The far right won the 2024 European elections, but that was happening in the European Union even before the polls opened. The attempt to normalize the current situation by promoting the description that a “pro-European” center has withstood the electoral clash is just a mystification. The far right is not one political force, but several. More than anything, the far right is a political program, which is increasingly dominating the European Union - on migration, on climate, on general hatred.
Let's start with numbers, which are the usual way of “normalizing” mystifications.
Of the 720 members of the European Parliament, the “official” far right, the one that will still be described as extreme for a few more months, divided between ID (Identity and Democracy) and ECR (Conservatives and Reformists), elected 131 MEPs (Members of European Parliament), which would make it the third largest group in the Parliament, behind the European People's Party and the Social Democrats. However, there are at least forty more far-right MEPs in the non-aligned and other groups. These include the 15 AfD MEPs in Germany, the 10 Fidesz MEPs in Hungary and the 5 AUR MEPs in Romania.
With these numbers, the far right will effectively be the second force in the European Parliament, even if they are not all officially in the same group.
Will the Left have the courage to assume that capitalism has declared a war to the death against humanity?
The party with the most MEPs in the entire European Parliament is Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National, with 30. The third party with the most MEPs is the Fratelli d'Italia with 24. The fifth is Poland's PiS, with 20 (tied with the Italian PD and the Spanish PSOE). In Germany, the largest EU country, the far right was the second most voted party. Excluding coalitions, the far right was the most voted party in eight countries: France, Italy, Poland, the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Hungary and Latvia.
As if the above information wasn't enough, there are essential questions to ask about the remaining parties. Political programs from across the political spectrum have been drawn into the black hole of far-right hatred. This is why political aberrations such as the so-called Alliance (Bündnis) Sahra Wagenknecht—a party with a racist and nationalist program that presents itself as “left”— have emerged. The German government, led by the Social Democrats (theoretically center-left) and the Greens, governs with a right-wing policy in almost every area—from the environment to migration, obviously including the slaughter in Palestine. The response in the elections put them below any of the right-wing parties: why vote for imitations when there are those who aren't ashamed of being fascists?
In France too, Macron's turn to the right didn't stop the rise of the Rassemblement National (RN), which got more than twice as many votes as the official neoliberal party. Following the call for elections, the leader of the Republicains, Nicolas Sarkozy's former party, has already declared that he would support a far-right French government led by the RN. There is no red line.
But a far-right policy is more than the number of MEPs who are admittedly far-right. It must be clear that the electoral programs of the overwhelming majority of the parties of the European People's Party, the official “winner” of the elections, are far-right, anti-migrant, nationalist, anti-worker programs, advocating a return to the past and the historical hatreds of Europeans—against women, against Muslims, against Jews, against blacks and other ethnic minorities, against the LGBTQ community. And, of course, they are science denialist programs and, consequently, climate crisis denialists, disguising their service to the big multinationals as “economic realism.”
The European Union's policy will therefore be an extreme right-wing policy, in which the neoliberal precepts will be maintained, dropping any masks. The European Union serves to keep European multinationals making profits for their shareholders and managers. And if we're honest, that's what the European Union has always done, albeit in the past with a bit of a makeover.
So what will change? The institutions will continue to use their various branches—legislative, executive, judicial, coercive and media—to guarantee the deepening of the climate crisis and ensure the collapse of humanity. However, the alliance that governs Europe has been given the green light to apply institutional violence (police and military) and spread hatred from the top, encouraging an even greater breakdown of the already fragile societies that exist in this structural crisis of capitalism.
A first test will come soon, with the return of the fiscal rules of the European semester, which means nothing more than the return of the cruel austerity we know from after the 2008 financial crisis. But the jackhammer of the climate crisis will not stop, it is a war waged by governments and companies against society and it will only get worse in the coming years. The rise of the far right, predictable in the absence of an organized and disruptive left, brings new troops to this war against humanity.
Now, when the stability of our planet and our societies is fluctuating like never before, now that even the venerable institutions of national, European and global capitalism are beginning to fall, one after the other, into the hands of fascism, will the focus of the political Left remain on institutions and a return to the pre-far right past period?
Since real politics is not simply the sum of small agglomerations of ideas, but of concrete political programs, what would be the program for the sudden appeal of a union of those on the left? We already know that there are several crises, but what is the political program that responds to the essential political issues of our time? Will the Left have the courage to assume that capitalism has declared a war to the death against humanity? Will we recognize that capitalism is actively recruiting an ever larger part of society to kill the other through far-right politics? If so, do we agree to organize ourselves to win this war?
