While Germany was trying to come to terms with the far right’s victory in Thuringia, which had won a regional election for the first time since World War II, the new MEPs elected in June’s European elections were beginning to arrive in Brussels. Almost a third of the 720 legislators in the new European parliament are on the right of the political spectrum. Election after election, far-right forces are advancing in a large part of Europe, and traditional parties seem unable to find a way to stop them. Meanwhile, the cordons sanitaires are becoming increasingly weaker.
“A cordon sanitaire can be an effective tool for a limited period of time. But it can backfire when mainstream parties rely on it for a long period of time, instead of investing resources in successful political competition against the forces of the radical right,” warns Daniel Hegedüs, regional director for Central Europe at the think tank German Marshall Fund.
This danger is being experienced first-hand by the French, where several generations of citizens are fed up with always having to vote not for their political option, but to stop another, the extreme right. This start of the political year has left France without a government due to the almost mathematical impossibility of guaranteeing a sufficient majority after the legislative elections in July. Thanks to the reactivation of the Republican front, these elections halted what at times seemed an unstoppable victory for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN), which would have meant having the first extreme right-wing head of government of the Fifth Republic. But this cordon sanitaire that has been in operation again seems, almost two months later, to have trapped the country in a dead end that could lead to an eventual reinforcement, in view of the next elections, of the same extreme right that had been stopped. in extremis one more time.
In Brussels, there has been more success so far: the cordon sanitaire imposed by the moderate groups (popular, social democrats, liberals and greens) has prevented the most extreme forces from taking important positions in the European Parliament: of the three groups to the right of the right – European Conservatives and Reformists (ERC), Patriots for Europe (PfE) and Europe of Sovereign Nations (ESN) – only ECR, which includes the MEPs of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, was able to take two of the 14 vice-presidencies of the hemicycle during the distribution of powers in July. This blockage has also extended to the parliamentary committees and subcommittees, where the most extreme groups have been left without presidencies or vice-presidencies. It also seems highly unlikely, given their internal divisions, that these groups could unite, although this would make them, with 187 MEPs, the second parliamentary force after the European People’s Party (EPP, 188), ahead of the Socialists and Democrats (S&D, 136).
But this does not mean that they cannot join forces when it comes to rejecting policies – in votes and resolutions – that they do share, such as a strongly heteronormative ideology, rejecting everything that they disqualify as culture. woke and, of course, in immigration matters.
“Moreover, it will be difficult to maintain a similar cordon sanitaire if, after the upcoming Austrian and Czech elections, two more members of the Patriots for Europe [además del húngaro Víktor Orbán] “They enter national governments and are therefore represented in the Council,” Hegedüs warned by email. These elections, at the end of the month, “could change the rules of the game, increasing the number of governments led by populist or radical parties from two, in Hungary and Italy, to four in the EU,” he noted.
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In the European elections, the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) became the most voted party in Austria for the first time, while the AfD came second in Germany. It was precisely the victory of the RN in the European elections that led French President Emmanuel Macron to call early general elections in which the far right finally began to dream of governing.
With Europe increasingly tilted to the right and an increasingly fragmented vote, has the cordon sanitaire formula to curb the far right in Europe been exhausted?
The answer is difficult, given the diversity of voting systems in the 27 countries and because what has worked for years in one country may be new in another. What is clear is that, in the current political landscape, it is no longer enough. And the search for solutions cannot or should not be at a national level only, because the phenomenon of the extreme right has ceased to be episodic and has become an increasingly widespread reality throughout Europe, and beyond.
“It is a game that we are playing at a European level,” says Ernesto Pascual, professor of Political Science at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. “There is a reflection that Europe should do more than any specific country, to say, hey, what are the problems, why is populism growing?”
“Is the cordon sanitaire the measure that will prevent the growth of the extreme right? Obviously not. Society must reflect on the issues that concern citizens. Although the speeches are more or less true, we talk about security, immigration, social rights,” he said in a telephone conversation.
From Cardiff University, far-right specialist Marta Lorimer agrees on the importance of not leaving these issues in the hands of ultra-right forces that have managed to channel and unify these claims for which they promise simple answers, however false or impractical they may be. And they have managed to “clean up” their image, which in turn has allowed a “normalisation of the far right” in the political landscape that makes it even more difficult for the cordon sanitaire to work.
There is something else that worries Lorimer about this process of normalisation: “Part of the problem is that other parties are essentially copying the message of the far right, rather than thinking of much better political responses that could address some of the concerns that explain why people vote for the far right.” Along the way, he points out, they forget the mantra of the founder of the French National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, that, between the original and the copy, voters choose the original. “So what is the point of copying them? Let us instead try to present a different message to what they suggest. We must address the concerns of voters, but without assuming that the only solutions they will like are those suggested by the far right,” he insists, as Pascual also points out.
In Brussels, this message seems to be getting through. In response to one of the conditions that S&D imposed for her ratification in a new mandate, which would address the urgent problem of housing in the EU, the president of the European Commission, the conservative Ursula von der Leyen, has promised a new “European plan for affordable housing” and is expected to create a portfolio with these responsibilities that will foreseeably fall to a commissioner from the social democratic sphere. A step forward, but still insufficient. Because the challenge is greater, Pascual warns: “We are not only facing a challenge of who governs, but also the challenge of the survival of the liberal democratic system in Europe.”
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