On Thursday, the Dutch will be the first to go to the polls in the European elections, which are technically a collection of 27 national ballots held over the four days from 6 to 9 June. This is fitting, given that the last Dutch general election in November 2023, which produced a shocking landslide for the far right, has been defining the narrative of the 2024 European elections “campaign”. Although polls predict huge gains for the far right, its deep divisions mean the victory may prove to be a pyrrhic one.
A much-cited report by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) predicts that the combined far right will win roughly a quarter of the 720 seats in the new parliament. This would be an increase in support of some 4 to 5%, and is in line with a longer-term trend: the far right made big gains in the European elections of 2014 and 2019.
But while the far right may be the best-represented political ideology in the European parliament, its political influence will most likely again fall well short of its electoral weight. The reason is that EU politics is group politics and the far right is the most divided political “family” in Europe. In the outgoing parliament, it was primarily divided between two groups, Giorgia Meloni’s European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), and Marine Le Pen’s Identity and Democracy (ID). In addition, some far-right parties are in the “non-attached” group, most notably the Fidesz party of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán.
The ECR was founded by British Conservative MEPs but is currently dominated by the Brothers of Italy (FdI) and the Polish Law and Justice party (PiS). Although the vast majority of member parties are radicalised conservatives (such as Poland’s PiS) or basic far-right parties (such as the Sweden Democrats (SD) and Vox in Spain), the group is still often referred to, and treated as, a “conservative” group, in other words part of the “mainstream” right. The term “far right” is mostly reserved for the ID and its member parties, such as Geert Wilders’ Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV) and Matteo Salvini’s Italian League. Consequently, the oft-proclaimed “cordon sanitaire” around the far right in Brussels, recently reconfirmed by European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, is largely an illusion, as it applies only to the “far right” ID and not to the “conservative” ECR.
According to the ECFR forecast, the “mainstream” grand coalition made up of the European People’s party (EPP), which is rightwing, the Socialists & Democrats (S&D) (centre left) and the liberal Renew Europe will lose seats but hang on to a majority in the new parliament.
The EPP (which includes parties such as the German CDU/CSU and the People’s party (PP) of Spain) could also potentially construct a majority with the combined far right. This would be more difficult to organise, but the right of the EPP could still leverage it to push socialists and liberal MEPs to accept more radical policies on issues such as the European Green Deal and immigration – issues at the heart of the EPP campaign and on which it has largely copied the framing and policies of the far right.
However, such a rightwing coalition would require support from practically all far-right parties, preferably neatly organised in one, or at most two, political groups. Le Pen last month proposed such a merger to Meloni, who has so far kept her options open. But even if the ECR and ID leaders could come to an agreement, the divisions are far from healed. At Le Pen’s initiative, ID – predicted to become one of the five biggest factions in the parliament – also kicked the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) out of the group.
It is expected that Fidesz will join the ECR after the elections, which has created sharp pushback from several existing member parties, including the Czech Civic Democratic party (ODS) and the Sweden Democrats (SD), which both vehemently reject Orbán’s pro-Russia position.
In short, while the European elections will almost certainly give the far right another electoral victory, it is likely to remain politically divided, limiting its effectiveness. Consequently, the new power centre will not so much be the far right, be it ECR or ID, but the far right of the EPP, which will leverage the threat of a rightwing majority to push its traditional coalition partners further to the right, particularly on issues such as the environment, gender and sexuality, and of course immigration.
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Cas Mudde is the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, and author of The Far Right Today
