By: Víctor Alay
The 2024 European Parliament elections have been marked by a sharp rise of the far right in the European Union (EU) as a whole [1]. Its rise has been facilitated by a growing legitimization by the parties of the traditional European right, as has become evident with Georgia Meloni.
The far right-wing Rassemblement National (RN) has taken first place in France, one of the two core countries of the EU, giving way to a deep political crisis that is shaking the whole of Europe. In Germany, the most powerful country in the EU, the far-right Alliance for Germany (AfD) has come in second place, overtaking the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and leaving the Scholz coalition government on life support. They have also won in a major country like Italy. And the same has happened in places like Hungary, Austria, and Poland (if we count the votes of the two far-right parties that ran). In the Netherlands we are heading for a government hegemonized by the far-right Wilders. Likewise, the far right participates in coalition governments in Sweden, Finland, and Latvia.
The results of the European elections have brought the political crisis to the heart of an EU in which the main powers, Germany and France, are weakened and in crisis. They have meant a clear increase in nationalist tendencies, just at a time when the EU, wedged in the middle of the clash between the two main world imperialisms, the U.S. and China, plays an increasingly subordinate role in the world economy and politics. An eventual Trump victory in November in the U.S. would undoubtedly accentuate this deep crisis.
The election results, although anticipated by the polls, are still a clear threat to the working class and the popular and oppressed sectors of Europe.
The European far right
The electoral advances of the far right are undoubtedly relevant. The current far right has points of contact and, in many cases, historical links with the old fascist parties of the 1930s. This is the case of RN in France or Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia. The German AfD embraces the whole history of Germany, which includes, of course, the Nazi era. However, while this is true, in the present circumstances we cannot equate them with their origins and we must analyze their particular characteristics in relation to the old fascisms of Hitler, Mussolini, or Franco.
The extreme right does not rely, as in the 1930s, on the support of armed fascist bands [2], composed mainly of desperate social sectors of the petty bourgeoisie. It is sustained, instead, by the parliamentary cadre. This is despite the fact that they claim in a more or less evident way a fascist heritage, that there are violent Nazis in their structures, and that they maintain relations, not always easy, with armed fascist groups. The European far-right is not currently working with insurrectionary perspectives but with the idea of relying on parliamentary channels to curtail freedoms and democratic rights and establish an authoritarian Bonapartist state. They have, in general, great sympathy and support among the police and military sectors, which represents a significant potential danger.
They are parties of a chauvinist, patriotic character, indeed national-imperialist in the case of the imperialist European countries. Their slogan is Less Europe, more fatherland [3] and they are against the recently approved new EU enlargement project towards the east. They define themselves as sovereigntists and patriots. They counterpose the national sovereignty of their country to that of the EU and call for the return of powers to the states. As Germany’s AfD puts it, they stand for a new home for a community of sovereign states. Today, however, they no longer advocate leaving the EU as they once did. The German far right also advocates, unlike Meloni, for the withdrawal of U.S. troops and the closure of the American base in Ramstein, although it is divided over Germany’s membership in NATO.
The main banner of the extreme right is the fight against immigration. Xenophobia, Islamophobia, and racist supremacism are a central part of their program. They support the conspiratorial thesis of the Great Replacement of western Christian civilization and culture at the hands of an Islamic mass invasion and advocate border closures and mass expulsions. Last November, representatives of the German extreme right met in Potsdam in support of the Great Re-emigration to North Africa of two million people, including asylum seekers, foreigners with residence permits, and unassimilated German citizens.
The enormous increase of migrants from ruined, plundered, and oppressed semi-colonial countries with servile governments, with their populations hit by situations of war, famine, drought and lack of outlets, is combined with capitalist decadence in the host metropolises, where the poorest sectors of the working class and the peasantry live worse and worse and suffer greater privations. The far right takes advantage of this dramatic circumstance, exploiting the crimes or occasional excesses committed by foreigners and pitting the poor against the poorest, presenting the immigrants as the culprits of their situation: as thieves of their subsidies and as responsible for their low wages and working conditions.
The economic agenda of the far right is ultra-liberalism and the abolition of labor rights and social conquests, although not all extreme right-wing parties express this with equal clarity. It is no coincidence that Milei was the main guest at the far-right meeting in Madrid organized by Vox shortly before the European elections.
The far right questions the very existence of climate change and climate emergency. They rely on the recent mobilizations of European farmers (mostly led and influenced by the large agricultural employers) to directly oppose any climate mitigation measures (it should also be noted that, without going as far as the extreme right, the traditional right is reaching agreements with them in this field in a growing number of countries). The far right unabashedly presents itself as anti-feminist and a defender of the oppressed male and fiercely opposes the movement in defense of women’s rights and the LGTBI population.
In international politics, all of them, Le Pen, Meloni, or the AfD defend their own imperialism. All of them also support rearmament and militarization (along with the governments of the right and social democracy). They also support, without exception, the Zionist genocide against the Palestinian people. However, they are divided in relation to Russia. On the one hand, we have Putin’s friends (Orbán, the AfD, the Italian Salvini or, more discreetly, the French RN), who are against any kind of military or economic aid to Ukraine and in favor of the handover of the Ukrainian Donbass to Russia. AfD expressly advocates the restoration of relations with Russia, the end of economic sanctions and the return to gas purchases. On the other side, we have the Italian Meloni or the Spanish Vox, clearly aligned with NATO and against Russia.
The advance of Alliance for Germany (AfD)
In Germany, the main government party, the social democratic SPD, has fallen (with 14% of the votes) behind the extreme right-wing AfD (Alternative for Germany), with 16%. The AfD has become the second political force in the country (behind the Christian Democrats CDU-CSU with 30%) and the first in the Landër of the former East Germany.
It has achieved these results despite the scandals prior to the elections (pro-Nazi statements by its top candidate, Maximilian Krah, and prosecutions of some of its leaders for espionage in favor of Russia and China).
Before the elections, the 300 largest German employers’ associations made a public stance against the AfD, which they consider, in the current historical circumstances, a hindrance to their interests. The big German employers, with strong investments abroad and large export interests, vitally need the EU for their business, both in Europe – their main export market – and abroad, as well as to try to make political weight in an international context dominated by the confrontation between the USA and China. It also needs skilled workers for its industry, the need for which Germany is unable to meet. That is why it does not share the AfD’s ultra-nationalist, anti-EU positions. Nor does it share their extreme xenophobia. Although it makes full use of the native-foreigner division within the German working class, the big employers do not share theses such as that of the Great Re-emigration, which would imply the massive expulsion of legal foreigners and unassimilated German citizens that it nevertheless needs for its factories and businesses.
The rise of the German far right is proportional to the decline of the country. German capitalism, which already stood out as the most powerful in Europe, had an enormous boom in the 1990s with the German unification (in truth the annexation of East Germany) and with the expansion to Eastern Europe, semi-colonized by German capitalism supported by the enlargement of the EU. The former buffer states were turned into a new market and a base for relocating factories to countries with lower wages and rights and with few environmental and social regulations.
But East Germany was never really brought into line with the West. Even today, there are still two Germanies, with first-class Germans and second-class Germans. Seventy percent of East German industry was dismantled, and the rest was handed over to large corporations in the West, with lower wages and pensions, inferior labor regulations, worse access to education and health care. East Germany became a kind of laboratory for social experiments to be applied later in the West.
Then, in 2003, Social Democrat Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (today a prominent businessman and Putin’s partner) became, with his Agenda 2010 and the support of the SPD, the European vanguard of deregulating the labor market, cutting unemployment benefits and implementing a low-wage sector with no rights.
Now, however, we have reached the end of German exceptionalism. German capitalism is experiencing the exhaustion of the momentum provided by unification, expansion to the Eastern countries, and Schröder’s Agenda 2010. Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine has caused the rupture of access to gas and to the Russian market. Lagging far behind the U.S. and China in new technological branches as well as economically stagnant, Germany finds itself without new markets for its exports and with a substantially different relationship with China compared to the 2000s. Now, German corporations compete with China in the EU itself and in Germany itself, for example, with the electric car (which is not gaining momentum) or solar panels. At the same time, an exporting power like Germany cannot, as the U.S. does, promote protectionist measures against China, even more so when large German companies have huge investments there oriented towards the Chinese market. As expressed in the Zionist genocide in Gaza, German imperialism acts as a political runt subjugated to the US.
The rise of the AfD is based on this decline and insecurity of German imperialism. It gains strength in the deep sense of frustration in the east of the country, in the hopelessness of sectors of the middle classes, in the loss of purchasing power due to inflation and in the deterioration of the wage and working conditions of the most impoverished sectors of German workers. It appears as an alternative to social democracy and right-wing parties. Its main expression is the xenophobic rejection of the foreign population [4].
It is necessary to follow closely the BSW, which is a red-brown force of the former leader of Die Linke Sara Wagenknecht, which obtained 6.2% of the vote, with a particular influence in the eastern Landër. This party claims to be a defender of workers’ rights, vindicates the Stalinist past of the GDR, and carries the main banners of the AfD: it is against immigration and is Islamophobic and nationalist; it supports the Israeli genocide; it is against any aid to Ukraine and is pro-Putin; it rejects the green agenda and gender equality policies. The upcoming autumn elections in the Landër of Thuringia, Saxony, and Brandenburg in the east will give us clues about its future (and that of similar forces in other countries).
RN’s victory in France has provoked a deep crisis in the country, which drags the EU along with it
The results of the European elections in France, although anticipated by polls, have come as a great shock. The collapse of Macron (14.6% of the vote) and the triumph of the far-right RN (31.37%) placed the government and President Macron in an untenable situation. His unexpected and highly criticized decision to dissolve the National Assembly and call an immediate general election has placed France before a new and dangerous scenario and the EU before an uncertain future.
Macron’s collapse is a true reflection of the decline of French imperialism, the second great European country which, together with Germany, forms the backbone of the EU. Macron’s arrogance has not been able to hide this reality. France is being expelled from its former African colonies, its public services are in serious deterioration, its economy is stagnating, with high levels of indebtedness (110.6%) and public deficit (5.5%). Since the mobilizations of the Yellow Vests (2018-2019), it is a European vanguard in the repression of dissent and attacks on democratic freedoms and fundamental social rights such as public pensions. The main beneficiary of this decline is currently RN, which aspires to form a government and which, as its aspiring prime minister, Jordan Bardella, says, wants to put order in the street, and in the accounts, and to attend to the principle of reality (i.e. not to fulfill some of its old demagogic promises such as withdrawing Macron’s pension reform).
The street protests of June 9 and later, with the youth at the forefront, and, later, the demonstration of several hundred thousand of the “people of the left” on June 15, were encouraging.
Taking up the old name of the Popular Front of 1936, the political left has constituted itself as the New Popular Front (NFP). It ranges from the openly bourgeois Place Publique¸ to the ex-Trotskyist NPA-canal historique, including various parties (La France Insoumise, the PS, the Greens, PCF) and with the support of the trade unions and a hundred different associations.
The electoral agreement includes in the lists some particularly odious characters such as Aurélien Rousseau, chief of staff of Macron’s former prime minister during 2022-2024 and architect of the pension reform or François Hollande, socialist president between 2012-2017, who became even more unpopular than Macron due to his rabidly neoliberal and anti-worker policies.
The program of the NFP, which operates within the framework of French imperialist capitalism and the EU, contains demands such as the cancellation of Macron’s pension and unemployment insurance reform, the increase of the minimum wage, a price freeze on basic necessities, the indexing of wages with the rise in prices or making public schooling effectively free of charge.
But if they should manage to reach power, they will have to face the boycott of the Macron Presidency, a rabid offensive of the far right and the right wing, and the economic sabotage of the big French and international bosses. Facing this joint offensive and guaranteeing the fulfillment of the promised social measures is impossible without raising a revolutionary movement of the masses that allows expropriating the banks and the big corporations, that puts the means of production in the hands of the working class and that puts an end to the French imperialist domination abroad. All of which is impossible in the framework of French capitalism, of the Fifth French Republic, and of the EU, which is nothing but the Europe of capital.
These are moments of enormous importance for the French, European, and world working class in the coming period, whether the far-right RN or the NFP wins.
Notes:
[1] Although in some small countries such as Sweden, Finland or Portugal it has experienced setbacks.
[2] The exception was Greece’s Golden Dawn.
[3] Just the opposite of Mario Draghi’s recent report for the EU, where he advocates that “Europe must act as an economic nation, not as an asymmetric federation”.
[4] Germany is second only to the USA in the number of immigrants in the world. In 2015-2016 one million Syrian nationals arrived and in 2022 one million Ukrainians. There is also a large number of people from Turkey, many of them naturalized, but not culturally integrated, like the vast majority of immigrants. In 1990 there were 5.9 million; thirty-one years later, according to UN data, about 16 million, 16% of the total population.
Translation by: John Prieto
