The European elections are to political junkies what the World Cup is to football fans. There are 27 countries with 27 different political configurations and 27 results to analyze. Because they are not national elections and generally do not change the government in office, voters often treat them experimentally, voting for parties they would not choose to lead their country, or by simply voting to protest the party in power, as Americans do in midterm elections. This is what makes them unpredictable, either attractively or alarmingly.
Since Brexit, the British no longer vote in the European Parliament, and they never cared much about it anyway. The Americans have a rather vague vision of the institutions of the European Union. Nevertheless, the English-speaking media has always needed a shorthand to summarize this messy, complex and continental horse race. This week, they found one: the rise of the far right. The resulting debate? America could head in the same direction at the end of the year.
The far right is retreating in Scandinavia or Poland
Applied to France, the alarmist headlines were apt enough: Marine Le Pen’s anti-establishment, far-right party, the National Rally (which has actually been part of the French establishment for decades, although not ever been in power), won the election with around a third of the votes. It was clearly a protest vote, targeting Emmanuel Macron. The president reacted accordingly, calling early French legislative elections. Voters must decide if they really want to let the RN run the country. If Macron loses his bet, Jordan Bardella could become Prime Minister.
But almost everywhere else in Europe, the headlines and banners in American media were wrong. In Poland, PiS, the former far-right ruling party, came in second place for the first time in ten years, beaten by the current center-right ruling party (including my husband, Radek Sikorski , is part of the government). In Hungary, a brand new insurgent center-right party has, against all expectations, stolen votes from Viktor Orbán’s autocratic ruling party. In Slovakia, the Netherlands, and even Italy and France, the center left did better than in previous elections. In Scandinavia and Spain, the far right has done worse.
In Germany, the story is more complicated. The tripartite coalition in power obtained poor results, the AfD, a far-right party undermined by scandals linking it to Russian money and Nazi sympathies, obtained 16% of the vote, more than what some predicted a few months ago. Far be it from me to minimize the threat of the AfD, with its toxic rhetoric and its financial links with Russia, nor the threat of its sister party in Austria, which narrowly came first. But the real winners in Germany are the center-right Christian Democrats, who are neither pro-Nazi nor pro-Russian. On the contrary, they have been saying for months that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz should do more to help Ukraine, not less.
Trump more unbalanced and dangerous than ever
For Americans, the message of this election is alarming and unexpected, but not because of what is happening in Europe. If you take a look at the Old Continent, whether it is Giorgia Meloni, Italian Prime Minister whose party comes from Mussolini’s fascist movement, or the party of Marine Le Pen, whose roots really go back to Vichy , or even on Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, you will see far-right leaders who have succeeded precisely by appearing to move closer to the center, by trying to appear less extreme and by embracing existing alliances, such as the European Union and NATO. They talk a lot about immigration and inflation, but the traditional parties do the same. Their goals may secretly be more radical – Marine Le Pen may intend to undermine the French political system if she wins, and I don’t believe she has cut ties with Russia – but they are succeeding to hide this radicalism from voters.
Donald Trump is not like these politicians. The former US president is not moving toward the center, and he is not trying to appear less confrontational. Nor does it seek to join existing international alliances. On the contrary, almost every day it seems more extreme, more unbalanced and more dangerous. Meloni did not incite his supporters to block the results of an election. Le Pen is not talking about punishment and revenge. Wilders agreed to be part of a coalition government, meaning he can compromise with other political leaders, and he promised to put his notorious hostility toward Muslims “on the back burner.” Even Orban, who went furthest in destroying his country’s institutions and rewrote the Hungarian constitution for his own benefit, does not openly brag about wanting to be an autocrat. Trump prides himself on it. The people around him speak openly about their desire to destroy American democracy. None of this seems to harm him with voters, who seem to welcome this radical and destructive extremism, or at least not to care about it.
The American media’s clichés about Europe are therefore false. In reality, the European far right is progressing in some places, but retreating in others. We Americans are in no “danger” of following European voters to the far right, because we have already far surpassed them. If Trump wins in November, it is America that could lead Europe into its radicalization, and not the other way around.
* Journalist and historian, Anne Applebaum is a Pulitzer Prize winner and the author of Gulag: a history And Democracies in declinetranslated into French by Grasset. This item was published in the original version on The Atlantic website. © 2024 The Atlantic. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.
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