2023-11-26 07:34:48
The shock wave caused by Geert Wilders’ overwhelming victory on Wednesday in the Dutch elections transcended The Hague to be felt throughout Europe. There were chills in Brussels, Paris, Berlin and Madrid. In Budapest and Rome, euphoria.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was quick to be the first to congratulate Wilders to the tune of the Winds of Change song while Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini proclaimed that “a new Europe is possible.” From the opposition, Frenchwoman Marine Le Pen celebrated that her victory “gives hope to Europe.” The joy at Wilders’ good result makes clear that the programs of their respective parties clash with each other (the Dutch campaigned during the pandemic against “giving money to Italy”, refuses to accept migrants arriving through the southern border and wants to laminate the community budget, an objective that would put Orbán’s Hungary, for example, in serious difficulties).
For now, their shared objective is the 2024 elections. The advance of the populist right and the extreme right since the asylum crisis of 2015 is evident on a continental scale and these parties could find a new stimulus in the context of insecurity and economic fears that dominates the continent when, in June, almost 400 million citizens are called to the polls.
The growing fatigue with the economic consequences of the war in Ukraine and the accelerated energy transition, the tensions caused in European territory by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the fear that the new crisis will cause more immigration and insecurity are the background landscape on the that the elections to the European Parliament will be held, an event that many voters perceive as less relevant than the national elections and are more inclined to cast a protest vote.
The European Conservatives and Reformists, the Vox group, can be the third political force in 2024
Wilders has clearly stirred up European waters and has known how to fish in a more than mixed international scene. “The result of the Dutch elections sends a signal that the European Union cannot afford to ignore,” warns Elizabeth Kuiper, an analyst at the Brussels think tank European Policy Center, who highlights the growing support for anti-immigration positions in different European countries. Asylum policy was the issue that brought down the last coalition government led by liberal Mark Rutte, which proposed reducing the right to family reunification. Called to the polls early, a majority of voters have opted for the toughest political option, Wilders.
“Clearly, the mobilization of voters who express political unrest must be addressed at the European level in the coming years,” says Kuyper, with an eye no longer on the elections to the European Parliament, but on the work program for the next five years. . “The EU must demonstrate that it can solve social problems and develop a just climate transition.”
The latest projections of the national polls suggest that the Group of European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), to which Vox, the Polish Law and Justice (PiS) or the Brothers of Italy of Giorgia Meloni, the object of the Party’s desire, are affiliated European People’s Party, will become the third political force in the European Parliament on June 9, ahead of the Liberals. In the next legislature there could be between 40 and 50 more seats to the right of the EPP, according to parliamentary sources.
This result would pose a serious dilemma for the EPP: keep alive the great coalition of conservatives and socialists on which the EU has been built or build an alternative majority with parties of the populist right and the extreme right, a cooperation that has been normalized at the national level. in Italy, Sweden or Finland, for example. Both the leader of the EPP, Manfred Weber, and the Italian Foreign Minister and former president of the European Parliament, Antonio Tajani, have openly defended the second option, which is not shared by the German CDU, but their enthusiasm has been mitigated in recent months.
European far-right leaders cheer each other on, but their political objectives are contradictory
Although Weber does not give up on attracting Meloni to the EPP, his caution could be due to the liberal group’s reluctance to cooperate with ECR or Identity and Democracy (unmitigated far-right), because “in that case” there would be no majority “without dirtying their hands.” , parliamentary sources point out, or to the difficulties in carrying out legislation with a base as heterogeneous as the political magma to the right of the classic right.
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