and has only slowly and discreetly resolved to distance himself from Vladimir Putin, the latter is Atlanticist, more Eurosceptic than Europhobic, above all reactionary and fiercely against the Russian intervention in Ukraine.
Incapable of pushing through common policies, these two groups are also far from being able to win a majority in the European Union, even together, but the danger they represent is nonetheless significant.
Should they gain any real ground at the European elections next June, they could block or slow down the Union’s decisions by rallying the support of the hardest currents in the People’s Party. Vladimir Putin would then have every opportunity to come to an agreement – on the backs of the Europeans – with a Trump returning to power or even with Democrats fed up with these European complications. The nationalists are the greatest enemies of the European nations, but it is by no means impossible to counter them.
Consider Mme Le Pen and her friends. They are no longer saying that the European Union is a “people’s prison” from which we should need to get out as quickly as possible. They no longer say this because international instability has convinced Europe’s citizens as never before of the need for unity, but that does not stop the Lepenists from applauding a man, Geert Wilders, who would like to get his country out of the Union.
Either these people are lying about their true intentions or they are making the wrong choice, the worst choice, as is their habit. Shortly before Donald Trump imposed tariffs on our industries and threatened to close the American umbrella, Mme Le Pen went in vain to seek her anointment at the foot of Trump Tower in New York. She then went to Moscow to ask for and receive Vladimir Putin’s one, and her friends voted against the European loan intended to revive our economies battered by the pandemic, against the interests of 450 million European citizens.
Three disastrous choices in a handful of years on three key issues – that is the achievement of the Rassemblement National, and an electoral triumph for these incompetents, obsessed with backtracking and playing a shell game, would be inevitable?
Come on! The battle against the extreme right is anything but lost. Wilders, Salvini and Le Pen are a long way from taking control of the Union, because all that is needed is for the Christian Democrats, the centrists, the Greens and the social democrats – for all democrats – to pick up the gauntlet, right now, and put up a united front.
