The shooting of the Slovakian prime minister, Robert Fico, has dramatised the increasingly angry and polarised landscape of European politics. With just weeks to go before the European parliament elections, it is time to step back from the brink.
This eruption of violence in the midst of the campaign is so shocking that it may, at best, have a chastening effect, softening the venomous tone of political discourse by reminding democracies old and new of what they stand to lose.
More likely, it will aggravate polarisation and perhaps serve as a “Reichstag fire” moment for Slovakia’s national populist government, leading to a more repressive regime in Bratislava and beyond.
As the 59-year-old Fico lay fighting for his life, the Slovakian interior minister, Matúš Šutaj Eštok, declared “we are on the verge of civil war” and warned politicians against inflaming a dangerous situation. But other ministers swiftly seized on the attack to justify Fico’s plans to crack down on the media and civil society and turn the independent public broadcaster into a government mouthpiece.
Fico’s Eurosceptic authoritarian ally, the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, drew 1.2m views and a torrent of anti-globalist, anti-EU comments when he tweeted his sympathy for the Slovakian leader after the attack.
We know little about the 71-year-old gunman or his motives so far. Šutaj Eštok called him a “lone wolf”. But social media conspiracy theorists were quick to blame Europe’s liberal elites for creating an environment of hate against Fico.
It comes against a backdrop of growing low-level political violence and threats against candidates, mayors and elected officials that have led some to abandon politics. Suspected far-right thugs beat up a Social Democratic MEP candidate in eastern Germany last month, putting him in hospital, and several Greens activists have also been attacked. French mayors quit last year after attacks on their homes by anti-immigration militants or urban rioters.
How the assassination attempt on a leader who opposed military aid to Ukraine and was sympathetic to President Vladimir Putin’s narrative on Russia’s war of aggression will affect the EU election, if at all, remains to be seen.
But populist and far-right parties that promise to restore law and order may be the electoral beneficiaries of the anxiety generated by political violence. The Brussels bubble was already abuzz with horror at the prospect of hordes of far-right lawmakers rampaging into the European parliament in next month’s 27-nation EU elections.
More than a scare story, it has the makings of a self-fulfilling prophecy. By hyping up the threat from anti-immigration nationalists, Europe’s centre-left parties risk amplifying the very phenomenon they strive to prevent.
It is also depressing that the left offers no inspiring vision of a better tomorrow that could draw voters away from those who want to close borders and turn the clock back. Crying wolf may only make a bad situation worse.
Yet a cool-headed analysis of recent opinion polls suggests that the far right remains a long way from wielding any significant power in the EU’s institutions, whether in parliament, the commission or the council of member states.
All polls so far suggest that the two rival rightwing groupings contesting the June elections will together win fewer than one-quarter of the seats in the 720-member legislature. That puts Gordon Brown’s talk of a “tidal wave” into perspective. Even if those groups could agree with each other on policies and alliances, which they can’t, they would not have enough seats in a coalition with the centre-right European People’s party (EPP) to form a majority.
Fico’s Smer party, which originated on the left but has lurched towards Orbán-style Eurosceptical populism, was suspended from the centre-left Socialists and Democrats (S&D) group last year and has not joined another political family, minimising its influence in Brussels.
Arithmetically, the only plausible coalition that can run the next EU legislature has to include both the EPP (expected to win about 175 seats) and the S&D, which is predicted to win about 140, plus the centrist liberal Renew Europe (RE) group (set to have about 85 members). They may also need the support of the Greens-EFA group (heading for about 50 seats) to pass some climate and environment measures.
Nevertheless, leftwing rivals of the commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, jumped on her refusal to rule out a deal with the ECR in last month’s first debate among leading candidates. It “depends very much on how the composition of the parliament is, and who is in what group”, she told the audience in Maastricht. She has since sought to clarify by saying she would only work with those who had a “clear commitment to the rule of law, clear commitment to Ukraine, clear commitment to our Europe”.
And the liberal group Renew Europe, which signed a joint statement with leftwing parties condemning political violence, is facing questions after its Dutch affiliate, the VVD party, agreed to enter a new governing coalition led by far-right anti-immigration crusader Geert Wilders’ Freedom party (PVV), a member of the Eurosceptic Identity and Democracy (ID) group in the EU legislature.
A bigger far-right contingent will make for a noisier parliament, with more political theatre. At best, it may remind complacent mainstream politicians that the climate, energy and environmental policies they enact can have a financial impact on ordinary people’s lives. These bite hardest in countries where real wages have fallen since the Covid-19 pandemic.
This chart by the Italian bank UniCredit’s chief European economist, Marco Valli, shows how wages have failed to keep pace with inflation since the end of 2019 in the Netherlands, Austria, France, Germany, Finland, Ireland and – most dramatically – Italy. That correlates almost exactly to the countries where the far-right has made the biggest poll gains, except for Ireland, where the leftist Sinn Féin has captured most of the angry vote.
If the threat of a far-right takeover of the European parliament is exaggerated, it has already made a huge impact on immigration policy across Europe and in the UK by changing the narrative.
Paying off foreign governments with dubious human rights records to keep refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants at bay became official EU policy in 2016, when the then German chancellor, Angela Merkel, brokered a deal with Turkey to stem the flow of Syrian refugees and other migrants into Greece.
In national politics, the cordon sanitaire (quarantine) that once kept the far right isolated in a corner has broken down in several EU countries. Mainstream centre-right parties have brought them into past or present government as junior partners in Finland, Austria and now Croatia , and formed minority administrations that rely on their support in Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark. In Italy, the two largest parties in government are rightists.
Anti-fascist scare tactics proved successful in Spain last year, when the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, his Socialist Workers’ party and its leftist allies successfullyemployed the civil war era slogan No pasarán (“They shall not pass”) to beat off a challenge by the conservative People’s party by pointing to its alliance with the far-right party Vox.
That campaign, in a country with a living memory of fascist rule, cannot easily be replicated across Europe. Elsewhere, the left would do better to give anxious voters credible hope of better living standards and fairer taxation, rather than resorting to the fascist threat.
Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre
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