France’s far-right leader is not alone — and that is a real problem for Europe

Francois Mori/AP

For the second time in 18 months Marine Le Pen and her Front National have won a national poll in France, increasing her share of the vote in the first round of Sunday’s regional elections compared with last year’s European parliament ballot.

In a year bracketed in France by the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan terrorist atrocities, Le Pen has benefited from the national mood of fear and anger and the craving for security.

But her triumph is no flash in the pan to be ascribed to jihadism.

Regardless of how her party fares in the second round of voting this coming Sunday, Le Pen is here to stay. She has transformed the politics of the Fifth Republic from a binary contest of the left versus Gaullism into a trickier and less stable three-party system.

To call Sunday’s far-right victory in France a wake-up call for Europe’s leaders borders on the meaningless. Through crisis after crisis since 2008 there have been too many wake-up calls to mention.

Europe’s traditional elites of the centre-right and centre-left just keep sleepwalking into the next disaster. It may be coming soon in the form of David Cameron’s gamble on whether Britain stays in the EU.

On Sunday evening Le Pen was quick to claim that the Front National was now France’s political party number one. She is not alone. Next door in Belgium, Bart de Wever, the mayor of Antwerp and leader of the Flemish nationalist and separatist party the New Flemish Alliance, voiced satisfaction with the French outcome.

His is the strongest party in Belgium. In Denmark and Sweden, in the Netherlands and Austria, in Switzerland too, far-right nationalist movements are all leading in the opinion polls as the single most popular parties.

Francois Mori/APIn fragmented political systems, this does not mean they are on the brink of taking power. They enjoy pluralities, but find it impossible to assemble governing majorities. But even if they are not tested in office, the far-right parties are shaping policy-making and setting the agenda across much of Europe.

Such is the picture in western Europe. In eastern Europe, the nationalist right is already in power in Hungary and in Poland. Viktor Orbán in Budapest is the pioneering cheerleader. He has no opposition to speak of. His main “opposition” comes not from the centre-left but from the neo-fascist Jobbik movement. In Poland, Jarosław Kaczyński and his Law and Justice party in Poland are wasting little time in aping Orbán’s constitutional trickery to entrench itself in power.

On the critical issues of the day – immigration, security and Euroscepticism – there is little to separate Orbán and Kaczyński from President Miloš Zeman in Prague and Robert Fico, prime minister of Slovakia, both on the left.

Besides, on economics, the role of the state and welfare, the far-right parties are way to the left of social democracy, seeking to turn the clock back to state interventionism, full employment, generous pensions and welfare systems (for native whites, not immigrants).

What these far-right parties in east and west all share are chipped shoulders heaving with grievance – summed up as hostility to and rejection of globalisation and multiculturalism.

Francois Mori/APThey do not like modern life. They are anti-Muslim, anti-immigration, anti-EU, anti-American (Poland excepted), illiberal. And they like Vladimir Putin (again, except Kaczyński).

They are nationalists. This also militates against making common cause despite all the similarities in outlook, because nationalists usually see foes rather than friends in other nationalists.

Britain is no exception to the tidal currents threatening to wash away the established European order. It might be seen as a more extreme example of the phenomenon – Conservative party loathing for the EU plus the Labour party’s regress to earlier socialist welfarism mirror the positions of Europe’s far right.

Rather than Britain, it is Germany that is the real exception to the Europe-wide trend. The question is for how long. A rightwing nationalist takeover as in Poland is inconceivable in Germany. Ditto a far-right, anti-EU party winning an election, as in France.

But surrounded by EU partners increasingly in thrall to “me-first” nationalist positions, the leaders incapable of agreeing very much, as well as growing anti-German sentiment, Berlin is already fed up – on sharing immigrants, for example – and increasingly tempted to go it alone, to seek its own solutions.

Whether she likes it or not – and by and large she does not – it falls to Chancellor Angela Merkel to anchor Europe and to contrive some form of shelter from a storm blowing on several fronts at the same time.

It is a tall order. The European Union has never looked so temporary and fragile.

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