Rosa Balfour and Stefan Lehne discuss why the radical right is on the rise in Europe, how this trend might impact EU policies, and what can be done to contain it.
Ahead of June’s European Parliament elections, radical right parties are gaining ground across the continent.
Rosa Balfour, director of Carnegie Europe, and Stefan Lehne, senior fellow at Carnegie Europe, unpack the causes of this trend and reflect on how it could shape the EU’s political future.
Carnegie Europe is grateful to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland for their support of this work.
[00:00:00] Intro, [00:01:28] Why the Rise of the Radical Right Matters, [00:11:18] Why the Radical Right Is on the Rise, [00:19:46] How the Radical Right Can Be Contained.
Rosa Balfour, September 12, 2023, “Ursula von der Leyen’s Three Tiers of Challenges,” Carnegie Europe.
Rosa Balfour, February 9, 2023, “The EU Must Reconcile Geopolitics and Democracy,” Carnegie Europe.
Rosa Balfour, September 29, 2022, “How a Far-Right Victory in Italy Might Ripple Through the EU,” Carnegie Europe.
Rosa Balfour, September 20, 2022, “A Meloni-led government need not spell disaster for Italy’s institutions,” Financial Times.
Rosa Balfour, March 1, 2022, “Russia through the European prism: populism, politics, and the Russian war on Ukraine,” Encompass Europe.
Rosa Balfour et al., 2016. “Europe’s Troublemakers – The populist challenge to foreign policy,” European Policy Centre.
Stefan Lehne et al., January 18, 2024, “Judy Asks: Can the Far Right in Europe Be Contained?”, Carnegie Europe.
Stefan Lehne, October 18, 2022, “The EU and the Creative and Destructive Impact of Crises,” Carnegie Europe.
Stefan Lehne, February 8, 2022, “Europe is Struggling, Thirty Years After the Maastricht Treaty,” Carnegie Europe.
Stefan Lehne, October 15, 2019, “Could an Illiberal Europe Work?”, Institute for Human Sciences.
Rosa Balfour
Europe has entered a critical election year, and across the continent, the radical right is gaining ground, challenging the dominance of established mainstream parties. Beyond the national level, this trend is also poised to influence the European parliament elections in June, shaping Europe's political landscape for the second half of this decade. While recent setbacks in Poland and Spain suggest that the rise of the radical right may not be a foregone conclusion, its growing appeal to European publics and potential impact on EU policies cannot be ignored. So what is fueling the rise of the radical right? How could it reshape Europe's political dynamics? And can anything be done to stop it?
Rosa Balfour
Hello and welcome to a new episode of Europe Inside Out, Carnegie Europe's monthly podcast about the continent's greatest foreign policy challenges. My name is Rosa Balfour, and I am the director of Carnegie Europe.
This episode of Europe Inside Out is about the rise of the radical right in Europe and what that might mean for EU policies moving forward.
I'm joined by Stefan Lehne, senior fellow at Carnegie Europe. Stefan, welcome.
Stefan Lehne
Hi, Rosa. It's a pleasure to be here.
Rosa Balfour
Stefan and I have teamed up and are about to publish a report on the radical rights across Europe and how it impacts European foreign policy, in particular. I think what I'd like to do, Stefan, is just ask you why you agreed to take part in this project. Why does the rise of the radical right matter? Why is it important?
Stefan Lehne
Well, Rosa, I think I'm personally affected by this phenomenon. I'm from Austria, and in Austria now, for almost one year, the FPÖ, the radical-rights party, is leading all the polls. It will almost certainly come first in the European Parliament election, and it has a good chance also to win the national election in September. So for me, it's a small consolation that this phenomenon is not limited to Austria, but affects practically all of Europe today. But it is deeply disturbing because it puts a lot of risks on many things that I've believed in very strongly, including progress on European integration.
Rosa Balfour
For me, too. I mean, I worked on the rise of populism a few years ago and looked at it, and produced a report called "The Troublemakers", which was about the impact of populism on foreign policy. But this time around, I think it's really important to focus on the radical right, which is different from populism. What we've seen over the past decades is that mainstream political parties have really struggled to understand the nature of the challenge of the radical right: what they stand for, why they are impactful, why they are successful. And having misunderstood the challenge means that the political tactics to address the rise of the right have never really quite worked. So we've seen sometimes politicians and political leaders cry wolf, just paint a very dark picture with the rise of the radical right. And then when they have one, that picture perhaps hasn't quite met the expectations. Therefore, the radical right has actually done better because people see that actually the beast isn't as scary as mainstream political parties have painted.
On the other hand, others have underestimated the phenomenon of the rise of the radical right.We've seen this in European politics and diplomacy, that some have felt that the radical right could be bought off, because it's transactional, then you offer them something of an incentive to try and contain their possible impact. And I think both tactics haven't really worked. We need to think again and look at what the radical right actually stands for, how it might shape policies looking forward, how it might influence European policymaking, and in particular foreign policy, because that's the issue that is less addressed in the literature.
Stefan Lehne
I would agree with you that this phenomenon has been around for a while, but we're at a new stage now. The radical right is in five European governments, or it's supporting them, at least through the parliament. That is the case in Finland, in Hungary, Slovakia, in Italy, and in Sweden. It has very good chances to doing quite well in the European Parliament elections. It is expected that the two party groups, ECR and ID, will reach a level of about 25 percent of all the MEPs and will have more influence in the future than before. Then there are national parliament elections in Belgium in June and in Austria in September. And in both cases, radical right parties are expected to do extremely well. So clearly this is now a new situation and much more serious, and I think with huge implications, particularly for European integration going forward.
Rosa Balfour
Because they've changed tack on Europe, haven't they? I mean Orbán says we don't want to leave Europe, we want to conquer Europe. So they've changed their position from being deeply Euroskeptical to being still Euroskeptic, but with a different approach.
Stefan Lehne
I think the transition was mainly from exit to voice, basically, using this term of political science. A few years ago, many of these parties advocated for leaving the European Union or leaving the euro. This is hardly the case anymore. I think the experience of Brexit, the way it was handled, the kind of perception that the UK really entered a very dark period through Brexit, had an impact also on the continent. And it's clear that asking for leaving the European Union will lose you many voters in elections.
But the parties remain profoundly Euroskeptical. Some of them demand renegotiations of the treaty, a return of powers to the national level. Others will simply just block any kind of further integration going forward. Some of them insist that their national law should have priority over EU law, which would be a revolution and would really destabilize the entire European legal system. And generally, I think the overall view is we need to go back in history, basically, to greater sovereignty for the member state. We need to protect the ability of nations to organize their own life, which is fundamentally sort of inimical to what we actually need to do to keep European competitiveness and economic well-being, which really requires more integration, capital markets union, finalizing monetary union, many things that are absolutely necessary in a context where Europe, in economic terms, in demographic terms is rapidly declining compared with other parts of the world.
Rosa Balfour
In the report, we look at fourteen countries with fourteen rather large radical right parties and we ask questions about their positions on several issues. And one area where it is clear that they have a vision for the European Union, this alliance of European nations, but it's less clear what they see in terms of, for instance, economic security.
So, what are our findings in the report? On some issues, the radical right has already been successful. And this didn't happen yesterday. It's been happening for at least a decade. In framing the debate about migration as purely as a security threat, in fact, rather than as, for instance, an answer to demographic challenges across the continent, we've seen it now in the past year or so.
We're seeing that it's being very successful in framing Europe's climate policies as a threat to the lifestyle of Europeans, European agriculture and so on. And this is an area where we can expect the electoral campaign to focus a lot. But on other issues perhaps they've been less impactful. Stefan, what do you think?
Stefan Lehne
Absolutely, but I think you rightly underlined, a few years ago almost the only message regarded migration. This was basically their key concern, their flagship project. And now they have a much broader approach you referred to. They exploit the unhappiness of population about some aspects of climate policy. They are very much into the inflation debate, basically. They are very much also skeptical on “wokeness” and the values agenda, and dismissive of basically the LGBT concerns that the EU is trying to propagate.
They've been, as we've noted in doing this report, less active on foreign policy. This has not been their strong suit. They are sort of minded very much as nationalists on national concerns. As far as foreign policy is concerned, of course, the external aspects of migration was a big topic for them, basically closing borders and forcing people to return to the countries. They also want to instrumentalize development assistance in order to get concessions on the migration front. They've been following very closely the Russia-Ukraine war, but they are sharply divided on this. There are, among these fourteen parties, there are some that are very much in the Russian camp and others that are very much protective of the Ukraine and very anti-Russian.And this split is probably the deepest split in the camp of the radical right and one of the reasons why the ECR group and the ID group doesn't see eye to eye. Because particularly in the ID group there are a number of pro-Russian parties which are not acceptable basically for the more moderate.
Rosa Balfour
Although Russia has managed to put a supporter at the table of the European Council and of the Council of the European Union so often. And that’s also became apparent in the interviews that we did with the European diplomats. Sometimes there is an external actor sitting at the table of decisionmaking in the EU.
Stefan Lehne
One important foreign policy issue is of course enlargement. We have discovered that most of these parties are quite skeptical of enlargement. They believe it costs too much money, it might actually open the door for more migration. So altogether, I think the large majority of these countries is opposed to enlargement. But there are exceptions. For instance, Poland would like to have Ukraine inside the European Union, sees this as an issue of national security. Even PiS agrees with this agenda. Then there is, for instance, the Romanian radical right party, who believes that Moldova is really part of Romania and therefore should be part of the European Union. And also, curiously, Orbán believes that it would strengthen his positions and Hungary's position in the European Union if some sort of like-minded Balkan regimes would also be around the table of the European Council, like Serbia, for instance.
Rosa Balfour
So, Stefan, given that our report is coming out in April, so a few weeks from now, I don't want to anticipate too many of our findings because I want our readers, our listeners, to also read our report. So why don't we just take a step back and just think about why this is happening? I would say that what is happening in Europe now is of interest to the rest of the world because the far right is doing pretty well globally. But Europe actually has an experience of this for several decades, and we've seen first populism taking place since the 1980s, and now the radical right on that wave, building also on some deeper roots into European history, the radical right is the dominant manifestation of this. So I think the rest of the world should also take note of the European experience.
Now, I'd like to ask you, there's sort of two meta interpretations or explanations of why this is happening. The first is the economic explanation. This is a consequence of globalization and its losers, the famous Rust Belt, for instance. And according to this interpretation, the classes that have lost out the most from the process of globalization are those that are turning to the radical right.And then you have another explanation, which is more rooted in culture, and it's about the rise of identity politics. So some of that is, of course, the anti-immigration sentiment that we talked about earlier, but now we also have the anti-woke version. And so for some, the explanation is really about culture and identity. Do you have a particular position on this? Do you think it's more about economics or it's more about identity?
Stefan Lehne
I think both are certainly causes of this phenomenon these days. I think there's no question that overall the outlook for many people is less rosy than it used to be. Ten-fifteen years ago, the majority of people believed that their children would have much better lives than they had themselves. This has changed. Now many people believe that their children would actually have worse lives. And this, of course, changes the political atmosphere quite fundamentally. Then you had a whole series of very severe crises that were disrupting people's lives that had consequences on their quality of life, what they can afford, what they couldn't afford. So unhappiness and frustration is definitely one of the driving elements behind this.
At the same time, the more political phenomenon was that the old mainstream parties that were based basically to some extent on professions like the farmers voted conservative; the people ran businesses voted for liberals or conservative parties; workers, unionized workers, voted for the social democrats. These mainstream parties have lost grip, basically. They have got much, much weaker. And this opened a lot of political space for foreign policy entrepreneurs. There are some liberal ones, like Emmanuel Macron, but in particular, I think there's a huge space that opened up for populist and radical groups, both on the far left and on the far right. More on the far right. And identity politics, of course, plays into this phenomenon.
Rosa Balfour
The changing structure of society has also changed the way in which these people are represented. And the political parties have been behind the curve in this. I also think there's another explanation, because if you look at Europe for the past twenty years, and you look at all the parties that have emerged across the landscape, it's very hard to find a direct correlation between, for instance, austerity politics and the rise of populism and/or immigration and the rise of populism. And look at Portugal. Portugal in the 2000s and 2010s did not see any populist parties emerge, despite the fact that it was very badly hit by the eurozone crisis, as we know. And even Greece, to an extent, it had an extreme right party with Golden Dawn, but it didn't last very long, despite the fact that it had both the economic crisis and the migration crisis.
So I don't think that the sort of explanatory power of these meta-narratives, it's there, but what I think is really important to look at is how democratic practices have deteriorated and eroded and hollowed out in Europe and how people have felt disempowered. So to an extent it was less important whether it was economics or identity, but it was really more about the fact that people did not feel that they were appropriately represented by politicians in putting forward their grievances. And so there's this sort of process of hollowing out of democracy.
Stefan Lehne
There was clearly a loss of confidence in elites across Europe. And that's not necessarily a bad phenomenon, because to some extent means that people have more confidence in challenging established authority. They are less obedient than they used to be.
I think one factor that should not be underestimated is the fragmentation of the media scene. You used to have this established mainstream media that basically everybody listened to, everybody read. There was some more red ones and some more conservative ones, some liberal ones, but basically there was a strong sort of established mainstream media. And the radical right parties, before the populist ones, felt very badly treated by this media. They didn't have sufficient representation there, so they started their own thing, and they used the Internet much earlier than the mainstream parties and used it much better. And now they have built a media empire based on the Internet. They built their own bubbles, basically, where their followers hear essentially only what these parties want to transmit to them. So the big public TV has lost a lot of readership, and far fewer people listen and view the established news, and more and more of information is really transmitted through this Internet-based media, which gives a lot of space for disinformation, propaganda, fake news, and all that.
And I think this has definitely also contributed to the polarization that we see in societies and has created a lot of opportunities for far-right parties to exploit the anger and to actually reinforce the frustration that parts of the population experience.
Rosa Balfour
What we've been talking about is what happens at national level. But I think for the EU, it's particularly important because the EU is this strange animal which requires technocratic governance to move forward. But of course, in this context, politics has become amplified echo chambers of anger, and technocratic politics really struggles to work in that context. And I think this political development is particularly challenging for the EU, and for the way in which it works, because it alters the balance between politics and technocracy, which has been governing Europe, the end of the permissive consensus, whereby those people in Brussels could move forward on the agenda and national politics would take care of their accountability and the democratic nature of the politics. That balance has been altered.
Stefan Lehne
I think what is quite clear is the EU is extremely complex and, as you said, technocratic and far removed from the daily lives of most people. And what this development of the media scene and the discourse has meant is that there's a refusal of complexity. More and more people go for a very easy, often false solution because they get frustrated and overwhelmed by the complexity of what the establishment is trying to convey to them. And that is something that creates very fertile ground for populist and radical-right rhetorics, basically in exploiting the frustration of the population that cannot really understand what the elites are trying to present to them.
Rosa Balfour
So, when we started talking, Stefan, we said, why is it that we were interested in doing this paper? And it was really about gauging the nature of the challenge and how radical right actually does impact EU policymaking. So what did we discover?
Stefan Lehne
I think one thing that struck me is that there are tendencies that work in opposite directions. We've learned, for instance, that the kind of very nationalist, transactional attitudes of far-right actors in Brussels, have a certain contagion effect. If a country blocks EU decisions repeatedly, other countries that would normally behave in a very constructive fashion think, why should they be idiots, basically, why can't they block, too? So there is a contagion if you don't trust each other anymore and everybody goes for his own or her own interest. That means that people who then try to act on the basis of solidarity and on the basis of the common good look pretty stupid. So there is definitely a loss of solidarity and an overall tendency towards more transactional behavior.
At the same time, we've learned from our talks with diplomats here in Brussels that there is also the phenomenon of socialization. Some representatives from far-right parties that end up in government and participate in EU Council meetings and in European Council negotiations become sort of sucked into a process that is aiming at a compromise solution. And there is a certain socialization phenomenon that is going on that is at the moment visible, particularly with the Finn party and also with Meloni, who behaves much more pragmatically than many people expected.
So both these phenomena are real. You have the contagion, basically a disintegrative tendency, and on the other hand, the socialization of parties that come from outside and suddenly have a stake in the game and become insiders. And it will be very interesting, looking forward, over the next year, which of these tendencies will prevail. I would think if we have a situation where Orban is joined by a number of other far-right players, Le Pen, Kickl, Wilders, etcetera, then I would think that this disintegrative centrifugal tendencies will obtain and this will weaken the European Union and its cohesion quite fundamentally. On the other hand, if we have a calmer period with less crises, basically, there is a hope that more and more of these parties will become closer to the mainstream. If you look, for instance, at the Green parties, they used to be outsiders in Austria. They voted against the EU membership of Austria. Now they are the most pro-European party that you find in Austria. So this socialization is a real phenomenon, but it can only really happen in a context where we don't have too much disruption and too much a negative tendency.
Rosa Balfour
Yeah. Which is not the context in which we're working at the moment. And in addition to that, I think we shouldn't forget that if Trump were to be successful in the U.S. presidential elections, then come 2025, we'll have a completely different landscape in which the radical right will feel enormously enabled to be disruptive within the European Union, and obviously globally as well.
I would say I think I'm a bit more on the contagion side of the equation than the socialization side. Although historically, I can think of parties or leaders that have been absorbed by the system, or bought into the system, or neutralized by the system. But I think perhaps we've got more instances of contagion than socialization, in my view, especially in light of the context. I also think that what we have seen is that, the center right in particular, has shifted a lot towards the radical right positions. Certainly has been the case on migration policy, I think on climate we're also seeing this happening with center-right parties who endorsed the Green Deal, now having second thoughts and pausing legislation or calling for delayed implementation of measures. So really, as far as the European Parliament elections are concerned, we need to see whether the center-right is going to strike some kind of deal with the parties towards the right.
Stefan Lehne
I think the mainstream parties have the main responsibility for containing the right of the radical right. I think the EU inherently is a liberal project and it cannot survive if it abandons its core values. So the mainstream parties have to stick to the central principles of the European Union moving forward. This doesn't mean, of course, that the cordon sanitaire, this policy of exclusion of the radical right, will always work. We have to say, frankly, in a number of countries, this is no longer an option. But when radical parties have to come into government, when there is really no alternative, then they have to make sure that this is done on the basis of coalition agreements, in which guardrails to maintain a pro-European liberal course in line with the values of the European Union is guaranteed. And this has been done successfully, I believe, in Finland, for example. And this also, I think, is now the subject of the negotiations in the Netherlands, the conditions for Geert Wilders's government coming into being. But that is, I think, the risk that we have is if the mainstream parties are more and more sucked into the logic of following the radical right and abandoning principles, then I think one can't be very optimistic regarding the future.
Rosa Balfour
No, because that actually contains the seeds of the destruction of the European Union. I mean, again, when you're looking at the policy areas that these parties care about, in some cases they are hopelessly divided, therefore less impactful than they might be. But in other cases, they are confused. If you look at the challenges that European states are facing now and that are on the agenda for the European Union, this is the climate, it's security and defense in light of Russia's war against Ukraine. And it's about protecting the single market from a disrupted global landscape, i. e. economic security. On all these matters, these parties do not want more EU to be involved. But in order to address these challenges, for reasons of size, it's just, you know, the politics of scale basically, European states need to work together and they need to work together on the basis of shared rules. And of course, these parties, and we know that they have been successful, such as in Hungary or in Poland, the first thing they do is to dismantle the rule of law in their respective countries and make sure that Brussels does not interfere in these matters. So basically, they might have might think they have a vision of Europe, but it's actually a vision of Europe which contains the seeds of the destruction of Europe.
Stefan Lehne
I think the year 2024 could be the critical year. Clearly the rise of the radical right has reached a new stage. It represents a much bigger threat at any time before in this century, there is a lot at stake. As you indicated, probably the most important elections that happen this year don't happen in Europe, but they're happening on the 5th of November in the United States, which will have a massive impact also on the European political system and its development.
I think we are still… basically, at the moment, this is still a minority. The mainstream party, the liberal forces, are still prevailing in Europe, but they will only be able to contain this threat if they're acting much more closely together and if they are conscious of the fundamental principles that they have to stick to.
Rosa Balfour
Well, I also think that they really ought to. Instead of chasing the agenda and the framings that the radical right has been setting, they really ought to be much more forceful and visionary about their own view of the world. And bring, not be afraid of debating politics with European citizens. I mean, as you rightly say, the radical right is a minority and it does well because people are not going to vote. And if people were incensed by politics, if people felt they were participating in the big debates about what will Europe look like in ten years’ time, in twenty years’ time, if they were more involved in that, I think we would see a different electoral outcomes, but we would also see traditional political parties being more forceful about what their views are and what their values are and what vision they have for the future.
We've talked about a lot of things. We haven't actually talked much about the report, which really does focus on foreign policy and how the radical right has impacted foreign policy and how it has not. So I encourage those listeners who want to know more to read the report when it comes out in April.
Rosa Balfour
Thank you so much for joining me today, Stefan. And also over the past few months, I've enjoyed very much working with you and thank you for taking the time.
Stefan Lehne
Thank you. It was a pleasure.
OUTRO
Rosa Balfour
For those who are interested in learning more about the radical right in Europe, I encourage you to follow Carnegie Europe's work.
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