Hans Kundnani
In the European parliamentary elections in June, far-right political parties did better than ever before. Two far-right alliances are now the third- and fourth-largest groupings in the parliament, ahead of the centrist Renew Europe group. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) emerged as the largest party by far in the European polls, which prompted French President Emmanuel Macron to dissolve his country’s National Assembly and call snap elections. The RN did not win an absolute majority in those votes, but it became the biggest single party in the domestic legislative body for the first time.
These recent electoral gains of the far right in France—as well as successes in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and elsewhere in Europe—have caused no small amount of consternation. The far right’s successes in the last couple of years have forced many centrist proponents of the European Union to wake up to the possibility of a far-right takeover of the EU, something that was long thought of as a conceptual and practical impossibility. From the perspective of these alarmed centrists, the nationalism of the far right poses a fundamental threat to the project of European integration. They see the far right as a kind of alien force inherently antithetical to the EU—it is “anti-European.”
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