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Success has been a long time coming for Geert Wilders. I met the Dutch politician in 2004 as he prepared to launch his own political party. Wilders’ denunciations of Islam and immigrants had already made him a target and he was getting used to a life living in safe houses and surrounded by bodyguards. “I feel like I’m trapped in a B movie,” he told me.
Now, almost two decades later, Wilders has moved from being a bit player to the role of leading man. His Freedom party topped the polls in last week’s Dutch elections. Wilders will still struggle to form a coalition government and to become prime minister. But he has made an unprecedented breakthrough.
His success is part of a clear Europe-wide pattern. Political groups that were once dismissed as fringe far-right parties are gaining popularity — and in some places power. Viktor Orbán of Hungary is now the longest-serving EU leader. Giorgia Meloni has just completed her first year as Italy’s prime minister. Robert Fico, a populist who dabbles with far-right themes, is back as prime minister of Slovakia. The Sweden Democrats are the second-largest party in parliament and support the governing coalition.
The far right is also gaining ground in Germany and France. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) now regularly tops 20 per cent support in the polls, making it the second most popular party in Germany. On a recent trip to London, François Hollande, the former French president, told me that in his country “the far right have devoured the traditional right”. Polls suggest Marine Le Pen may finally win the French presidency in 2027.
All this inevitably brings back memories and fears of how the far right destroyed European democracy in the interwar years. But the evidence so far is that the modern European far right can work within democracies, without destroying them.
In Austria and Italy, far-right parties have come into office as part of ruling coalitions, and then ceded power after elections or scandals. Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party lost ground in the recent polls — and will almost certainly be eased out of power.
Orbán’s career shows, however, that complacency about the far right is dangerous. He returned to power in Hungary in 2010 and is still prime minister, having undermined the independence of the judiciary and the media. The US presidential election may also tempt the European far right to emulate Donald Trump’s rhetoric and methods — including questioning election results, encouraging street violence and advocating mass deportation of immigrants.
But following the Trump-Orbán model will be hard for the likes of Wilders, Meloni and Le Pen. The Hungarian leader had a large enough parliamentary majority to push through constitutional changes that tilted the system in his favour. Meloni, though, is part of a coalition government. Wilders would face the same hurdles. Even a French president can struggle to get things done, without a pliant national assembly.
However, even if European far-right parties do not overturn democracy, they can pull political debate on to their turf. The most obvious trait they share is a powerful hostility towards immigration — particularly of Muslims — and a willingness to contemplate measures that have previously been dismissed as impractical, intolerable or illegal.
The current surge in legal and illegal migration into Europe is a large part of the explanation for the support for far-right parties. In response, many mainstream politicians, including in the Netherlands and France, have joined the calls for sharp cuts in immigration.
Meloni’s experience illustrates the difficulty of delivering on that kind of rhetoric. She has been unable to stop a sharp rise in the number of refugees arriving in Italy by boat. At the same time, she has had to acknowledge that Italy needs immigrant labour — and has increased the number of visas for workers from outside the EU.
Meloni is unusual among the European far right in being strongly pro-Ukraine. By contrast, Orbán, Wilders, Fico, Le Pen, the AfD and the Austrian Freedom party have all pushed for accommodation with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. If their influence increases in Brussels, it will be bad news for Kyiv.
The far right is also invariably hostile towards the EU — which it characterises as an elitist and “globalist” project, dangerous to national identity and favourable to mass immigration.
In the past, Wilders and Le Pen have talked of getting their countries to leave the EU or the European single currency. But these ideas no longer poll well (possibly thanks to Brexit) — so they are now playing down talk of Nexit or Frexit. Orbán’s fondness for denouncing Brussels has also never translated into any real move to leave the EU.
Rather than quitting the EU, far-right parties are much more likely to try to change it from within. They are already taking aim at the EU’s human rights laws and its commitment to the UN convention on refugees.
If the far right continues to make significant gains in national elections — and in the elections to the European parliament next summer — it may soon be in a position to undermine values and legal commitments that have long been regarded as central to the European project. The EU could be a very different beast, a few years from now.