The rise of the radical populist right has seemed unrelenting. In 2015 Law and Justice won an absolute majority in the Polish Parliament, the first such result since the restoration of full democracy after the end of the Soviet Union. In 2016 the campaign for the UK to leave the European Union pulled off a close and largely unexpected victory. Lega and M5S formed a populist coalition to take power in Italy in 2018. Hungary’s Orbán won another super-majority in a country that is no longer described as wholly free. The 2017 legislative elections in Austria saw the far-right FPÖ come into government. Joined in Estonia in 2019 by EKRE, a party with leaders who are openly white supremacists. And again in 2019, in the Dutch provincial elections, the party that came first was the FvD, led by a man who believes Europe should be kept white. Even where they didn’t win, these radical right and extremist right-wing parties claimed record numbers of votes – such as the FPÖ presidential candidate in 2016 (46.2%), the neo-Nazi L’SNS in Slovakia’s 2016 general election (8%), Le Pen in 2017 (33.9%) or the Sweden Democrats in 2018 (17.3%).
What is notable is that very few of these scores, whether victories or not, actually represented majorities of voters, let alone the general preference of entire countries. While it became almost impossible to move for ‘sensible commentators’ informing us that ‘ordinary people’ were now all supporting anti-establishment populists because liberal and centre-left politics was a failure, behind the scenes many voters have become increasingly frustrated and angry with the populists and their policies.
The reality is that during this time, these liberal, environmentalist, and left-wing voters, who come from all parts of society and all parts of Europe, have started to push back on both the populists and the media narrative that was being forced on them.
The first indications came with 2017, with the victory of Emmanuel Macron in the French presidential election. Representing a backlash to the Nationalist rhetoric of Brexit, Macron pitched himself as an aggressive defender of Europe, urging French citizens living on the edge to join him in building a Europe that protects rather than turning their backs on European identity entirely. He even went so far as to climb onto the victory stage with the EU’s anthem, ‘Ode to Joy’, playing in the background. However, this election was more a proto-case than the first instance of the liberal fightback. The chaos of Brexit likely hurt Le Pen but the collapse of France’s centre-left and centre-right parties was already underway after both parties delivered two deeply unpopular presidencies (Sarkozy 2007-12 and Hollande 2012-17), followed by 2017 presidential candidates that were seen to be either inadequate or corrupt (Hamon and Fillon, respectively).
Perhaps the best example of the start of the return of liberal politics came in one of the heartlands of the populist right, Slovakia. Slovakia is a deeply conservative country. The (populist-leaning) Social Democrats have largely stayed in power through a mixture of of socially conservative policies and the fragmented nature of the Slovakian political right. Slovakian voters however were outraged with their political class when a journalist, Jan Kuciak, and his fiancee were murdered. Police said that he had been targeted for his investigative work, the first time a journalist had been assassinated this way since Slovakia’s independence. While thousands of people protested in defence of freedom and democracy, Slovakia’s political parties descended into partisan bickering. Some opposition parties insinuated the government was responsible for the killing, while the government created a conspiracy theory that its opponents were working with George Soros to orchestrate a coup d’etat. Amid continued public anger at what was seen as a wholly deplorable and inadequate political response, the government eventually resigned, though Prime Minister Fico only left office on the condition that his party would serve the rest of its term in government.
It was in this context that Zuzana Čaputová ran to be Slovakia’s next President. She campaigned on a platform of detoxifying politics, tackling corruption and dishonesty among politicians and bringing responsibility back to public service. As co-founder of the new liberal, pro-EU party, Progressive Slovakia, she started the race backed by a political force that had no representation in the Slovakian Parliament. She was a vocal supporter of the anti-government protests that followed the murders and advocated for an expansion of LGBT rights, more environmental protections and a reform of the country’s police and judiciary to give them greater political independence. In March she won 58% of the vote and became Slovakia’s first female President. This was the first major hit that liberal and progressive voters had scored against the populists in years.
The next big victory came in Spain. Now Spain was not considered a hotbed of right-wing populism so the context is slightly different here. Nonetheless, while some had already called the death of European social democracy, this year the Spanish centre-left undoubtedly proved its detractors wrong. In May and June of 2018, the ruling Partido Popular (PP) found itself embroiled in a corruption scandal. The Social Democrats (PSOE) decided to launch a No Confidence motion and with the backing of other parties it was successful, bringing down conservative Prime Minister Rajoy after seven years in power. But the job was far from done. Though PSOE leader Pedro Sánchez was now his country’s new Prime Minister, his position was still very fragile. In 2016, at the last general election, his party had won only 22% of the vote. Through careful relations with the Catalan and Basque parties, as well as the centre-right Ciudadanos, Sánchez managed to keep the government together.
But things looked to be turning for the worse for the fragile progressive government when it lost power in a previous heartland, Andalusia, amid the sudden growth of a new far-right party, Vox. The defeat of his government’s budget in February 2019, forcing snap elections, raised fears that the same story of growing right-wing populism and the decline of the centre-left would now play out in Spain too.
Yet the reality was that Sanchez managed to greatly solidify his position, pushing PSOE up in the polls, extending a lead of just a couple points over PP in January to a final lead of 12 points come the day of the election. As well as shifting to the left on economic policy (without indulging in populist attacks on the EU over austerity, as some over left-wingers have done), Sanchez ran a campaign that was confident in identifying itself as ‘feminist’ just as women’s rights and advances in equality came under ever greater attack from the right. PSOE’s campaign secured much of the moderate centrist vote as well as bringing in previously disaffected voters back from Podemos. By the time all the seats in the Spanish Parliament were allocated it was clear that only Sánchez would be able to take the position of Prime Minister. The progressives had scored their second victory.
And as of this week, the European Parliament elections have brought Europe’s new liberal, progressive and environmentalist surge into full view.
It started with an exit poll from the Netherlands on Thursday night. Suddenly there was a flurry of activity on social media as everyone clicked that the polling had been way off the mark in two important areas. First, the party that was supposed to win the top spot, the far-right FvD, had massively underperformed and came in only fourth. Second, the actual winners were the Social Democrats, who won 18% of the vote, much higher than what the polls had predicted (with many attributing this success to the influence of Frans Timmermans, the party’s lead candidate and the lead candidate for the European Socialists and Democrats to take the position of European Commission President).
Then on Friday the exit poll came out from Ireland. Another shock as a Green wave hit the country and the Irish Green Party heavily outperformed expectations.
On Sunday morning, leaks of the final results in Slovakia showed that Čaputová’s Progressive Slovakia, in alliance with the liberal centre-right SPOLU had once again defied what any could have predicted from one of Europe’s most religiously conservative countries. Having been rated at only 8% in the polls, the alliance actually achieved 20%, taking first place comfortably ahead of the ruling Social Democrats (15.7%).
Around midday, in Latvia, the liberal centre-right New Unity showed a recovery that was nothing short of heroic. Having won only 6.7% in the country’s October 2018 parliamentary election, this Sunday New Unity shot back up to 26%, reclaiming first place.
By mid-afternoon, results coming out of Austria left no doubt that the far-right FPÖ really had been hit badly by its recent implication in a corruption scandal that had killed relations with the ÖVP and forced the party out of government. The FPÖ lost around 5 points compared with its previous polling. By contrast the Austrian Greens beat their polling predictions by around the same amount, taking 13.5% of the vote (in contrast to a polling score of around 8%).
Then evening hit and the exit polls started to roll out thick and fast. Germany wasn’t going to be left out of the Green wave in European politics, its own Green party winning over 20% of the vote, double the score of the far-right AfD who came fourth. European federalism also received a boost as the German branch of Volt, a pan-European party founded in 2017 supporting a federal Europe, won its first seat. In Romania Alliance 2020, composed of USR and PLUS, two liberal very pro-Europe parties, secured over 18% of the vote in their first run at European elections. In France, Macron failed to take first place from Le Pen but even here, Le Pen’s score was no improvement on 2014 and it was a surprisingly strong showing from the Greens that prevented Macron from claiming victory. In Spain PSOE consolidated their position, while far-right Vox lost ground compared to the national elections only a month ago. Voters punished the centrist alliance with the far-right in Estonia by putting the Social Democrats into second place. And in Finland, the far-right also underperformed as the centre-right and Greens gained in strength.
Now granted, it was not rosy everywhere. The Sweden Democrats managed to hold their ground. In Denmark losses by the Danish People’s Party were compensated by their xenophobic policies going mainstream in the country’s two main parties. The more aggressive strain of Flemish separatism, Vlaams Belang, made gains. And in Italy, Lega followed through on the gains it had made in the polls.
Nonetheless, the overall picture stays the same. Green and liberal parties achieved historic breakthroughs and the radical and far-right either stagnated or lost ground. Even in the UK, where Nigel Farage was supposed to be carried to victory on a wave of public anger at the failure of the government to deliver Brexit, his new Brexit Party only did slightly better than UKIP did in 2014 and actually did worse than the combined vote share of the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party. Parties advocating a second referendum won around 40% of the vote, while parties pushing for a No Deal Brexit won around 35%. All told, the liberals are certain to enjoy a much more powerful third place with over 100 seats in the next European Parliament and the Greens, with around 70 seats, will challenge for fourth, depending on how successfully the far-right unites under a new banner.
As this article has hopefully demonstrated, every EU state has its own particular actors, sudden events and individual contexts that guide how they continue to develop. And yet there are commonalities too. The run-up to this election saw an unprecedented mobilisation from civil society to promote the vote and encourage participation, whether through increased interest from (some) political parties, Spotify or airlines (yes, plural). This will have helped boost the visibility of the 2019 elections, reaching audiences that might otherwise have not given the European Parliament a second’s thought.
The Europeanisation of our political debate has also likely contributed to giving the European elections greater importance in the mind of your average citizen. We increasingly recognise that at least some (though not all) of the key decisions on our economy, migration and climate change, all key issues for European voters, are being taken at the European level. At the same time some of the consensus that had previously existed around European politics has broken down. As polarisation around the question of the future of the EU and what policies the EU should be implementing has grown, so voters have become more concerned and more invested in the outcome of the elections. Quite simply, more voters care about having their voice heard in the European Parliament and about influencing the direction of its politics.
All this contributed to turnout at the European Parliament elections increasing this year. And this was not just at the average level EU-wide (symbolically crossing the 50% barrier), nearly every state showed an increase. In France and Germany the turnout jumped around 10 points. In Poland it doubled. Other states showed more modest increases but they were nonetheless part of the same trend. And in France and Romania, the previously unthinkable happened: turnout for European Parliament elections reached similar levels to the turnout for national legislative elections. For the first time ever since their introduction in 1979, the 2019 European Parliament elections have dealt a huge blow to the narrative that European voters don’t care about this institution and how it represents them.
So what now? With the voting done, the political fight for the future of Europe will move to within the European Parliament itself and between the European Parliament and the Council. Starting with the second of the two contests, both the Parliament and the Council will be looking to move quickly in order to rally around a single candidate for the presidency of the European Commission. In 2014, the Council was caught off guard by an assertive and proactive Parliament, and so had little choice but to accept MEPs’ preferred candidate, Jean-Claude Juncker, as the new Commission President. This time round they hope they will be ready. The composition of the Parliament, which has undergone a major process of political fragmentation will make finding a majority among the MEPs harder. The reality that the biggest group’s candidate (the EPP’s Manfred Weber) is manifestly unpopular with Liberals, Socialists and Greens, will not help the situation. Either the progressives in the Parliament will have to bite their tongue or a new consensus candidate will have to be found quickly (with the liberal Dane Margrethe Vestager, current Competition Commissioner, probably best placed for this).
The other battle will take place within the Parliament and will focus on the allocation of committee chairmanships. Within the European Parliament, committees undertake a great deal of the legislative work (including the debating and amending of proposed laws). Chairmanship of these committees is therefore a key consideration for all the political groups and a major reward for winning more seats. In particular the ECON, IMCO, ITRE and JURI Committees will be hotly contested. The big question will be whether the populists and the far-right are able to win a seat at the top table in any of the Parliament’s committees. Going by previous elections, where committee chairmanships were allocated on an approximately proportional basis, it would seem hard to prevent the radical right-wing populists from taking something. However, the proportional allocation is not a rule set in stone and we could very well see new rules being created in order to form a kind of ‘governing majority’ within the European Parliament – a more formal alliance that could claim the legitimacy to distribute the chairmanships only among its members. As these fights unfold, it is obvious that the Parliament will continue to assert its authority at the European level, pulling on an ever more convincing argument of popular legitimacy delivered directly by the EU’s hundreds of millions of citizens.
The final lesson from these elections is this: yes, there are populist right-wing and far-right voters in Europe but they are not the majority. There also exists a large number of Europeans who like the EU, who believe in environmentalism and who support the advancement of LGBT rights. As the populist vote failed to make any great advances, Social Democrat, Green and Liberal parties who responded to these values emerged as the winners. As the contests of European politics gain new relevance and meaning to European citizens, so the European polity will develop and solidify, attaching not to institutions, but to a shared identity. The birth of a new democratic community is not straightforward but it is happening, and there are many citizens in Europe who are invested in making sure it has a future.
Europe Votes 