How worried should we be about the new European right?

The European parliament election could see far-right parties across the EU make some big gains, writes former Europe minister Denis MacShane. So should we be braced for what Gordon Brown warns is an ideological ‘tidal wave’?

Marine Le Pen has said that she and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni can set up a new unified hard-right European political grouping (AP)

A month ago, Gordon Brown wrote a newspaper column proclaiming that the “rightward drift in European politics will have turned into a tidal wave” by June.

That was certainly the conventional wisdom of many commentators and academics in London this year that this week’s European parliament election will see a fundamental realignment of European politics.

But are they correct?

The disappearance of the 20th-century left parties rooted in working-class communities and industrial trade unions has created a vacuum. It was filled by those demanding frontiers be closed to foreign workers, to goods that undercut national production, and an end to green policies that hit farmers and minimum wage workers.

But the new right has turned ugly and as disunited as the old left. It seems unable to shake off its heritage. Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party was founded in homage to Mussolini. Busts of the duce now are on sale in summer festivals in Italy in communes controlled by the far right.

Marine Le Pen is calling for the expulsion of Germany’s Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) party from its European parliament group – after its lead candidate in the European parliament elections said Hitler’s SS were not criminals. The AfD has just suffered a setback as its vote fell back in elections in Thuringia, which were won by the mainstream Christian Democratic Union.

In the seven-party debate on French TV this week (4 June) Le Pen’s number one MEP, Jordan Bardella, 28, was harangued over his refusal to vote for any support for Ukraine and his opposition to the EU sending arms to Ukraine.

Many Germans talk of the AfD as “neo-Nazis”, in contrast to the flattering term “radical” right used by academics writing in English.

Geert Wilders’s Dutch Party for Freedom is violently hostile to Islam and wants to see EU spending cut to the bone. Wilders himself has sported a pro-Russian pin on his jacket. Now he has formed a coalition with three other Dutch parties, including the party of the outgoing Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, Nato’s secretary general designate.

Rutte’s party is part of the European confederation of liberal parties (including Britain’s Liberal Democrats), and many are up in arms at Rutte’s party getting into bed with the racist anti-EU Wilders.

Wilders leads a party with one member: himself. His government programme calls for big cuts in EU aid to farmers and no more EU climate change policies.

That requires unanimity in the EU council – yet Le Pen, Meloni, Viktor Orban and Solvakia’s rightist prime minister, Robert Fico, who is currently recovering from being shot, wants more EU handouts to buy votes.

Poland’s nationalist anti-women PiS party, which recently lost power, is furious at the idea of Orban’s pro-Putin Fidesz party joining the European Conservatives and Reformists federation set up by David Cameron and PiS in 2009.

Le Pen, now a grandmother and looking after her antisemitic papa, Jean-Marie Le Pen, 96 this month, says she and Italy’s Meloni can set up a new unified hard-right European political grouping.

But more than Poland’s PiS leaders are alarmed that rightists like Orban and Fico, who constitute Putin’s fifth column inside the EU, would be included in any Le Pen-Meloni far-right European political grouping.

Le Pen’s party is being challenged on its right by Eric Zemmour’s anti-Muslim Reconquête party, much as UK Tories face Reform to their Islamophobe right.

Zemmour, who said “I dream of a French Putin,” recently spoke at a gathering in Brussels organised by Orban, which Suella Braverman, Nigel Farage, and the English academic promoter of the far right, Matthew Goodwin, all attended.

Meanwhile, the EU rightists are divided on ideology, geopolitics and personality.

Meloni can hardly bear to be in the same country, let alone the same government, as her hated rival Matteo Salvini of the pro-Putin, anti-immigrant Lega party.

The latter is losing its business support, as Italy’s private sectors needs new workers while Italian women have stopped having babies. Immigrants are the only answer.

In short, while there will indeed be more rightist MEPs in the European parliament after its 9 June election – where voters often cast a protest vote for parties like Ukip which they wouldn’t vote into government – this new right is already divided and full of personality clashes.

The mainstream parties will have a combined 3-1 majority over the far right. In Spain, this week’s poll showed the two main left and centre-right parties winning two-thirds of the 61 Spanish MEP seats. VOX, the Franco nostalgia party, which recently hosted a far-right conference in Madrid addressed by Meloni and Le Pen, will only win six seats.

But playing footsie with the far right as some Tories are prepared to do may cost European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, her job. She has foolishly said she can work with Meloni, who is talking of a new right-wing Euro party.

That is a red rag to Emmanuel Macron, whose party, which he created in 2017, will get half the votes of the far-right National Rally headed by Le Pen.

Macron is furious that Von der Leyen is giving any credibility to Meloni and her sister-in-arms on the racist and EU right.

Heads of government appoint top EU jobs just as they sign off on all EU laws, so Le Pen’s increase in votes counts for little on Monday 10 June and the months that follow.

But many in France see a good Le Pen score on Sunday as a signal for the 2027 presidential election – when Macron is not eligible to stand.

Nonetheless, he will not want his place in history to be the man who ushered in a 1930s-style government, and Von der Leyen’s warm signals to the far right mean Macron may turn to Mario Draghi, the technocratic Italian politician who as president of the European Central Bank was dubbed the “man who saved the Euro” after the financial crash of 2008-09.

Meanwhile, a cautious, reformist government looks to be emerging in Britain after the failed Brexit political experiment of anti-European Tory politics which has consumed five UK prime ministers.

European politics will be divided, certainly on the left but much more significantly on the right, as in Britain where the Conservatives face a European-style xenophobic and Muslim-hating Reform party.

The new ugly right so feared by Brown will be devoured by mutual rivalries and hatred – but it won’t be a return to the 1930s.

Denis MacShane is the former Minister of Europe. His latest book ‘Labour Takes Power’ is published by Biteback