© REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

From its very beginnings, the European Parliament has often been the target of scorn from commentators. They claimed it was a mere bauble of European integration with little power to challenge the member states of what was then the European Community. This reputation for institutional weakness fostered a tendency to treat elections to the European Parliament as a sideshow, where the strength of parties on a national level could be assessed in contests that were unlikely to cause them existential trouble. Yet through the Lisbon Treaty of 2009, the power of the European Parliament to shape legislation and affect the composition of the European Commission has expanded to a level far beyond the expectations of those first MEP candidates who stood in 1979.

In the process, gaining MEPs in European elections has become a central goal for any party or movement that wants to exert decisive influence over a European integration process that is reconfiguring Europe. Moments of turmoil such as the eurozone crisis, the Syrian refugee wave, the tensions between Ukraine and Russia or the end of old regimes in North Africa have underlined how the fate of member states is intertwined with the development of the EU and the states along its collective borders. Moreover, the Brexit crisis has starkly demonstrated the extent to which EU institutions can exert enormous pressure on states who attempt to challenge the structural foundations of European integration.

The ongoing nature of this process of institutional transformation has turned this year’s European elections, on May 23-26, 2019, into a crucial test for the political survival of newer as well as more established political groups, as part of the wider struggle to shape Europe’s future course. In the process, the long-term trajectory of key party families could be crucially affected by successes and failures on the European level. Right-wing populist parties, the Green movement, traditional Social Democrats, the alliance of center-right parties organized in the European People’s Party (EPP), and groups oriented toward liberalism as well as the far left could each experience a massive boost through these electoral battles or be plunged into a difficult position if its results point to further setbacks to come.

Far Right’s Change of Tactics

Of all these different political forces, right-wing populists have attracted the most attention. The recent entry of such parties into government in Austria and Italy in combination with the successes of the Leave campaign in the United Kingdom have fostered a misleading tendency to portray such movements as a new force within European politics. In reality, French parties under the leadership of the Le Pen family have been a force to be reckoned with since the 1980s, while Italy’s Lega and Austria’s FPÖ have gained power on the local and national level since the early 1990s. Even in Germany or Spain, where right-wing populist parties have only broken through at the national level since 2014, they have built on activist networks that have been operating on a regional level for several decades.

This history of right-wing populist parties in the EU means that there is also a track record that can be examined when it comes to assessing their ability to build a cohesive EU-wide party family. Such efforts have often foundered as the particular national interests of such movements hampered their ability to cooperate effectively on the European level. Yet the emergence of figures who have become Europe-wide household names, such as Lega leader (and Italian interior minister) Matteo Salvini, could well mark the beginnings of a decisive shift toward cooperation within the European Parliament and other institutions. Also, transnational far-right networks such as the Identitarian movement show an increasing interest in capturing EU institutions rather than bringing them down

European parties committed to defending an open society face many of the same strategic dilemmas as their right-wing populist rivals. Yet though they share an abhorrence of the populist right, the liberal parties grouped in ALDE as well as France’s La Republique En Marche, the German Green Party, Poland’s Wiosna or Romania’s USR, to name just a few examples, each draw on their own distinct set of ideological traditions. The way the Remain movement in the UK has splintered politically is typical of how attempts to push back against right-wing populism do not make other ideological dividing lines disappear.

Green Surge, Flailing Center-Left

Green surges in Germany and the Netherlands are likely to bolster the number of Green MEPs, who will want to carve out their own distinct ideological niche. By contrast, the way the votes of those who identify with social liberalism have fractured across different parties will make coordination more difficult for the ALDE party family. Far-left parties like Spain’s Podemos that enjoyed rapid growth in the wake of the Eurozone crisis face their own struggle to retain voters. They may be tempted by new populist options while still trying to maintain a coherent ideological identity to ensure that core supporters who abhor far right ideas remain loyal.

As elections in Europe increasingly become affected by mobilization for the populist right and counter-mobilization against it, parties that are not strongly identified with either position are struggling. Having presented itself as being neither left nor right, Italy’s Five Star Movement (M5S) has become ground down as the voter coalition it constructed has become difficult to sustain. Perhaps most severely affected have been traditional Social Democratic parties such as Germany’s SPD, who in trying to triangulate to appeal to voters on both sides of the divide in the battle over populism have ended up satisfying none. Others like Spain’s PSOE have been more successful. All in all, however, the center-left group, the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, is likely to return to the European Parliament in a weakened condition.

Dramatic Structural Shifts

In an environment where established party networks are fragmenting while emerging ones are struggling to coalesce, the EPP can still maintain dominance despite losses and internal tensions of its own. Even if Hungary’s Fidesz breaks with the EPP, all it needs to do is to remain stronger than any rival in a fragmenting party landscape is to control ad hoc processes of coalition-building and shape the composition of the European Commission. One of Europe’s many paradoxes at this juncture is that, at a moment where the EU’s emergence as a central global actor has accelerated the fragmentation of European politics, the political network most likely to take advantage is made up of center-right parties that have dominated the politics of member states for decades.

The relentless emphasis on the rise of right-wing populism in much of the US and British news media in particular has diverted attention from how the EU’s growing geopolitical power and the European Parliament’s rapidly expanding influence within its system have led to more dramatic structural shifts in European society. These dramatic structural shifts have fostered the emergence of different players as new parties have risen to prominence during moments of crisis that link the individual fate of voters with that of the EU as a whole. Yet while some parties that have dominated the European Parliament since that first election of 1979 have come under enormous pressure, others have adapted to sustain a strong grip on Europe’s future. In a period when so much in European politics is in flux, perhaps being the least noisy player in the game can ultimately be the cleverest move of all.

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© REUTERS/Max Rossi

In 2018, it’s a familiar scene: In a shock to the political system, a motley band of single-issue activists and anti-establishment radicals rises from the ideological fringes to enter the parliament of one of Europe’s biggest states. As politicians from traditional parties look on in horror, the movement makes a flamboyant impact on parliamentary debate with eye-catching stunts and wild rhetoric. While journalists wonder whether these new MPs might be soft on Moscow, their party challenges an entrenched consensus over the state’s economic system and military alliance with the United States. Later it will be remembered as a wild first step in their long march through Europe’s institutions.

Let’s go back to 1983. The early years of the German Green Party, which caused much scandal upon its entry into parliament in that year, were characterized by a deeply held conviction among its members that environmental degradation and a nuclear arms race were generating a fundamental clash between the interests of the people and supposedly corrupt elites. In fact, many of the social movements that emerged from the political turmoil of the late 1960s cultivated an attitude of total opposition to the established order that in 2018 would be considered a form of radical populism.

As the German political scientist Klaus von Beyme has pointed out, the Greens only began to distance themselves from their early populist style after entering a coalition government in the federal state of Hesse in 1985; in the subsequent years, their skepticism vis-à-vis European integration and their suspicion of all things military would gradually be tempered or abandoned, leading to the emergence of the pragmatic movement that many today see as the best hope of protecting the moral foundations of liberal democracy from a very different populist wave.

Unique Ideological Patterns

Comparing previous outsider parties to the right-wing protest parties that have gained ground in recent years holds an important lesson: the social composition of an emerging party’s base and its initial ideological foundations are crucial to shaping how it evolves when it comes into positions of power. All European populist parties have managed to take advantage of popular discontent surrounding the eurozone crisis after 2010 and the refugee surge of 2015. But each one of them has its own unique ideological pattern, and its own movement structure that shapes its approach toward European integration. And while US political entrepreneurs such as Steve Bannon, UK euroskeptics such as Nigel Farage, or Vladimir Putin’s regime may hope that these populist movements will trigger the collapse of the European Union, many well-established right-wing populist movements need no external help. They have a more complex relationship with the European integration process than one might assume.

As much as European populists are anchored in the nationalist politics of their own societies, they also draw on ideological themes focused on the defense of a collective European space against internal or external threats. Potential enemies of a collective “Christian Europe” are often a feature of the rhetoric of populist leaders in countries such as Hungary, Italy, or the Netherlands. Yet while interaction with EU institutions has helped deepen links between populist movements, it has at times also fueled tensions between them over responses to the moments of crisis that have transformed European politics since 2008.

A Threat to the EU?

A deeper look at the underlying origins and strategic goals of key populist parties provides a firmer understanding of the extent to which they represent a threat to the established order of the EU. As such parties and their members gradually adjust to the continued survival of European institutions they had so fiercely opposed, another possibility has come into focus: right-wing populists may well attempt to harness European integration processes in the service of their own specific personal and ideological ambitions.

From France’s Marine Le Pen to Austria’s Herbert Kickl, senior figures in right-wing populist movements have shifted from total rejection of European institutions toward a focus on redirecting them toward an authoritarian defense of a vaguely defined “Christian Europe.” To analyze the emergence of right-wing movements in Europe only through the lens of “populism” is therefore to miss other factors of equal importance in shaping their behavior. Other key dimensions of their identity—such as cultural value systems, class affiliations, ethno-linguistic loyalties, attitudes toward the projection of military power, or particular foreign policy stances—often draw them into their own distinct policy trajectories once they begin to wield power in parliaments and governments.

Each of the political movements that have come to be associated with the rise of right-wing populism has its own particular origin story. France’s Front National, recently renamed Rassemblement National, blended the anger of veterans and expellees alienated by the outcome of the Algerian War with the remnants of a 1950s Poujadiste movement suspicious of social change. It rallied its supporters around themes focused on fear of immigration and supposed threats to France’s sovereignty.

Italy’s Lega Nord has gone through several transformations, starting as an early 1990s independence movement for Italy’s North under the bombastic leadership of Umberto Bossi and later eveloping into a vehicle for the all-Italian nationalism of his equally voluble if rather more strategically deft successor Matteo Salvini, without ever abandoning its suspicion of non-Italian outsiders or commitment to low regulation and tax cuts.

Deutschtum on the Up

Emerging more recently, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) was initially founded as part of a backlash against the German government’s policies during the eurozone crisis. Yet after several leadership changes, the AfD’s identity has shifted from Deutschmark patriotism towards far more right-wing, anti-migration, and anti-Islam positions. With Austria’s Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ), a combination of neo-liberal economic policies coupled with an emphasis on German as the basis of Austria’s ethno-linguistic identity has proved a path to electoral success since the early 1980s. Yet this Deutschtum (German-ness) ideology has also fueled tensions with neighboring states. Slovenia is concerned by the willingness of FPÖ leaders to toy with hostility to Austria’s Slovenian minority communities: Italy is worried by irredentist claims on its South Tyrol region which has a German-speaking majority. By contrast, under the leadership of Geert Wilders, the Dutch Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV) has largely remained a single-issue party, whose identity is defined by a relentless hostility to Islam and Muslim immigrants in what it claims to be a defense of European liberal values.

Along with movements hostile to the established milieus that dominated the politics of the EU until the early 2000s, there are parties often identified with populism that are less hostile to the so-called establishment. One example is Hungary’s Fidesz party, which under the leadership of Viktor Orbán since 2010 has used right-wing populist themes such as hostility to migration and fascination with Russian authoritarianism to consolidate its hold on power. Yet it hasn’t broken with the network of Christian Democratic parties united within the European Peoples Party in the European Parliament.

So although it vehemently opposes further migration and what it calls the meddling of EU institutions, Fidesz regularly backs the Christian Democratic consensus in many policy areas. It also emphasizes the Christian dimension of Europe’s identity in a way that echoes the rhetoric of the founding generation of post-1945 Christian Democratic statesman such as Alcide de Gasperi and Konrad Adenauer. Similarly, Poland’s Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (“Law and Justice,” or PiS) often uses populism to mobilize support. Yet its close relationship with factions within the Catholic Church and the influence of pre-1939 national conservative traditions on its leadership have anchored it in a belief system that does not mesh well with the ideological flexibility of other European parties associated with populist politics.

Then there are loose voter coalitions such as Italy’s Movimiento 5 Stelle (M5S) for whom populism is the glue that holds disparate ideological factions together. M5S has updated a classic populist hostility toward vaguely defined elites by claiming that the internet can provide a new means of divining the will of the people. But it remains a fractious alliance with a small leadership group that represents various milieus drawn from both the left and right of the Italian political spectrum. With such an ideologically diverse voter base, frequent authoritarian tendencies, and a willingness to shift policy goals overnight, M5S sits in a category of its own—the party is so completely defined by its thin-centered populist ideology that it is difficult to place in any of the main ideological camps at the heart of European politics.

The best way to determine which right-wing populist movements could construct robust Europe-wide alliances, and which might struggle to find partners, is to look at how their ideologies affect policy. This is particularly the case when it comes to the three dominant themes that have helped to define the development of the EU in the past decade: the financial crisis and the shakeup of the eurozone structures that followed; the responses to Russian expansionism; and how to manage migration and the EU’s external borders. Only when looking at how right-wing populist parties interact with one another over these three key issues is it possible to establish whether there is enough ideological convergence between them to represent a unified force that could either undermine the EU or reconfigure European integration processes along authoritarian lines.

Fundamental Disagreements

The outlook for such populist cooperation is decidedly mixed. While populist parties might share anti-migration stances, a neo-liberal economic outlook, and hostility toward European institutions, there are still fundamental disagreements over eurozone policy. Certainly, the challenge posed by Italy’s governing coalition to the structures of the eurozone has elicited enthusiasm from AfD politicians hoping for the euro’s demise. But when Lega and M5S politicians demand further funding from the EU their supposed populist allies in Germany and the Netherlands are quick to express their outrage. And even though they share frustrations over the role of the European Court of Justice, the deep gulf between Lega and PiS over how to respond to Russian expansionism prevents any form of cooperation. Moreover, while prominent populist leaders like Matteo Salvini and Alice Weidel might agree in general about the need to harden the EU’s external borders, disagreements swiftly rise to the surface when the debate shifts to how refugees and migrants who land in Italy should be distributed across the EU.

For all the talk of how Orbán and Salvini might be developing a political relationship that could lead to the defection of Fidesz from the European People’s Party (EPP) to a European alliance of populists, such divergences over specific policies, as well as wider differences in social and ideological outlook, will likely continue to hamper the ability of right-wing populists to cooperate when it comes to concrete policy. Indeed, the need for right-wing populist movements to retain the loyalty of nationalist voters can drive them into conflict with each other. The angry exchanges between Lega and FPÖ over Austrian government proposals to make dual citizenship easier to achieve for German-speakers in the Italian region of South Tyrol is only one of many instances where irredentist tendencies have undermined the ability to build a Europe-wide populist alliance.

This is the paradox at the heart of national populist parties’ attempts to cooperate at the European level: in order to do so, they would need to find a common political language and shared ideological goals, and foster a sustained effort to reconfigure the European integration process. It is already evident how such coordination could work. For over a decade, far-right youth groups such as the Identitarian Movement that provide the recruiting grounds for populist parties have been developing the ideological basis for such Europe-wide political networks. By emphasizing a shared European identity based on deeply authoritarian concepts of racial supremacy, such movements foster a belief among their adherents that Europe needs to be defended from various external and internal threats, including migrants and the United States.

Men on the Inside

Prominent figures in the US, Russia, and the United Kingdom may well hope that right-wing populist movements will shatter European institutions. But the shared structural and ideological characteristics between parties such as the Lega, AfD, or Rassemblement National may well take them beyond a grudging acceptance of European integration towards an active embrace of those aspects they believe match their own goals.

The Austrian and Italian governing coalitions, both with a strong populist presence, are already throwing their weight behind collective European border control initiatives overseen by Frontex. This is true, too, for the expansion of military and policing operations across North Africa and the Sahel which are designed to choke off the main African migration routes to European territory. Rather than representing a mortal threat to European integration, there are signs that European right-wing populists could pull European institutions into a more militarized stance that reflects these parties’ willingness to project collective power into states along the EU’s borders in a profoundly illiberal fashion.

It’s not a coincidence that Green parties across Europe seem most attuned to how right-wing populist movements could subvert European integration. After all, they have gone through their own process of adaptation to and cooption of European institutions. The ferocious political debates that often pit Green parties—who advocate greater cooperation and openness when it comes to relations with the EU’s neighbors—against right-wing populists who embrace the militarization of the EU’s collective external borders have come to mark one of the key dividing lines of contemporary European politics. Yet it should be no surprise that a European integration process that has profoundly influenced every aspect of European life may well transform the ideology and strategic goals of some of its most vehement opponents. To prevent right-wing populists from turning Europe into the closed fortress of their fantasies is perhaps the next great challenge for those who believe in a Europe whole and free.

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© REUTERS / Kevin Lamarque

It has become a weekly ritual. In the midst of desperate attempts by American diplomats to assuage the concerns of counterparts in Europe, President Donald Trump unleashes a volley of tweets that further destabilize a transatlantic alliance that has been crucial in sustaining the global dominance of the United States. In the past few weeks the pace of Trump’s malevolent bumbling has accelerated, with the bullying of European allies at the NATO summit in Brussels and his courting of Vladimir Putin at their summit in Helsinki leading many European policymakers to question the future of an alliance that has endured for over seventy years.

For many observers, the disruptive impact Trump has had on a global order that entrenched the preeminence of the United States seemed to mark a sudden break from established American foreign policy traditions. Disoriented policymakers in the United States often interpret this system shock in near revolutionary terms. The willingness of Donald Trump to undermine America’s alliances is often depicted as a sudden moment where a relatively stable liberal order was overturned by a small faction of Trump loyalists that reject the global role American institutions have played since 1945. Indeed, the idea that the current turmoil engulfing the transatlantic alliance is the product of a unique electoral aberration is comforting to those who hope for its swift restoration after Trump falls.

Yet a closer look at the evolution of relations between the United States and members of the EU since 1992 indicates that there are long term structural factors at play that have been causing tensions within the transatlantic alliance for quite some time. Many of the resentments that Donald Trump’s wildly provocative rhetoric plays upon reflect frustration over supposed free-riding on American generosity. This issue has repeatedly flashed up under previous presidents. In the 1990s, the inability of European states to head off the Yugoslav wars of secession caused frustration among US policymakers who had hoped that the collapse of the Soviet Union could lead to a shift of strategic focus to the Asia/Pacific theater. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to deep tensions with key EU states, though British, Spanish, and Polish support for the US war effort balanced rhetoric from those US conservatives, such as John Bolton, who were already beginning to define the EU as a potential strategic adversary.

For many Europeans, the subsequent election victory of Barack Obama in 2008 fueled hopes that the transatlantic alliance could overcome such challenges. But despite initial emphasis on renewed cooperation, the inability of European states involved in the NATO intervention in Libya in 2011 to sustain targeted airstrikes without American assistance brought to the surface frustration with what many US officials believed was a lack of equitable burden-sharing when it came to defense spending. In his final years as president, Barack Obama expressed frustration with a perceived imbalance between high levels of US defense spending and budget cuts in EU member states that were increasingly hampering the operational effectiveness of European militaries.

An Emerging Europe

A paradox of these growing tensions between the US and its European allies is that they were also a product of the EU’s increasingly powerful global role in other key policy areas. While the end of the Cold War led to cuts in European defense budgets that exacerbated the military imbalance with the United States, it also intensified a process of European integration that would lead to an vast concentration of collective trade and regulatory power in a restructured EU. When the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992 consolidated economic and monetary integration and deepened political union, the ability of the EU’s institutions to influence trade and regulation on a global scale expanded rapidly in ways that clashed with the interests of key American business sectors.

Though there are still many unresolved aspects of economic and monetary integration despite the waning of the Eurozone crisis, it is notable that Europeans have repeatedly resisted American pressure over the past decade—for example, Europe has brushed off American calls to change course over such issues as debt relief for Greece or Brexit. The divergence of European strategic priorities from American attempts to shape the global economy has been a source of tension since at least a decade before Trump’s election. As the EU intensifies integration and puts pressure on trading partners to adopt its own regulatory framework, that tension will only grow.

In the context of a transnational system that is increasingly developing its own state-like structures, the EU’s internal institutional dynamic was also creating pressures for greater defense coordination before Donald Trump took power. The dawning realization of the extent of military weakness in the period between the Libyan War and the Russian annexation of Ukraine fueled concerns within Europe about the extent of its reliance on US security guarantees.

The increasingly unpredictable behavior of the US has accelerated these efforts, as even many Europeans who are strongly committed to the transatlantic alliance have swung to the view that American unreliability may well make the effort needed for the EU to achieve strategic autonomy a matter of existential necessity. In what can be described as a belated victory for the Gaullist view of geopolitics, there is now an emerging consensus across the EU that its interests can no longer be made reliant on an American political system that is vulnerable to violent electoral swings between belligerence and paralysis. As ever with shifts in EU policy, this is still likely to be an incremental process. But the emergence of an EU able to project collective power in all areas of policy would diminish US leverage and influence in Europe and geopolitical flashpoints surrounding it.

So rather than just assuming that Donald Trump is the primary factor behind the crisis threatening the transatlantic alliance, it is worth looking at how he has been able to use this long term divergence in institutional approaches and strategic interests between the US and the EU to his advantage. Even in an alternative scenario in which Trump had lost in 2016, a more benign US president would have still have faced tensions between the EU and the United States. These would have needed to be managed in a way that acknowledged the divergence of interests while still retaining the benefits of continued cooperation in security and defense. If Trump leaves office soon, it could still be possible to have such an honest dialogue. Both sides could discuss the implications of a strategic rebalancing process in which the EU expands its military strength to lighten the load on an overstretched United States while American political elites accept the strategic implications of a truly equal partnership.

Yet if Donald Trump continues to sabotage any attempts to explore such a managed rebalancing, the accelerating strategic divergence could quickly become unbridgeable. The differences in opinion between Europe and America would then fuel strategic rivalry. If one takes the potential global implications of such a breakdown in the alliance between the US and the EU into account, then those American policymakers should be careful what they wish for in demanding a massive expansion of European military power.

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