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Opinion polls suggest that parties of the nationalist and far right could win almost a quarter of the seats in June’s elections to the European parliament. Forecasts of a significant shift to the right in Europe therefore seem well placed. Yet we should be wary of treating the pan-continental far right as a homogenous bloc or of being too confident in judging its ability, after the vote, to shape and disrupt the usual business of the European legislature.
In early February, Reconquest!, the party formed in 2021 by Eric Zemmour, the rightwing commentator and former candidate for the French presidency, announced that it would be joining the European Conservatives and Reformists group in the European parliament. Nicolas Bay, who left Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) to join Reconquest! before the 2022 presidential election in France, became the first French MEP to sit with the ECR since it was founded in 2009.
While Bay will sit alongside representatives of Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) party and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, the RN’s MEPs belong to a different far-right bloc, Identity and Democracy, which also contains Italy’s League and the Alternative for Germany.
Much of the coverage of the move, particularly in France, focused on the role played in brokering the agreement between Reconquest! and the ECR by Le Pen’s estranged niece, Marion Maréchal, who will head the party’s list in the June poll. Le Monde reported that Maréchal had worked on the deal for several months with her husband Vincenzo Sofo, a Brothers of Italy MEP, and concluded that it was “bad news” for her aunt, who has been courting Meloni recently. But, as diverting as internecine strife within the wider Le Pen clan is, the decision of Reconquest! to throw its lot in with the ECR rather than ID draws attention to some important faultlines on the nationalist right in Europe. These have as much to do with ideology as with personalities.
The ECR was founded after the UK Conservatives left the centre-right European People’s party in the European parliament. Since Britain’s departure from the EU, the ECR has been dominated by PiS and other established central European rightwing parties, which have been joined by newer “neo-nationalist” formations such as the Brothers of Italy and Spain’s Vox.
Political scientists Martin Steven and Aleks Szczerbiak have argued that the ECR has in recent years emerged as a “strong voice for conservatism in Europe”, distinct from Christian Democracy, on the one hand, and the “radical right” on the other.
On social issues, the ECR emphasises the family as the “bedrock of society” and calls for “effectively controlled immigration and an end to abuse of asylum procedures”. But while its founding statement of values emphasises the “sovereign integrity of the nation state”, it eschews hardline Euroscepticism of the kind espoused by the RN, for instance, and instead propounds a “Eurorealist” vision of a reformed EU as a community of co-operating nations.
And on economic matters, it is notably full-throated in its support for “free and fair trade” and sceptical of the kind of market regulation that underpins the European social model and which Christian Democratic parties have done so much to help fashion.
But it is on foreign policy — where it is strenuously Atlanticist and vocally Russophobic — that the ECR differs most from the “radical right”. This is perhaps where it is best placed to take advantage of the increasingly porous border between nationalist conservatism and mainstream Christian Democracy in order to influence policy at the European level.
Welcoming the entry of the Finns party to the ECR last year, vice-chair Charlie Weimers said it would “further strengthen the . . . group as the pre-eminent Russia-critical voice in the European parliament”. Policy on Russia and the war in Ukraine will also be the principal obstacle to the emergence of a single pan-nationalist bloc in the European parliament after June. Many worry, with good reason, about the rise of the far right across Europe, but they would do well to take these divisions seriously — it pays to know who you’re dealing with.
In January, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said that it was “rather unfortunate that these two blocs, ID and ECR, have so far failed to co-operate”. He added that he had “great respect” for Meloni and that his party, Fidesz, would be “happy to join the ECR”. Whether Meloni and the ECR would want as a colleague a man so conspicuously sympathetic to Moscow is another matter.
