Friday, October 11, 2024

Brussels yawns as Europe’s populists notch yet another win

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In the Netherlands, for example, Wilders is not a part of the Dutch government, and has also backed down on some of his Euroskeptic, anti-migration positions in order to reach a deal with his coalition partners. A similar scenario may well play out in Vienna, where the FPÖ is likely to enter government only if it distances itself from Kickl. The party may even be excluded from government altogether if the center-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) manages to cobble together a three-way coalition with the Social Democrats and the liberal NEOS.

In Italy, meanwhile, Giorgia Meloni is leading the country’s most right-wing government since World War II. In the European Council, however, Meloni has not proven as obstructive as many mainstream politicians feared, meaning that when the EU’s 27 national leaders gather, Orbán is relatively isolated (apart from occasional support from Slovak PM Robert Fico). But that could be about to change: If Donald Trump wins the U.S. presidential election in November, Orbán will doubtless feel emboldened. 

“Just as we were right about migration, we’ll be proven right about the war [in Ukraine],” Orbán told the Hungarian parliament on Monday. Hungary has long pushed the EU’s migration policy toward the right with its anti-immigrant rhetoric.   

Even if the far right doesn’t win power immediately, victories by extremist parties do impact the European political landscape, said the University of Oxford’s Vicente Valentim, author of “The Normalization of the Radical Right.” 

Across European societies, far-right victories normalize previously stigmatized behavior, Valentim stressed, as citizens who might already harbor xenophobic or far-right views feel more comfortable acting on them. 

On the policy level, Valentim continued, far-right parties “end up setting the agenda and making other parties talk a lot about their issues,” especially following electoral victories. Mainstream parties often end up enacting “the type of policy that oftentimes far-right parties would like to propose themselves,” he added, which only further normalizes the far right. 

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