Europe Takes a Trumpian Turn

In the European parliamentary elections in June, far-right political parties did better than ever before. Two far-right alliances are now the third- and fourth-largest groupings in the parliament, ahead of the centrist Renew Europe group. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) emerged as the largest party by far in the European polls, which prompted French President Emmanuel Macron to dissolve his country’s National Assembly and call snap elections. The RN did not win an absolute majority in those votes, but it became the biggest single party in the domestic legislative body for the first time.

These recent electoral gains of the far right in France—as well as successes in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and elsewhere in Europe—have caused no small amount of consternation. The far right’s successes in the last couple of years have forced many centrist proponents of the European Union to wake up to the possibility of a far-right takeover of the EU, something that was long thought of as a conceptual and practical impossibility. From the perspective of these alarmed centrists, the nationalism of the far right poses a fundamental threat to the project of European integration. They see the far right as a kind of alien force inherently antithetical to the EU—it is “anti-European.”

Such thinking rests, however, on a fundamental misunderstanding of both the far right and the EU. In truth, the far right and the EU are much more compatible than many would like to believe. The far right’s fervent “civilizationism,” which imagines Europe as a white Christian bloc, is not inherently opposed to the ostensibly liberal project of European integration but rather was always part of it. In fact, as liberal politicians such as Macron increasingly speak about Europe in civilizational terms, the visions of the “pro-European” center right and Euroskeptic far right are converging.

Were the far right to become even more powerful within the EU than it already is, the bloc would not automatically unravel as many imagine. Rather, it would likely proceed further down the path it is already on—what I have called “the civilizational turn” in the European project. Thinking in a binary way about a liberal EU besieged by an illiberal far right externalizes the problem of the far right, obscuring a clearer understanding of how the EU might evolve in the future.

CIVILIZATION AND ITS MALCONTENTS

In Europe, the far right has long been understood primarily—even exclusively—as nationalist. To many who believe in the European project, in fact, this nationalism is precisely what is wrong with the far right. But this argument simplifies the thinking of the far right. As well as being nationalist, it is also civilizationalist—that is, it seeks to speak not only on behalf of a country against Europe but also on behalf of Europe against the rest of the world. In particular, it speaks on behalf of a European civilization that it sees as threatened by nonwhite immigrants whom it believes are replacing Europe’s native population.

Immediately after the European parliamentary elections, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban set up a new group in the parliament called Patriots of Europe, a name that perfectly captures this tension between nationalism and civilizationalism in the imagination of the far right. Members of the far right think of themselves as both nationalists and Europeans. They are not automatically opposed to the idea of European unity. They do tend to be skeptical of further integration and prefer what they call a Europe of sovereign states, but that is not a position that is extreme or exclusive to them. After all, it was also the vision of French President Charles de Gaulle.

In addition to simplifying the far right by focusing exclusively on its nationalism, many have idealized the EU as a cosmopolitan project, similar to the way some Americans idealize the United States and therefore think of former President Donald Trump as “un-American.” Many people in Europe imagine that when they choose to think of themselves as European rather than French, German, and so on, they are in effect saying they are citizens of the world. British Prime Minister Theresa May caricatured the EU as a cosmopolitan project when, while defending Brexit in 2016, she declared, “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.”

The far right and the EU are much more compatible than many seem to believe.

Similarly, supporters of European integration—that is, the removal of barriers to the movement of capital, goods, and people within Europe—often speak of it as if it were global integration. When the EU was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012, for example, European Commission President José Manuel Barroso said the European project had shown “that it is possible for peoples and nations to come together across borders” and “that it is possible to overcome the differences between ‘them’ and ‘us.’”

In reality, the EU has always been a project that is analogous to nationalism rather than its opposite—call it regionalism, a kind of quasi nationalism on a larger, continental scale. Its supporters like to believe that it can be based only on civic values. But European regionalism has always also included ethnic and cultural elements connected to Christianity and whiteness. These ethnic and cultural elements of European identity did not simply disappear in 1945 in the wake of the great conflagration of World War II. Rather, they persisted well beyond and informed the European project itself, which, in the context of the Cold War, was imagined as much in civilizational as ideological terms.

There is also a particular American version of this tendency to idealize the EU as a model of multilateralism that is the antithesis of everything that Trump stands for. Yet the EU is already much more Trumpian than many Americans realize, especially in its approach to immigration: it, too, has been building a wall. The EU’s southern border is far deadlier than the United States’ southern border. Over 30,000 people have died trying to cross the Mediterranean since 2014—more than five times the number of people who have died crossing the Sonoran Desert or the Rio Grande in the same period. According to Human Rights Watch, the EU’s policy toward migrants is simply to “let them die.”

SHAPED FROM WITHIN

These two misconceptions—that the far right is nationalist and that the EU is inherently cosmopolitan—have created a blind spot around what a far-right EU might look like. Those who associate the far right exclusively with an insistence on national sovereignty have tended to worry that if the far right became stronger, it would prevent further integration within the EU or, worse, lead to European disintegration—that is, an unraveling of the EU as power is returned from Brussels to member states. But there is also another possibility: an EU in which integration continues, at least in some areas, but takes place along lines that are increasingly set by the far right.

Because of the way that they simplify the far right and idealize the EU, many of the EU’s most ardent proponents imagine that a far-right version of the body would have to be dramatically different from the current iteration—or perhaps even something like its opposite. But it doesn’t. In fact, to conceive what a future far-right EU might look like, just imagine the bloc going further in the direction it has already been going during the last decade, especially on issues related to identity, immigration, and Islam. Since the refugee crisis in 2015, the pro-European center right has been increasingly mimicking the far right on these issues.

The pro-European center right has mimicked the far right on immigration.

In this respect, the center-right European People’s Party (EPP) has played a role in mainstreaming and normalizing far-right ideas that is somewhat analogous to the role played by the Republican Party in the United States. The key figure is Ursula von der Leyen, the German Christian Democrat who was reelected for a second term as European Commission president in July. When she first became the European Commission president in 2019, she created a new position of European Commissioner for Promoting the European Way of Life to coordinate an EU approach to migration. In both its name and its operations, this new office made it explicit that migration was not just a difficult policy problem to be resolved but a cultural threat to Europe.

As the far right has continued to rise, the EPP has made it clear that it thinks it must respond by taking even tougher measures to stop immigration than it has already taken since 2015. After the elections in the Netherlands last year, in which the Freedom Party—led by the far-right firebrand Geert Wilders—became the largest party in the Dutch parliament, EPP leaders such as Manfred Weber, the group’s president, said that the way to beat “populism” was to stop asylum seekers from making it to Europe. Following the model set by the deal signed in 2016 between the EU and Turkey, the EU has subsequently paid authoritarian states in North Africa to violently stop migrants crossing the Mediterranean—despite the EU’s claims to stand for democracy and human rights.

As the pro-European center right has enabled the far right, the far right has also become more willing to operate within the EU rather than seeking to simply thwart it. It is particularly striking that Fabrice Leggeri—the director of the EU border agency Frontex from 2015 to 2022, during which time the agency’s budget increased from around $160 million to around $830 million—stood as a candidate for the RN in the recent European elections and is now a member of the European Parliament. That the lead EU agency on migration was for the last decade being run by a supporter of Le Pen is a good illustration of how, rather than threatening the EU from outside, the far right has for some time been shaping it from within.

THE AUTONOMY ILLUSION

The rise of the far right in Europe also has implications for current debates about European security. In the last few months, a flurry of proposals have advised Europeans on how to respond to a second Trump presidency—or as some have put it, how Europe can be “Trump-proofed.” Many of those who make these recommendations speak generically of Europe as if it were a clearly defined and unitary actor. But worse than this distortion, many analysts also tend to ignore political developments in Europe itself. In fact, they seem to talk about the problem of European security as if the only far-right government in Europe is Orban’s in Hungary. In reality, there are others, including that of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni—and there could be more in the future.

The current debate in Brussels and other European capitals about the need for European “strategic autonomy”—in other words, an EU that no longer needs to rely on the military protection of the United States—is a rerun of the one prompted by Trump’s election in 2016. Since then, European analysts have focused mostly on the mechanics of how to achieve what Germans call Handlungsfähigkeit, or “the ability to act.” One particular aspect of the problem is that the United Kingdom—a key European security provider, as its leading role in supporting Ukraine has illustrated—is now outside the EU, which limits the potential of the EU as a vehicle for delivering European security.

But there is now an even deeper problem. The rise of the far right in Europe shows that gaining greater strategic autonomy from the United States is not the unproblematic alternative to NATO that many on both sides of the Atlantic seem to assume it is. What strategic autonomy would mean in practice for most European countries, including Germany, is exchanging dependence on the United States for dependence on one another and especially on France, the EU’s only nuclear power. But the possibility of a far-right government in France—a plausible outcome of the next presidential election, in 2027—makes this kind of dependence on France even less attractive than it already would have been, not least because of Le Pen’s many public ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

It would be possible to make the argument that it would be preferable for European countries, including Germany, to depend on Le Pen rather than Trump for their security. In particular, a realist might argue that whatever the ideology of their governments, European countries would nevertheless share similar strategic interests, an overlap that would make them more dependable partners. But the EU still imagines itself as standing for values that are the antithesis of those of the far right. Instead of arguing that the EU should abandon those values and pursue an approach based on shared interests, most foreign policy analysts seem simply to externalize the rise of the far right as if it were not also happening in Europe itself.

Having long underestimated the far right, European foreign policy elites are slowly waking up to the way in which it is influencing the EU. But because of how they idealize the EU and imagine the far right as an alien entity, they misunderstand the relationship between the two. They fail to see how much the far right is inherent in the EU rather than an external threat to it. This in turn makes it seem as if there is a straightforward solution to the possibility of a second Trump term: an “autonomous Europe” freed from its dependence on the United States. But reliance on other EU member states that have far-right governments or might have them in the near future risks creating another crisis altogether.