© REUTERS/Francois Lenoir

Ahead of last month’s European Parliament elections, Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini announced he would be forming a pan-European alliance with France’s failed second-round presidential candidate Marine Le Pen in order to create a new far-right European group to disrupt the European Union from the inside.

There was just one problem. Le Pen and Salvini were already in such a European Parliament alliance: the Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF) group.

On Thursday, Le Pen held a press conference in the European Parliament to announce that her project with Salvini had been a success. They had met the threshold to form a group in the Parliament—a total of at least 25 MEPs from at least seven different member states—and had decided to call their group “Identity and Democracy” (ID).

“We have changed the political chessboard of the EU,” Le Pen declared.

But as she described the group’s composition and goals, it became clear that it was virtually indiscernible from the ENF. The far-right euroskeptic parties in the group are mostly the same, with the addition of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which has left the British Conservatives’ European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group to join the far-right.

The addition of the German AfD, combined with the huge increase of Salvini’s Lega seats (up from five to 29) nearly doubles the far-right group’s size. While ENF had 37 seats, the ID group will have 73. This gives them 10 percent of seats in this term, compared to 5 percent in the previous term.

But even though more seats means more resources and greater influence in parliamentary committees, ID will likely remain the smallest group in the European Parliament, coming two seats behind the Greens. And given the lack of difference from the ENF, it’s hard to see how its influence in the parliament is going to be any different. Moreover, its failure to woo members of the center-right European Peoples Party, notably Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, will deny it the numerical heft that Salvini craves.

Political Pygmy

Both Le Pen and Salvini are themselves former MEPs, and they have had long experience with the parliament’s various far-right blocs over the years. Though much of the media has breathlessly portrayed their latest project as a new development that could destabilize the EU, the reality is that the presence of far-right groups goes back to 2007.

That group was called “Identity, Tradition, and Sovereignty”, but it didn’t last long. By the end of 2007 it had disbanded after Italian MEP Alessandra Mussolini (yes, the dictator’s granddaughter) made insulting remarks about Romanians on the parliament floor. MEPs from the irredentist Greater Romania party quit the group in protest, causing it to fall below the threshold needed to be an official group.

Such has been the history of the attempts to form a “nationalist international” in the European Parliament over the past decade. Through the years the far-right bloc continued to exist, though it was not officially recognized because it did not have enough MEPs. In these years Le Pen was teamed with Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, who is now in the political wilderness after having suffered a humiliating defeat in the Dutch European election.

The new ID MEPs, who will be led by Salvini’s foreign policy advisor Marco Zanni, were at pains at Thursday’s press conference to say that ID is not just a renamed ENF. No wonder, given ENF’s paltry record of achievements. Its members, especially Lega and Front National (which Le Pen has also renamed) MEPs, barely showed up to Brussels or Strasbourg, preferring to focus on national issues. Their record of cooperation is virtually non-existent, and they were so invisible in the last parliament term that many journalists forgot they existed.

Farage in the Wilderness

The stated aim of the group is to return power to EU national capitals, curb immigration, and prevent the spread of Islam in Europe. With such a platform it might seem a natural home for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, the successor to the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in Brussels.

But Farage has not had a good relationship with Le Pen in the past. After the 2014 election, she and Wilders tried to cajole Farage into taking his UKIP MEPs into a common Euroskeptic group with them, but they were rebuffed. The most important thing for UKIP has been to have a group in which Farage is the leader, so he can be given long speaking time at the top of the Parliament’s major debates and create clips for British news and his online fan base. Farage has also been wary of being associated with Le Pen, who is seen as an extremist by most people in the UK.

Farage has had his own group in the parliament since 2009, Europe of Freedom and Democracy. After the last European election in 2014, he and Le Pen were in a race to attract euroskeptic parties, and Farage won. Le Pen was unable to form a group until one year later in 2015, barely reaching the threshold.

This time around, it appears Le Pen has won. Though the ID group was briefly in talks with Farage to bring his Brexit Party MEPs into the fold, those talks went nowhere. Now, with time running out and Italy’s Five Star Movement (M5S) wary of continuing its unsuccessful alliance with Farage, it looks as if the EFD will cease to exist.

Zanni, who held the talks with Farage, said that the door remains open to the Brexit Party. “We were unable to create a united group for a number of reasons with the Brexit party,” he said. “It’s not a defeat; it’s a very open relationship; we are open to them if they want to cooperate.” He said they are also in talks with Spain’s new far-right party Vox, which has not yet chosen a group.

But it now seems even more unlikely than before that these far-right parties can cooperate with Farage. That’s because the UK’s Brexit chaos has scared Europe’s far-right parties away from the idea of their countries leaving the EU. Le Pen performed an about-face in 2017, changing her party’s position from wanting to leave the EU and the eurozone to wanting to stay in both. Lega and M5S also no longer advocate for Italexit, making the latter’s continued membership in Farage’s group rather untenable.

At their press conference, the ID MEPs were keen to stress that they are not a group that is against the EU’s existence. “Some people say that we want to destroy the EU, I want to contradict that,” said AfD MEP Jörg Meuthen. “The EU needs to be limited and reformed”.

New Names, Same Faces

The new names for these groups and parties will not change the reality that nationalist parties have difficulty working together. It is difficult to demonize foreigners and cooperate with them at the same time, as Alessandra Mussolini learned in 2007.

Indeed, it is a lesson her grandfather learned as well, always having to strike a balance between glorifying Italy and placating Hitler, who often spoke of Mediterranean peoples’ inferiority. This was one of the reasons that Franco never took Spain into the Axis—he distrusted international cooperation.

As the dust settles on the group formation process ahead of the first plenary sitting on July 1, what we are likely to see emerge is an enlarged far-right group that has benefitted from Brexit, picking up new members from two groups, Farage’s EFD and the British Conservatives’ ECR, which will likely no longer exist after the departure of UK MEPs.

But the ID group will probably still be the smallest, unable to block legislation. ID MEPs will probably still not show up. And the “far-right disruptor” that the media has been so preoccupied with over the next months will not materialize. At least, not in the context of the European Parliament.

The post The EU’s Overhyped Far-Right Alliance appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/ Hannibal Hanschke

There is little to be seen of Angela Merkel these days. Of course, she receives visitors, and she is also traveling quite a bit. But in terms of shaping the news and setting the agenda, the German chancellor has retreated from the limelight, and her foes and critics—including officials from her own party and administration—are growing bolder.

No place represents Merkel’s loss of authority more acutely than Chemnitz, a city of 240,000 in Saxony. There, three young men from Syria and Iraq—admitted to Germany because of Merkel’s 2015 refugee policy—are suspected of stabbing a German-Cuban man to death at the end of August. After the killing, thousands of people marched through the city in protest, among them several far-right groups. Neo-Nazis chased and beat up dark-skinned foreigners, while others attacked journalists or showed the forbidden Hitler salute.

A horrified Merkel condemned the “hunt” (Hetzjagd in German) on foreigners. But Saxony’s state premier Michael Kretschmer, a politician of Merkel’s own Christian Democratic Party (CDU), publicly contradicted her. There had been “no mob, no Hetzjagd, and no pogrom,” Kretschmer said after a visit to Chemnitz. He did promise that demonstrators who had become “abusive” would be punished.

Kretschmer, at least, is an elected official, and as prime minister of Saxony, he is not under Merkel’s jurisdiction. But just after his intervention, one of the federal government’s top civil servants joined the chorus. Hans-Georg Maassen, head of the Germany’s domestic spy agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), gave an astonishing interview to the mass-circulation Bild tabloid.

No Proof?

In the interview, Maassen said that his service had no reliable information that any hunt had taken place in Chemnitz. Nor did they have proof that a video showing right-wing extremists pursuing and hitting foreigners was authentic. “According to my cautious assessment, there are good reasons to believe that this may be targeted misinformation, possibly to distract the public from the murder committed in Chemnitz,” Maassen said.

Maassen had not informed the chancellery before the interview—neither of his doubts about the events in Chemnitz, nor of his intention to make them public. His immediate superior, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, another outspoken critic of Merkel’s refugee policy, at first backed Maassen, but later did ask him to provide proof.

It’s the second time within weeks that Maassen’s impartiality and ability to serve as BfV chief has been called into question: a former member of the right-wing, populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) claimed that Maassen had advised the party on how to avoid being put under surveillance by his domestic intelligence agency. Maassen has denied doing so, but opposition lawmakers and some journalists have accused him of harboring a too-cozy relationship with Germany’s far-right. The daily Handelsblatt reported this week about alleged leaks to the AfD from within Maassen’s service.

On September 10, the head of the domestic intelligence service finally submitted a brief report to the interior ministry and the chancellery. It was major climb-down, according to news reports: Maassen was apparently forced to explain that he had no reason to doubt the authenticity of the video, but that it shouldn’t have been so readily believed without verifying its origin.

What sounds like a rather involved story about semantics and bureaucracy has two possible interpretations. The first is reasonably innocent: Maassen, who has long been worried about the security risks that Germany imported by allowing hundreds of thousands of young men into the country, simply made use of the Chemnitz incident to express his service’s unease. In this case, Maassen may still have to step down, but the affair would stop there.

In the second version, Maassen would have acted with at least some encouragement from his boss, Horst Seehofer. In this case, it wouldn’t just be about a rebellious and overreaching civil servant, but about a power struggle at the heart of Merkel’s government. Seehofer was the politician behind the last rebellion against the chancellor, too. Just before the summer break, he threatened to use his authority as interior minister to close off the border for refugees registered elsewhere in the EU, forcing Merkel to go, cap in hand, to beg for concessions from her EU colleagues.

The Bavarian Angle

In addition to leading the interior ministry, Horst Seehofer is also head of the CSU, the conservative Bavarian sister party to Merkel’s Christian Democrats. It is facing regional elections in Bavaria on October 14, and the CSU, which has governed the state for more than 60 years, is doing badly in the polls. If that trend is confirmed in the elections, Seehofer’s party will need a coalition partner to continue governing, which, in Bavarian terms, would be a huge humiliation.

More importantly from Merkel’s perspective, Seehofer will almost certainly have to step down as head of his party if the elections go wrong for the CSU. Down the road, this may rid her of an increasingly unpleasant cabinet member. But in the short term, it means that Seehofer has little left to lose. And he has made no secret of the fact that he dislikes Merkel personally and considers her refugee policy a dreadful mistake. “I cannot work with that woman anymore,” Seehofer said in June.

It is unlikely that Seehofer will actively bring the chancellor down. Time is running short until the Bavarian elections, and Seehofer knows that voters would not thank the CSU for such a step. But he is forcing Merkel to tread extremely carefully, paralyzing the government and making it blatantly obvious how little power the chancellor has left.

Will she be able to recover her grip after October 14? That is certainly possible, though Merkel would need to become much more active and decisive than she has been since her re-election in 2017. But otherwise, bit by bit, her authority will continue to erode. In that case, few people would bet on her completing her current four-year term.

It’s an eventuality that the Social Democrats, her junior partner in government, seem to have factored into their policies already. Over the past several weeks, they have presented far-reaching proposals for new laws—a much more generous pensions system, for instance, or strict rent control for most cities—that are far more suitable to an opposition party or an election campaign than for being part of a stable coalition government.

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© REUTERS/ TT News Agency

Swedes woke up to an uncertain political situation on Monday, with no declared winners after a nail-biting election that brought the center-left and center-right political blocs to a deadlock, with neither able to form a majority government. Meanwhile, the far-right, anti-immigration Sweden Democrats declared themselves the “true winners” and kingmakers.

While the Sweden Democrats had hoped to become the second biggest or even the biggest party, they ended up well short of the 25 percent some polls had predicted. Still, there were jubilations among members when preliminary results showed them cementing their position as Sweden’s third party, advancing from just under 13 percent to just under 18 percent. They are clearly a rising force in Swedish politics.

With 28.4 percent of the vote, the Social Democrats fared better than some polls had predicted, though they still performed worse than they have done in over a century. And their coalition partner, the Greens, came dangerously close to falling below the four percent needed to enter parliament. However, Social Democrat leader and (potentially outgoing) prime minister Stefan Löfven refused to heed calls from the opposition to step down on election night.

All in all, just a tenth of a percent now separates the center-left and center-right blocs. While the center-left (the two government parties plus the Left Party) now has one parliamentary seat more than the center-right, the result may shift again on Wednesday after all the early votes and votes cast abroad have been counted and a final result is declared.

Immigration as a Key Issue?

As in other recent elections across Europe – from Italy to Germany – immigration was a key issue in Sweden, with opinion polls in the months running up to the vote showing it to be among the top three concerns for voters, along with healthcare and education. However, on the day of the vote Swedes’ priorities appear to have changed, as immigration dropped to eighth place according to exit polls. The Sweden Democrats, who according to the preliminary results gained 17.6 percent of the vote, were apparently able to capitalize on discontent around mass immigration: in 2015 alone, over 160,000 asylum seekers arrived in Sweden. The Scandinavian nation, with a population of 10 million, took in most migrants per capita of any European country. And in total numbers, only Germany took in more.

During the election campaign, immigration and integration dominated the political debate, and the Sweden Democrats linked those issues to everything ranging from healthcare and schools to crime and the welfare state. The party proposes that Sweden should, at least temporarily, halt the admission of quota refugees and stop granting asylum permits. They also want to offer incentives for repatriation and to limit immigrants’ access to welfare. They say that instead of taking more refugees in, Sweden should instead help those fleeing their home countries by offering assistance in or near the war-torn areas, for instance in the form of aid to organizations operating in refugee camps.

While other parties, too, campaigned on stricter immigration policies, many Swedes apparently felt the Sweden Democrats were more credible in this area. Efforts to win back voters by approaching or adopting the politics of populist parties like the Sweden Democrats are bound to fail, according to Thomas Sommerer, an associate professor in political science at Stockholm University. “When it comes to holding on to voters, tightening one’s migration policy is not a strategy that has worked for the Social Democrats nor for the main opposition party, the Moderates – no matter how hard they tried before the election,” he said.

Neo-Nazi Roots

The Sweden Democrat Party has been around for 30 years now. Among the party’s early founders and members were individuals who had previously been involved with neo-Nazi and racist groups. And as the election drew closer, Swedish media continued to expose current representatives for sharing racist content online, such as anti-Semitic memes and conspiracy theories.

The party’s history prevents the other seven parliamentary parties from considering them as a coalition partner—they made that clear before the election. However, with the center-left and center-right blocs winning around 40 percent of the vote each, Sweden will now need another minority government.

However, being ostracized will not keep the Sweden Democrats from wielding significant influence. Arguably, they also shaped the political debate and set the tone for the entire election, making migration more salient than it otherwise would be. Prime Minister Löfven has called them “a neo-Fascist single-issue party which respects neither people’s differences nor Sweden’s democratic institutions.”

The fact that the Sweden Democrats have the support of 17.6 percent of the Swedes is a sign of the divide between the political class and the wider population, many of whom have abandoned old parties. By casting their vote for the Sweden Democrats, these people expressed that they do want their policies to shape Swedish society.

For the Social Democrats, who have dominated Swedish politics since the 1930s and formed a coalition with the Green Party in 2014, the 2018 general election represents the greatest loss in a century. This downward trend is not unique to the Swedish Social Democrats of course, but has also afflicted their sister parties across the West, as Sommerer pointed out.

”In Sweden, as in Germany, the major political players on the left and right have moved to the political center over the past couple of decades and so, in reality, voters in both countries have been left with few genuine political alternatives,” Sommerer said. “Those who do not appreciate the general shift towards the center—and in Sweden both the Social Democrats and the main opposition, the conservative Moderate Party, have made this shift—now tend to go for smaller parties with clearer ideologies.”

Indeed, smaller parties have gained from this trend, and a record 41 percent of Swedes switched party allegiances in this election, according to exit polls on Sunday. Sweden’s Left Party rose from 5.7 percent in the 2014 election to 7.9 percent in this year’s vote. Other small parties experienced a boost in the final stages of the campaign. The Christian Democrats, for instance, long looked unlikely to make the four-percent electoral threshold but in the end got 6.4 percent of the vote.

Making Inroads

The Sweden Democrats also made significant inroads in traditional Social Democrat strongholds like the northernmost regions of Sweden and in some former industrial towns. A poll in June showed that a quarter of Swedish Trade Union Confederation members planned to vote for the Sweden Democrats. “As the previously dominating parties shrink—in Germany, Sweden and elsewhere—political majorities are becoming a thing of the past,” said Sommerer. “So one is left with two alternatives. One is to form broader coalitions with a larger number of parties—but that also becomes complicated when some alliances are being ruled out in advance. In Sweden, collaboration with the Sweden Democrats was ruled out by the other parties; in Germany the parallel taboo is to collaborate with the Alternative für Deutschland.”

“The other alternative is to collaborate across the political blocs and one change we’re seeing in Germany is that the Green Party is abandoning its old stance of working exclusively with leftist parties. There, the pragmatic sections of the party have become more dominant in recent years and have started collaborating with conservatives. It remains to be seen if the Swedish Greens will follow that lead. I wouldn’t be surprised if some parties are forced to become more flexible here,” said Sommerer.

The day after the election, the bargaining over political power has begun and looks set to continue for some time. The Social Democrats’ group leader Anders Ygeman told Swedish media on Monday that it “could take months” before Sweden has a new government.

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