On the eve of the European elections, the parties with a populist agenda must clearly outline where they stand. And it won’t be easy.
When Matteo Salvini, leader of Italy’s La Lega, met with Hungary’s “illiberal” prime minister Viktor Orbán in Milan in August, manysawthe beginning of a new groupin European politics. Ahead of the European elections in May 2019, the meeting suggested a potential alliance between the populist movements of Western Europe and Eurosceptics from the Visegrád block made up of Hungary, Poland the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
If such a convergence still seems distant, an important fact is that the populistsare now in government, while previously the get-togethers of sovereignists were seen as meetings between parties that were perennially condemned to the ranks of the opposition.
International populism had began with the formation of the Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF) group in the Strasbourg Parliament. The first generation of populists beganto take things seriously, however, with the meeting in Coblenza in January 2017, at which they set out a sovereignist challenge to Brussels and its liberalEurocrats. Alongside Marine Le Pen on that occasion were Matteo Salvini, the leader of the Dutch anti-Islam party Gert Wilders, the secretary general of the Austrian Liberal Party (FPÖ)Harald Vilimsky and Frauke Petry, the then chair of the German Eurosceptic party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).An intense year of electionslay ahead, and Donald Trump’s arrival in the White House meant thatin Europe too, peoplebegan to think the unthinkable.
Since Coblenza, however, the scenario has altered. The two most promising leaders have not changed substantially, but neither have they achieved the results they hoped for: Le Pen failed to become president and Wilders was defeatedconvincingly by Mark Rutte. The FPÖ achieved excellent results in October, entering the right wing governing coalition. However, the new chancellor and young prodigy of the Austrian People’sparty Sebastian Kurz, byabsorbing the anti-immigration line, has managed to marginalise the party founded by a former Nazi. Frauke Petry lost control of the AfDless than one month after the meeting in Coblenza; today she sits as an independent in the Bundestag while the AfD, which is polling higher than the socialist party, has drifted away from international sovereignism.
What has changed above all are the power dynamics, with the leadership of Le Pen now overshadowed by the success of La Lega and Matteo Salvini, who, along with Wilders, snubbed the latest meeting of the sovereignist front held in Nice in May, merely sending a video message.
The form of populism of those who have obtained power has gradually evolved from the spirit of Coblenza and, while maintaining adefiant attitude towards Europe, theyare also cleaning up their image in order to attract moderate voters. If once upon a time it was Salvini looking to the Front National for clues on how to rebuild his party from its low of the 4% in the 2013 elections, now it’s Le Pen who is proposing the process of “normalization” employed by the Lega for her new Rassemblement National party.
International sovereignism, even before it became a contradiction in terms, struggled to establish itself beyond a shared belief in someparticular policies. The result is largely a union of intentions, forged mainly by the migrant emergency. Beyond this and other shared points of view, it is difficult for political parties to march together when they are based on differing and often contrasting political orientations.
In particular, the populist alliance has not yet demonstrated an ability to bridge Europe’s main fault lines: those between the north and south,based on the perception of vast differences between the upstanding, virtuous countries and those that are not, and the east-west schism born from the atavistic opposition between founding member states and the new arrivals.
In the absence of a supranational structure there are two hothousesforalliances on a European level: the parliamentary coalitions in Strasbourg and the national blocks in the European Council. However, on an intergovernmental level, the only functioning example is the Visegrád group, which in recent years has been able to adopt joint positions, institutionalising mini-summits to improve cooperation in the offices of the European Union. Nevertheless, it is still highly unlikely that today, faced with conflicting national interests,a hypothetical Salvini government could form an alliance with Kurz or Le Pen based on the Visegrád model, given the fierce competition between member states in Western Europe.
As far as the European elections are concerned, it cannot be assumed that La Lega will be influenced by the union of populist forces or by Steve Bannon, any more than providing an effective counter-position to a progressive front, which would bring together parties even more diverse than those of a sovereignist alliance.
A more plausible scenario would see a new right wing alternative to the European People’s Party (EPP) through the creation of an alliance between the populists of the ENF and European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), which would obviously be losing the substantial heft of the Tory party. An enlarged group of conservative forces would be seen by the (EPP) not as an antagonist but rather as an ally to break up the historic compromise that has linked them for at least two legislatures to the socialists and liberals, in order to give life to a ninth European legislatureof a markedly right wing bent.
The 5 Star Movement (M5S) remains the great exception to the populist landscape. A comparative study by two political scientists published in 2017 in the Journal of European Public Policyhighlighted howin the European legislature the M5S has taken a decidedly left wing stance on social and economic issues comparedwith other populist parties, while alsosupporting less extreme policies on immigration.
At European level M5Shas remained trapped in a marriage of convenience with Nigel Farage’s UKIP in the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD), which while condemning them to political irrelevance in the chamber has enabled their admission to important dossiers,thanks to the inactivity of their distracted British colleagues.
Negotiations were begun with other groups in an attempt to escapeFarage’s soporific embrace. The collapse oftalks with the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats of Europe (ALDE) came at a high cost to both parties interms of credibility. However, a successful outcome would have been beneficial to all: the extra numbers would have boosted the alliance, its leader Guy Verhofstadt would have been better places amid the clash between EPP and the Party of European Socialists (EPP) to succeed Martin Shultz as President of the European Parliament, while the M5S would have obtained seats on important commissions as well as the vice-presidency of the European parliament (a role that was obtained anyway by Fabio Massimo Castaldo).
The stumbling block was not created byideological positions nor thepopulist aura surrounding the party’s founders, but rather by the potential impact of the entranceof a substantial number of M5S MEPs who would have become a majority within a very fragmented group. M5S representatives in Brussels have entertained friendships that are not entirely populist while they never categorically ruled outflirting with Macron.Now the roads seem to have diverged definitively following M5S’s decision to govern alongside La Lega.
While true that theguiding principle of European political families is more often than not opportunism, one essential rule remains: any marriage must be respectable. Taking this into account, it is mainly national considerations that determine strategic alliances and this is the reason whythe populists, Eurosceptics and conservatives, although ideologically similar, ended upspread across three different groups following the elections in 2014.
To subscribe to the magazine please access our subscription page here
On the eve of the European elections, the parties with a populist agenda must clearly outline where they stand. And it won’t be easy.
