The prime driver for radical-right parties in Europe is immigration, legal and illegal. If current trends persist, Europe will receive more than a million asylum applications by the end of this year.
LONDON
Political shock waves reverberated around Europe eleven days ago when the far-right Dutch populist anti-Muslim leader, Geert Wilders, won the most votes in the Dutch elections. Although he campaigned on a range of issues, Wilders focussed on immigration and against Islam. “We will make sure that the Netherlands will be for the Dutch again”, he said during the campaign, “we will restrict the asylum tsunami and migration”. With his fiery rhetoric and peroxide blond hair, inspiring many to call him the Dutch Donald Trump, Wilders is the longest-serving lawmaker in the Dutch parliament, having started his career as centrist back in 1998 before setting up his own Party for Freedom in 2006. He’s now on the verge of power, along with other European populists.
Research has shown that almost one-in-three Europeans now vote for populist far-right or far-left parties. So why this surge?
Populism is the idea that society is separated into two groups at odds with one another—the pure people and the corrupt elite. The true populist leader claims to represent the unified “will of the people”. He or she stands in opposition to the enemy, often embodied by the current system, aiming to “drain the swamp” or tackle the “liberal elite”. Populist parties can be anywhere on the political spectrum, but today most successful populists are on the right, particularly the radical right. In addition to Wilders, politicians such as Marine le Pen in France, Victor Orban in Hungary and Donald Trump in the US, combine populism with anti-immigrant nativism and authoritarianism.
Political scientists argue that societal changes, such as multiculturalism and globalism, are behind the rise of populist parties in Europe. Although their emergence could be seen in the early 2000s, the swell of support for populist parties appeared to surge in 2011 when the banking crisis turned into a sovereign debt crisis. This was when the ordinary voter saw wealthy bankers and other members of the elite class as more or less responsible for a crisis that affected the majority of society. Populist leaders, such as Donald Trump, chose to be in a permanent campaign to convince the ordinary man that they are not the establishment—and never will be. Populist content is full of negatives, such as anti-politics or anti-elite, a versatility that gives it strength and extraordinary power because of the ability to adapt to all situations.
European politics is showing signs of volatile times as populists on the radical right expand their influence on the mainstream. Of the third of Europeans who voted for anti-establishment parties in national elections held last year, half voted for the far right, which is benefitting most rapidly from disaffected voters. Illiberal nationalist parties currently hold power in Italy, Hungary and Slovakia, and have a share of it in Finland and Sweden. Poland recently bucked the trend when opposition parties won enough seats in October’s elections to take power from the Law and Justice party (PiS) which had ruled the country since 2015. Even then, the populist PiS obtained 35 percent of the vote, but this was insufficient to form a winning coalition. Austria’s nationalist conservative populist Freedom party, ostracised at the time of its emergence in the 1990s and which only narrowly lost the presidential elections in May 2016, is well ahead in the polls with elections due next year.
The prime driver for radical-right parties in Europe is immigration, legal and illegal. Hungary reported the largest number of non-EU citizens found to be illegally present in the country in 2022 (215,000), followed by Germany (198,310) and Italy (138,420). If current trends persist, Europe will receive more than a million asylum applications by the end of this year. In addition to immigration, the climate emergency, the cost of living, culture wars and Covid conspiracy theories are other issues driving the move to the radical right across Europe. Germany’s right-wing populist party, AfD, which has embraced climate change denialism in the past, has successfully weaponised anxieties about net-zero measures, orchestrating a backlash which is seeping into mainstream politics. Italy’s Prime Minister, Georgia Meloni, hopes to use next year’s European elections to effect a merger between the centre—right and her own radical-right grouping in the European parliament. If she is successful it will be even harder to uphold EU values and norms in countries such as Hungary and Slovakia.
Geert Wilders’ success in the Netherlands adds to Europe’s concerns about radical populism. His Party for Freedom won 37 seats in the country’s 150-seat legislature, the largest single bloc, well ahead of the outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s conservative People’s Party (24 seats) and the left-wing Labour-Green coalition (25 seats). Before he can become the next leader of the country, however, Wilders will have to find coalition partners who together would represent a majority of seats to enable him to win a vote of confidence to form a government. It will not be easy, but if he succeeds, and it’s a big if, he would be Europe’s first far-right leader to head a government since Italy’s Meloni came to power.
Wilders’ main problem is whether other parties will be prepared to join with him and his acolytes, known for their incendiary rhetoric. Ironically, by repeatedly implying they would be happy to go into coalition with Wilders, big parties also made him appear more acceptable. Mainstream parties in Holland and other European countries have for long pandered to extremists, competing to talk the toughest on immigration and fighting on fronts were the populists reign supreme.
Wilders’ election promises were the usual populist right-wing undertakings, such as lowering taxes, providing thousands more police officers, scrapping international agreements on climate change and more drilling for oil and gas. Other pledges were darker. Under Wilders there will be “zero tolerance for street scum”, and fourteen-year-olds will be treated as adults in criminal courts. Foreign aid will end, all asylum claims will be rejected and the Netherlands will host no more refugees. Possessing a Koran will be against the law and all Islamic schools will be closed along with the country’s mosques. Criminals with dual nationality will have their citizenship removed and be deported. That so many people in Holland voted for such extreme policies, reveals the extent to which populism has taken hold in the country.
Dutch coalition processes typically take months, and already Wilders admitted last Monday that he was not off to a dream start in his attempts to form a government after a man he appointed to oversee coalition talks quit after fraud allegations. Only one other party has so far given the nod to join him; others are “reserving their positions” while negotiations take place. Many remain doubtful if Wilders will be able to gather enough support to become prime minister, even though he softened his rhetoric and down-played his extremist policies in the weeks leading up to the vote, when some critics morphed his name into “Geert Milders”. If, however, centrist parties club together to keep Wilders out, there may be a price to pay with angry Dutch voters in the future. Next June, the 27 countries in the EU hold an election for the European Parliament and memories will not have faded in the meantime.
If he does succeed, Wilders will be a nightmare for Brussels. A seat around the EU summit table alongside other far-right nationalist populist leaders already in post, such as Meloni and Orban, would transform the dynamics. In short time, established EU policies ranging from climate action to EU reform and even weapons for Ukraine will be up for debate, or even reversal.
An even greater horror for Europe would be if the far-right populist Flemish independence leader, Tom Van Grieken succeeds in the Belgium elections, to be held on the same day that Europe chooses MEPs next June. Belgium, the home of the EU parliament and NATO, is also overwhelmed with immigration and could even split apart as a result. “Parties like ours are on their way in the whole of Europe”, said Van Grieken when congratulating Wilders. Hungary’s populist Prime Minister Orban also joined in the celebrations. “The winds of change are here” he claimed, sending shivers down the spine of any centrist EU politician, while populists around Europe cheered Wilders’ success and their growing grip on power.
John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently Visiting Fellow at the University of Plymouth.