The Hard and Soft New Right
In Central and Eastern Europe, the more extreme wing of the continent’s radical Right is gaining ground.
In Britain, the wisdom of the country’s 2016 decision to leave the EU is still hotly debated. Remainers point to reports that Brexit has had a negative effect on the economy. Brexiteers counter that a growing number of economists believe Brexit has had little or no effect on growth, and that it will take another decade to understand the true costs and benefits of the decision to leave the Union. The prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, inveighed passionately against Brexit following the referendum, but since Labour’s election win last year, he has repeatedly stated that he will not reverse the decision, and has even argued that it may yet yield advantages.
None of this has blunted the eurosceptic beliefs of New Right parties across the European continent, even as their growing support has made them more powerful. Most say they do not intend to follow Britain’s example and leave the EU entirely, not least because ditching the Euro currency and returning to the old system of francs, lire, Deutschmarks etc would bring economic disaster and destroy any ruling party’s chance of being re-elected, possibly for a generation. Instead, as Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde has written, they seek to “reform the EU into a looser, more democratic organisation that returns national sovereignty to member states.”
If the New Right succeeds in this aim, it will pose a greater threat to the Union than the Brexiteers do. Such a development would reduce Brussels to a guardian of the single market, thereby thwarting its founding ambition to create a federal European state. Last August, the former director of the German Max Planck Institute, Wolfgang Streeck, described the EU as “a vast supranational would-be state that had become practically ungovernable due to overextension and the extreme internal heterogeneity.” If the European New Right continues to grow in power and influence, public disenchantment with the EU project might overwhelm and collapse the fragile Union entirely.
In a recent article for the Financial Times, I argued that, while the New Right parties are united in their wish to reduce the EU to a common market, they differ on many other topics. The Fratelli d’Italia government led by Giorgia Meloni and the Sweden Democrats seem to be committed to democratic norms and the defence of the West. Other parties, however, are more radical, vehemently opposing LGBT interests and any further immigration, and often expressing strong support for Vladimir Putin’s Russia and ending aid to Ukraine.
For now, I would place Marine Le Pen, co-leader of France’s Rassemblement National, in the first camp, because she appears to have abandoned her closeness to Vladimir Putin. In a speech to the French parliament last March, Le Pen argued that the Russian president had “triggered a war on the EU’s doorstep and a geopolitical crisis that is, without doubt, the most dramatic of the last twenty years. ... It is the heroic resistance of the Ukrainian people that will lead to Russia’s defeat.”
Nevertheless, Le Pen remains a firm NATO-sceptic, and a much less keen Atlanticist than Meloni. After an early New Year visit to Mar-a-Lago, Meloni declared that Trump’s remarks about annexing Greenland and the Panama Canal were merely “a vigorous way to say the United States will not stand by while other major global players move into areas that are of strategic interest to the United States and, I would add, to the West.” Meloni has positioned herself as Trump’s interpreter for Europe, while Le Pen remains largely aloof to keep her options open.
The New Right’s hardliners are to be found in the parties of the former Communist states in Central Europe. For several decades, the most important figure there has been Viktor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary since 2010 (and before that, between 1998 and 2002). While Meloni attempts to make Trump more palatable to a European audience, Orbán brings Trump a history of opposition to the EU from the inside and a close political friendship with Vladimir Putin.
During his six-month presidency of the EU last year, Orbán visited the Russian and the Ukrainian presidents in search of a ceasefire. Those trips produced no immediate result, but may be understood, instead, as an overture to Trump. During his election campaign, Trump boasted that he would end the Ukrainian war in a day, although he has now agreed to a more realistic timetable of a hundred days, which his envoy has said will be needed “to make sure the solution is solid and it’s sustainable and that this war ends so that we stop the carnage."
During his lengthy stint in power, Hungary’s leader has fashioned a political system that remains formally democratic—elections are held regularly, opposition candidates are not barred from speaking openly and critically, and the country’s capital, Budapest, is led by a Green politician, Gergely Karácsony, who is allied with the Socialists (MSZP), and former Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány’s left-liberal Democratic Coalition (DK). These parties were part of a united anti-Orbán front during the 2022 election, which the governing Fidesz party won comfortably.
Even so, corruption allegations persist due to links between Orbán’s administration and a number of major corporations, forged and maintained by the head of the Cabinet Office, Antal Rogan. The outgoing US ambassador, David Pressman, told journalists in January that Hungary’s sovereignty is threatened by “the kleptocratic ecosystem Minister Rogan has helped to build and direct and that he has benefited from personally.” Rogan is now the target of US sanctions.
Peter Magyar, who was formerly close to Fidesz, has emerged as a challenger to Orbán, positioning his Respect and Freedom party as more friendly to the EU and NATO, while seeking “pragmatic” relations with Russia and China. Orbán has been able to protect Rogan, but Magyar’s newly created Tisza party has run consistently ahead of Fidesz in the polls for the past year, attracting strong support, especially from the young. He has a promising terrain on which to run. In an essay for The Bulwark, H. David Baer provides a detailed analysis of Orbán's rule and itemises a the grave problems currently facing the country:
The economy is in a technical recession and inflation is high, a situation aggravated by ongoing depreciation of Hungary’s currency. The budget deficit remains above target levels despite austerity measures. Adding salt to the wound, the EU recently denied Hungary $1 billion in European funds for failing to address concerns over corruption. The household material welfare of Hungarians, measured in terms of individual consumption, is the lowest in the EU alongside Bulgaria. The poverty gap index in Hungary is among the EU’s highest.
Hungary spends less on healthcare per capita than the EU average and has one of the highest rates of preventable mortality. Hungarian hospitals are overwhelmed with debt; buildings are in disrepair; patients need to bring their own hand soap and, frequently, even toilet paper with them for overnight stays. The country suffers from a shortage of doctors and nurses.
The railway system is teetering on collapse. Railroad tracks in Hungary are so old that trains can’t travel on them at normal speeds.
Yet Orbán, his family, and his circle continue to grow ostentatiously rich. Some of those closest to him—including his son-in-law—are implicated in corruption scandals. At home and in Europe, Orbán’s influence, especially on other of the New Right parties, is likely to wane. He has cultivated and nourished strong links to the US Republicans and Trump, from which he can expect to benefit. But in promoting himself as a leader of the awkward squad of the European New Right while ignoring his own country’s plight, he risks losing influence in both.
Over the past two decades, Europe’s New Right parties—in both their “soft” and “hard” variants—have doubled their support. Meloni’s electoral victory and the growing popularity of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National are the most obvious signs of success. Now that success is spreading to the east, where in the last months of 2024, the New Right scored two large victories. The Freedom Party of Austria (FPO), led for the past three years by Herbert Kickl, came first in the September general election, with nearly 29 percent of the vote—a win that would have automatically made any other party leader chancellor. Four months after the election, polls show its support has continued to grow, and it now sits at between 36 and 37 percent.
Elsewhere—most notably in France—centrist and leftist parties have sought to build a coalition to keep out the New Right. For the moment, they have succeeded, although the price of this success has been frequent changes of prime minister and a sclerotic and inefficient parliament that encourages rule by presidential fiat. In Austria, however, centrist coalition talks have failed, and the conservative Austrian Peoples’ Party (OVP) is now holding coalition talks with Kickl, which may yet see him become chancellor.
The FPO has a longer history than most on the New Right. It was founded in 1956 and initially led by a former Nazi SS officer named Anton Reinthaller, though he claimed to support a centrist programme. It was then part of a series of coalition governments and endured a number of scandals until Kickl assumed its leadership in 2021. As interior minister in an OVP-headed coalition, Kickl favoured much stronger measures to deter immigration and the deportation of immigrants already residing in Austria.
John Lloyd
Kickl has said that he believes it is the duty of Austrians to provide for themselves, not depend on the state. Were he to become chancellor, he would face a demand from the EU to reduce public spending after several years of growing deficits. Of all the New Right leaders, Kickl is the most outspokenly pro-Russian. He has been a voluble admirer of Putin and he has promised to cut aid to Ukraine. It may be that, like Orbán, he would continue to provide humanitarian and medical aid but discontinue all military assistance. His party’s programme states, “The European Union is currently pursuing a course of escalation at every turn, which could end in a third world war.”
An arc of New Right Central European states now looks likely to emerge, from Hungary through Austria to Slovakia, which is presently governed by Robert Fico’s New Right party, “Direction—Social Democracy.” In December, following talks with Putin, Fico protested that the Russian president had been “wrongly demonised” by the West. After elections later this year, the New Right coalition might stretch to include the Czech Republic, where the 70-year-old Andrej Babis’s ANO party presently leads the polls, and Romania.
In Romania, on Hungary’s south-eastern border, a hitherto obscure New Right politician named Călin Georgescu won the presidential election last November. The ruling parties and much of the media believe that Georgescu’s win was assisted by Russia, and it was subsequently annulled, a move that led to a predictable increase in his support. Under public pressure, a new election has been fixed for 4 May this year. The presidential office there does not have the power of the French or US presidencies, but it is considerably more powerful than the Germany presidency, let alone the monarchical equivalents in Belgium, Spain, and the UK.
Georgescu is firmly pro-Russian, and he has expressed admiration for the Legionaries, a long-defunct fascist group that briefly seized power at the beginning of the last war and instigated a pogrom against Jews. The group was suppressed by their former ally, Ion Antonescu, a fellow fascist and antisemite, who ruled the country until the end of the war (and continued the pogrom). Even more than other countries in Central Europe, Romania’s centre-right and centre-left ruling parties are deeply corrupt, a state of affairs that has lent Georgescu’s insurgent campaign credibility. Were Georgescu to win the election re-run in May, Romania would become the only European country to be led by a man who has publicly praised a genocidal political movement.
Germany is by far the largest exhibit in the New Right’s gallery. This is partly due to its geographical size and economic clout, and partly due to its recent history and related fears that the virus of Nazism still lingers in the country’s DNA. Germany currently has two New Right parties—the larger and more prominent Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and the smaller Left/Right Sarah Wagenknecht Alliance, led by the eponymous former star of Die Linke (The Left).
The AfD developed from a gathering of economists opposed to the substitution of the Deutschmark by the Euro in 1999, and it has since evolved into a New Right party that scores twenty percent support in the polls—eleven points behind the CDU/CSU centre-right coalition and four points ahead of the Social Democratic Party. The SPD presently heads the country’s three-party coalition government, but its support has fallen from 26 percent to 16 percent in three years, while the AfD’s support has risen from eleven to twenty percent over the same period.
The AfD’s policies are in tune with those of the New Right everywhere: pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine, anti-EU, and aggressively anti-immigration. It has surged to second place in the polls. The next election still looks likely to produce a relatively comfortable win for the centre-right but that victory will probably fall short of a majority in the Bundestag. Under these circumstances, the obvious choice for a coalition partner would be the AfD, but a self-imposed veto on collaboration by all the other parties, including the CDU/CSU, forbids it.
That may change if the polling numbers do not. That is, after all, what happened in Austria, where until late last year, the major parties refused to contemplate working in government with the FPO. Björn Höcke is the AfD’s leader in the former East German state of Thuringia, where its support is strongest, and his party won a regional election there last September. Höcke needs a coalition partner to govern and has said that many CDU/CSU members would happily work with the AfD. This is despite the fact that he has twice been arraigned before a court for shouting “Alles für Deutschland” (“Everything for Germany”) at rallies he was addressing (he claimed he did not know it was a Nazi slogan). Outbursts like that are why moderates on the right do not wish to have him or his followers in a future regional or national government.
The AfD’s political isolation has been enthusiastically challenged by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and also a close advisor and friend of Donald Trump. Musk has decided that the AfD and its co-leader, Alice Weidel, are Germany’s salvation. During a 75-minute interview with Weidel on X, he lavished praise on her party, and in an article for the daily Die Welt, he called the AfD Germany’s “last spark of hope.” As far as Musk is concerned, Weidel and the AfD are deeply misunderstood. “The portrayal of the AfD as far-right is clearly wrong,” he declared in Die Welt, “considering that Alice Weidel, the leader of the party, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? Come on!” Most recently, Musk made a virtual appearance at an AfD rally, at which he told his audience that, in Germany, “there is too much focus on past guilt.”
Attacks on Germans by immigrants in recent months are likely to benefit the AfD and boost popular support for its radical deportation plans. A stabbing rampage by a Syrian asylum-seeker in Solingen last August left three people dead, and a further five were slain in a car-ramming attack by a Saudi immigrant in Magdeburg two days before Christmas. Some observers believe that the New Right will do better than the polls show, since they are gathering support across generations and occupations, including among voters who might not be willing to disclose their support to pollsters.
But a growing number of voters are prepared to openly declare their support for the AfD. In an article for the Spectator, a German journalist named Elisabeth Dampier—who describes herself as someone “with an immigrant parent, a postgraduate degree, and who works in the liberal world of film and TV”—wrote:
Germany is no longer the safe, prosperous country I remember from my childhood, and it is these “normal” parties who are to blame. ... The AfD is the only choice for those who want to cut taxes, end mass immigration, restore our nuclear power, tackle the welfare state and prune over-regulation. That’s why I join Elon Musk in saying that only the AfD can save Germany.
The New Right parties in the west of Europe—such as the Sweden Democrats, the Fratelli d’Italia, the Rassemblement National, Geert Wilders’s Dutch Freedom Party, and the less successful Spanish Vox and Portuguese Chega parties—have vehemently criticised the centre-left and -right parties for their policies of mass immigration, and their support of the EU, but they have also remained broadly attached to democratic rules and norms.
The harsher worldview of the eastern New Rightists did, at first, seem to repel much of the electorate, particularly since many voters in the former communist bloc have little affection for Russia. Now, however, they are gathering a spreading base, even as they are excoriated by the established parties for their extremism. It may be that extremism—or something very like it—is what their hard-pressed working- and lower-middle-class supporters now want, so they have turned to the parties offering to bring radical or even revolutionary change to Europe. The danger, as with all revolutions, is that democratic norms become a casualty of this bargain.
