Dr Stijn van Kessel (QMUL) shares with David Gazsi (King's College London - QMUL) his insights into the results and the role that far-right parties will play in the new European Parliament in 2019-2024.
Experts commenting on the results of the latest European Parliament elections have framed the outcome in various ways. For some, the increased voter turnout (51% compared to 42.6% in 2014) was a sign of growing interest in European Union politics. Many also noted that far right parties fell short of earlier expectations of winning a landslide victory. Others instead argued that the elections proved the far right’s success in cementing its presence in European politics, and did not interpret the modestly augmented turnout as a possible sign of increased EU institutional legitimacy.
Dr Stijn van Kessel shares with us his insights into the results and the role that far-right parties will play in the new European Parliament in 2019-2024. Stijn’s research focuses on populism, Euroscepticism, and the ideology, voters and electoral performance of populist parties in Europe, with a particular emphasis on the radical right. He is joint convenor of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Standing Group on Extremism & Democracy, joint editor of the associated Routledge book series, as well as joint editor of the journal Politics. His latest project focuses on the organisation and ideology of pro-European movements in the UK and Germany.
The populist radical right has received a disproportional amount of attention in the run up to the elections but was never likely to genuinely ‘sweep’ the EU elections. Most citizens across Europe are simply not attracted by the ideas of the far right. Besides, the populist radical right already did well in the previous 2014 election, so it was unlikely to massively increase its overall vote share. That doesn’t mean that parties of the populist radical right performed particularly poorly. It is also important to keep in mind the cross-national variation in far-right performance. While in some countries, such as Denmark, the populist radical right didn’t do well, comparable parties won (or remained large) in cases such as Italy, France, Hungary, Estonia and Belgium.
It has now become normal to see populist radical right parties gaining seats across most European countries, although their individual performance varies. This also partly depends on the ideological course of, mostly centre-right, mainstream parties, some of which openly flirt with far-right ideas. Hungary’s governing FIDESZ party is an example of a mainstream political force that has basically become populist radical right.
It remains to be seen in which group each individual populist radical right party will end up, but given the (new or continued) strength of the Italian Lega and French National Rally, there will certainly be a sizable far right group in the European Parliament
Where EU decision-making is concerned, instead of focusing on the far right per se, it perhaps makes more sense to look at the more general trend of fragmentation, whereby the two dominant centrist blocks have lost their majority. Decision-making will thus become more complex and difficult, but perhaps also more dynamic.
If you would like to know more about the far right and its role in the European Parliament, please read the latest contributions of our experts here.
David Gazsi is PhD Candidate at King’s College London and Editorial Assistant with East European Politics. Until recently, he worked as Research Assistant at CER.
Photo credit: bradacs (flickr)