“Victory in defeat, there is none higher,” wrote Robert A Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land, about unsung heroes who never give up. Although the far right likes to portray itself as unsung heroes, it has mostly found defeat with a series of pyrrhic victories in recent weeks, unable to turn record electoral support in the EU, France and the UK into concrete political power.
This was perhaps best exemplified by Jordan Bardella, Marine Le Pen’s hand-picked “golden boy”, portrayed as almost infallible in much of the media. He led National Rally (Rassemblement National, or RN) to new highs in the 9 June European elections (eight percentage points up on the party’s 2019 performance) and France (14.5 percentage points up on the party’s showing in the first round of legislative elections in 2022). And yet, on Monday, Bardella was not announced as the new prime minister of France, but as the president of Viktor Orbán’s new Patriots for Europe (PfE), one of three rival far-right groups in the European parliament. The others are the longstanding European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), dominated by Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy (FdI), and a smaller, more extreme group called Europe of Sovereign Nations, launched on Wednesday by the German far-right Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD).
Although officially a new group, and now the third-biggest in the parliament, PfE is mostly just the old far-right Identity & Democracy (ID) of which Le Pen’s National Rally was the biggest player, with the addition of Orbán’s Fidesz party. Among a few other gains and losses, the only real surprises are former Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš’s Action of Dissatisfied Citizens (ANO), and the Spanish party Vox.
So far, Orbán has been unable to win over his regional allies, such as the Slovak prime minister, Robert Fico, or the Slovene ex-prime minister, Janez Janša. Consequently, the new group has only one government leader among its members, Orbán himself, though others could join him around the table of the European Council in the coming years. Ultimately, Orbán is less interested in the European parliament than in the decision-making Council, where he needs an ally to fight EU sanctions on Hungary.
The far right struggles to collaborate internationally for many reasons including clashing personalities, party volatility, ideological extremism and strategic considerations. But these factors are dynamic and have changed as the far right slowly but steadily moves from the margins into the mainstream of European politics.
In the 1980s, a bad personal relationship between the then National Front (FN) leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and the Austrian Freedom party (FPÖ) leader, Jörg Haider, hindered their collaboration in Europe. But this was a time when the far right was mostly politically ostracised and its politicians were not used to compromising for political gain. Today, many far-right leaders are, or aspire to be, part of governing coalitions and have learned to compromise to get things done. Hence, while Le Pen, Meloni and Orbán might not be close friends, there are no personal grudges that stand in the way of future political cooperation.
A revolving door of unstable parties is also, mostly, a thing of the past. A strong core of far-right parties has been represented in the European parliament for decades now. Similarly, a solid core of far-right MEPs has been involved in European politics in Brussels for years, having established personal connections and political experience.
It is true that ideological extremism, particularly competing nationalisms, complicate things. For instance, in 2007, the far-right Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty (ITS) group split over anti-Romanian remarks by an Italian MEP. And more recently Fidesz claimed that it had refused to join the ECR because it included what it called an “extreme anti-Hungarian” party. Still, in both cases, there were other reasons at play, not least fierce resistance toFidesz within the ECR.
Much of that resistance to Fidesz is about Orbán’s pro-Russia positioning and yet this is only partly an ideological dispute. While the ECR, which includes Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS), presents itself as the “pro-Ukraine” far-right group and loves to boast about vehement opposition to Putin, the same PiS supported Fidesz’s membership of the ECR and later even negotiated with Orbán about joining PfE. In the end, PiS has remained in the ECR on pragmatic rather than ideological grounds, having achieved a compromise with Meloni about dividing up the leading jobs in the group.
The main hindrance to collaboration on the far right is strategic, rather than ideological, organisational or personal. Far-right parties have often used international collaboration to fight isolation domestically, by showing either that they do not stand alone internationally or that mainstream(ed) parties in other countries want to collaborate with them. Much of the Russia-Ukraine debate is also more about strategy than ideology, as foreign policy is of secondary concern for most far-right parties. Parties such as AfD, Fidesz and RN carry a strong international stigma that is considered a hindrance for parties trying to find mainstream acceptance (for example, Sweden Democrats) but less so for those who do not (such as Chega in Portugal) or who have already achieved it (Italy’s League).
In the end, the foundation of Patriots for Europe (and, to a lesser extent, the even newer Europe of Sovereign Nations) will help to further mainstream the far right in the EU. They will pull the rightwing European People’s party, which is the largest group in the parliament, even further to the right on such issues as the European Green Deal and immigration, and towards an even more conciliatory relationship with the ECR. In other words, the far right continues to move forward, maybe not at the lightning speed often proclaimed by both the far right and the media, but forward nevertheless.
At the same time, Orbán’s Patriots for Europe represents yet another pyrrhic victory. Yes, it is the biggest far-right group ever to be constructed in the European parliament, but it is also almost completely ostracised, excluded from committee roles by an ongoing “cordon sanitaire” of pro-EU parties.
Cas Mudde is the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, and author of The Far Right Today
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