Rise of far right in Europe

It is a sequence of events Europe has seen before. A firebrand, — either of humble, apolitical origins or from a generations-long political dynasty to uphold — rallies their formerly left-voting, working-class base who feel alienated by the establishment.

On a continent that aspires to be — and is widely lauded for being — tolerant and open to the rest of the world, the far right has attained an incongruously high standing in recent years. In addition to the more established Fidesz Party in Hungary, the UK Independence Party, and the Law and Justice Party in Poland, the recent electoral success of the Sweden Democrats and Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy have added momentum to the populist machine. Fueled by the increased flow of refugees and migrants from the Middle East and North Africa region and the broader Global South since 2015, such political actors have relied heavily on the othering of those whom they perceive as dangerous to and incompatible with European society. The European Union is also presented as a faceless, bureaucratic and undemocratic institution whose sole goal is to over-regulate citizens’ lives and to tear asunder their individual national identities. The omnipresent menace of the “globalists,” chief among them Hungarian-American philanthropist George Soros, is also a common feature in extremist rhetoric.

Many of these parties have roots in neo-fascism or neo-Nazism, which remain persistent political entities despite their often highly public rebranding efforts. For instance, the recently elected Brothers of Italy, headed by Giorgia Meloni, has often been described as neo-fascist, and despite the party’s attempts to soften its positions to appease more moderate voters, its stances on the EU, the Russia-Ukraine war, reproductive rights and LGBTQ equality, among others, have alarmed people across Italy and the world.

The line between ostensibly moderate right-wing parties and more extreme ones has been severely blurred. As radical parties occupy a non-negligible number of seats in legislatures, it becomes increasingly difficult for center-right parties to govern without cooperating with extremists, or at least strategically adopting some of their stances. Emmanuel Macron, as the head of his self-created centrist Renaissance party, has adopted stricter stances on border control, migration and secularism, all in an attempt to lure would-be Reconquest or National Rally voters and avert a complete usurpation of power.

Bulgarian second year, Sara Kovacheva asserts that the renewal of her country’s right-wing in October 2022 parliamentary elections  makes her “terrified” that the political right has gained too much power in recent years. “I really wouldn’t want to live in a far-right Europe,” she passionately declared. The recent trends across Europe make it “feel like we are only going backwards,” she continues.

The vision of a united Europe is threatened by the rise of the right, but it is not a uniquely European phenomenon. The factors behind this emboldened far-right ideology — migration, Euroscepticism, wars in Europe’s neighborhood — are uniquely European, but the rightward and nativist shift is a global phenomenon that will hopefully be resolved before extremism has a chance to cement itself in the mainstream.