While the polls all announce a surge in the far right in the European elections on June 9, historian Nicolas Lebourg, a specialist in this movement, analyzes the reasons for this expected movement. However, in the face of “the impossibility of the extreme right to organize in the European Parliament”, “the European Union resists”he judges.
The far right could occupy up to 25% of the Strasbourg Hemicycle after June 9. Is this a general movement, which can be found everywhere in Europe?
The election promises to be excellent for the extreme right. But, this time, this phenomenon cannot be described as a “populist wave” attributable to a “crisis” to which voters react. Nor can it be attributed to Eastern countries with a less long democratic tradition. In fact, the founding countries of Europe – Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg – also see the far right making strong progress, and even a country like Portugal, resistant to this political offer until recently, does not escape it.
What, then, is the common base that pushes Germans, French, Dutch or Italians to vote for the extreme right?
There are patterns that we find. Obviously, many voters in Europe share the feeling that the risk of personal downgrading and the downgrading of one’s nation are one and the same. Weariness with liberal democracy and its legal safeguards also fuels a so-called “illiberal” temptation that we find in democracies elsewhere in the world (United States, India, Israel, etc.).
That’s to say ?
What often binds these public opinions is the idea that the liberal state is no longer strong enough to protect the majority ethnic group in society. The demand for authority is clearly expressed against migrants, but not only: the controversies against LGBT people or the right to abortion testify that there is a global vision of the need to control bodies through a moral order , social, demographic.
What, at the European level, brings these far-right groups, with different histories, together?
All these parties present themselves as replacement elites against those who have failed. For them, it is about regenerating society by ensuring it has a homogeneous and unitary form. This organic unity that they seek is only possible by revising international relations which, in their eyes, contribute to the disintegration of the nation. Marine Le Pen wrote: “globalism” and the “postmodernity” are a single phenomenon. And the idea of an ever closer European Union (EU) goes completely against these structural determinants of the extreme right always.
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