Nigel Farage imagines he is a true Brit, the man who said what the establishment prohibited and so allowed Britain to shed noxious European influence. In truth, he is a true European, member of a fast-growing insurgent pan-European right, surfing the same anti-immigrant, anti-liberal, anti-democratic constitution tides as politicians of his ilk are doing across the EU. Almost every European country now has a Faragist making the political weather – with one key difference. None wants to repeat Britain’s disastrous experience and leave the EU. Unintentionally, Farage has done the European cause one great service.
Yet, as Spain’s Vox, with its roots in Franco’s fascism, hopes for success in the imminent elections, echoing what Giorgia Meloni, with her Brothers of Italy’s comparable roots in Mussolini’s fascism, achieved last year by becoming prime minister, mainstream European politics quivers. Liberals and the left are in retreat before parties that celebrate the primacy of family and faith, oppose same-sex marriage, want a crackdown on immigration and multiculturalism, do not believe in climate change, critique all things woke, and, above all, believe their nation is more special than any other. Parties in almost every country in Europe repeat the refrain, climb in the polls and are either in national or regional government (Finland, Denmark, Austria, Sweden, Poland, Italy, Hungary) or soon could be (Germany, France, Holland, Spain).
More ominously, if they could lift the constraints, they would follow the lead of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and reinvent their democracy to allow only their party to rule, eliminating an independent judiciary and a free press, all in service of the rightwing cause. Poland’s Jaroslaw Kaczyński and Mateusz Morawiecki are trying to copy Orbán and take Poland back to its Catholic conservative roots. But whatever the populist right’s attack on the basic constructs of a democratic order or their passionate view that they and only they are right, nobody adds leaving the EU to their programme.
That is reinforced by the Russia-Ukraine war. Both French nationalist Marine Le Pen, who won more than 40% of the presidential vote in 2022, and Meloni were once happy to fawn over the Russian despot. After all, Putin regards homosexuality as a sin, claims to venerate Christianity, takes the toughest line on Muslims and celebrates the blood and mystic sanctity that constitutes the Russian nation state.
But his barbarous invasion of Ukraine has turned him from the right’s moral soulmate into a political leper. When Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, calls for Nato help, it makes no political or security sense for even an extreme-right EU politician to refuse it. Equally, Ukraine’s insistence on wanting to join the EU to reinforce potential Nato membership, so completing its formal membership of the west, underlines – even to the right – that the EU treaty architecture they live within has to be upheld. Orbán only pushes his pro-Putin views so far: he may need Russian energy, but he needs EU money more.
Putin and Brexit have become the two hard rocks that define the limits of the populist right’s political ambitions. The good news is that the EU is going to hold together and Putin will be opposed, as long as the German centre can hold the line against the AfD, the extreme rightwing insurgent. Here, the powerful constitution will save both Germany and Europe from neofascist ambitions. But that still leaves the continent as a kind of playpen – strong enough to continue but too weak to stop basic democratic principles and values from being flouted.
Take Meloni. She has read the runes and is pro-EU, pro-Nato and anti-Putin, a stance for which, given her background, she wins plaudits.
But that only gives her political cover to prohibit efforts to search for stricken immigrant boats, entrench symbols of Italian nationhood and culture, attack same-sex marriage and sack those suspected of being liberal sympathisers in the public broadcaster. It is baby-step fascism that prefigures more. Her manifesto declared that Europe should be a confederation of “homelands”.
Britain had its rightwing spasm in Brexit, with its roots in disaffection at loss of control, social neglect, appeal to old glories and ache for system change; now we confront the protracted clearing up of the economic and social debris. Our populist moment, Johnson aping Orbán in challenging the supreme court in the name of we the people, has passed.
But the direction of European politics will continue to affect us. Europe’s rightwing lurch and a weakened EU centre means the already slim chances of getting a better trade deal in 2026 are growing slimmer. The immigration pressures that forced the recent collapse of the Dutch government over the rights and wrongs of limiting asylum seekers are not going to lessen.
But for all that, ultra-rightwing politics will retreat. Ultimately, people want prosperity, security and fairness, not performative politics aimed at regression. The right are poor at running modern capitalist economies well or facing the reality that the climate and environment are degenerating before our eyes. Truth will out. Hard-won personal freedoms are not going to be relinquished: women across Europe are not going to give up abortion rights, nor gay people the right to marry. Hating the other burns out eventually. Ways will be found to manage immigration with decency.
Here Britain, curiously, could emerge as something of a model. Neither neofascism nor social conservatism has widespread appeal. Our prime minister may be British Asian but few care: what matters is what he does. Starmer’s Labour has the opportunity of a generation: to turn the economy around, meet today’s grand challenges while retaining our great liberal open culture. Success will be defeat for Europe’s right: democracy and capitalism shown to work. It will be our ticket to be readmitted to the heart of what will still be a great club that will emerge stronger, if battered. What we are living through is all part of the process: building Europe. Take heart.
• Will Hutton is an Observer columnist
