The mainstreaming of the European far right

A survey of the far-right in Europe offers a mixed picture. In April 2026 an electoral earthquake in Hungary forced Viktor Orbán, figurehead of the ‘illiberal international’, to step down as prime minister after years of obstructing the EU. Shortly afterwards, the pro-European government of Romanian prime minister Ilie Bolojan was forced out of office after a vote of no confidence initiated by the Social Democratic Party (PSD) with the support of the far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR). In Bulgaria, voters elected Rumen Radev’s pro-EU alliance, while in the Netherlands, Geert Wilder’s Freedom Party was unable to form a coalition government. In Finland, the Finns Party is a member of the governing coalition and in Sweden the conservative-led administration is supported by the Sweden Democrats.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of the post-fascist Fratelli d’Italia (FdI) party is cooperating with the EU on foreign policy, while in Poland prime minister Donald Tusk, a former president of the European Council, is being prevented from doing the same by the country’s president and PiS-aligned judges. The Danish People’s Party is no longer part of Denmark’s governing coalition, but the country’s centre-left government has adopted its anti-immigration stance. Marine Le Pen of the Rassemblement National (RN) is on the verge of power in France, while the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is leading the opinion polls in Germany – as is Nigel Farage’s Reform party in the UK, the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) in Austria, and the Swiss People’s Party (SVP) in Switzerland.

Despite the uneven development, however, the direction of travel is clear. The European elections in 2024 brought a sharp shift to the right, with around a quarter of the seats going to the far right. As of July 2026, far-right MEPs outnumber centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) MEPs by 12 seats, and centre-left Socialists and Democrats (S&D) MEPs by 61 seats. The former dominance of the EPP and S&D has thus been broken.

The power of the far-right bloc is limited by the fact that it is split into three groups. The strongest of these is Patriots for Europe (PfE), consisting of 85 MEPs from Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, the Austrian FPÖ and the RN. The European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), led by the Brothers of Italy (Italy) and the PiS (Poland), has 84 seats. The Europe of Sovereign Nations (ESN), consisting of parties from eight states and led by the AfD (Germany) holds the remaining 27 seats. This three-way split and the incompatibilities that led to it – particularly between the RN and the AfD, which had been excluded from the now-dissolved Identity and Democracy group, the predecessor of the PfE – highlight the strategic differences between the various rightwing parties in Europe, both inside and outside Parliament.

Taken together, however, the far right has significantly increased its influence in the decision-making bodies of the EU institutions. All three groups have increased their presence in committees dealing with climate and migration policy and are willing to support the EPP when majorities cannot be achieved otherwise. This has already happened with legislative proposals such as the Supply Chain Law, and has also been discussed in chat groups with regard to migration policy and other ‘culture war’ areas. National governments led or supported by far-right parties now have more influence in the European Parliament, and the EU College of Commissioners now includes Raffaele Fitto (Brothers of Italy, ECR) as Vice-President for Cohesion and Reforms, as well as Olivér Várhelyi (backed by Orbán and the EPP in 2024) for Health and Animal Welfare.

Policy differences

The three far-right groups differ in (a) their fundamental stance towards the European Union, (b) their relationship with conservatives, and (c) their foreign policy agendas in the context of the current geopolitical upheavals.

Stance towards the EU

All right-wing populist parties are rooted in a fundamental opposition to monetary union and supranational integration. Best exemplified by Brexit, this has usually been linked to a strategy of withdrawal and limiting the EU to a single market, possibly in conjunction with common defence and migration policies that would leave room for unilateral action at the national level. Based on de Gaulle’s vision of a ‘Europe of Nations’, with full sovereignty within national borders, this model rejects further integration or enlargement.

Since Brexit, far-right parties have abandoned their pledges to exit the EU – including monetary union and the eurozone – or retained them only in rhetorical form, expressed as radical Euroscepticism. The Italian Prime Minister has ruled out leaving the Union entirely, as has the Rassemblement National, whose predecessor, the Front National, was one of the most ardent advocates of withdrawal. The AfD was the only far-right party that retained the option of withdrawal in its manifesto for the European elections in 2024, other than on the extreme fringes.

The exit option has long since been supplanted by a demand for change, as articulated in Viktor Orbán’s 2017 speech to Hungarians living outside the country: ‘After the fall of the Wall, we in Central Europe thought Europe was our future. Today we know that we are the future of Europe.’ The plan is no longer to leave the Union, but something much more radical: to erode and destroy it from within.

Orbán embraced the slogans of the ‘Great Replacement’ theory, according to which Europe’s ethnic ‘purity’ is being actively undermined by elites’ openness to migration and other cultures, and that the only way this can be stopped is by a radical closing of borders, along with Christian-nationalist and anti-LGBTQ policies. Ever since the mass influx of migrants from Arab countries in 2015, especially – something the former AfD leader Alexander Gauland described at the time as ‘the best thing that could have happened to us’ – fantasies about ‘remigration’ have sprung up everywhere. These involve both the denial of jus soli (the legal principle that a person’s citizenship is determined by their place of birth) for children born in Europe, and vague plans for deportation which would also target EU citizens who ‘cannot be assimilated’.

Such ideas go hand-in-hand with antisemitic attacks on economic globalisation. The model for these is Hungary’s Stop Soros campaign. Orbán served as blueprint for Donald Trump’s MAGA movement and, when Trump came to power, was able to emerge from the shadows as a prophet of Europe’s future. The radical right proceeded to launch a general assault on the narrative around the Holocaust and the collaborationist or Quisling regimes implicated in it, for example rehabilitating the Horthy regime in Hungary and engaging in open revisionism of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and, increasingly, Austria and Slovenia – sometimes termed either the Visegrád Group or the Habsburg Connection – were able to form a blocking majority against Brussels (and Berlin and Paris), leaving the EU seemingly powerless when these countries installed illiberal democracies that lacked either a separation of powers, fundamental freedoms or an independent judiciary.

Relationship with the conservatives

Jordan Bardella, Marine Le Pen’s designated successor as head of the RN, also calls for strict limits on immigration and a review of the jus soli principle. However, Bardella and other leading figures on the far right have distanced themselves from identitarian rhetoric and the assumption of key roles by identitarians and neo-Nazis. The ban on contact with the AfD and other ESN representatives imposed by Marine Le Pen remains in place under Bardella and has been reinforced by open calls for a centre-right alliance, if not a governing coalition, with Christian Democrats, right-wing liberals and national-conservatives. In many cases these parties have already largely been cannibalised by the far right – see the Tories in the UK, Les Républicains in France and a series of Christian Democratic parties in north-west Europe.

Aimed at achieving government, or participation in government, the FN’s ‘de-demonisation’ project is shared by ‘moderate’ forces within the AfD that try to distance themselves from identitarian slogans and policies in the hope of appealing to right-leaning voters wary of extremists. Germany’s proclaimed ‘firewall’ is being increasingly called into question by the CDU/CSU – not just because it has failed to halt the rise of the extremists, but also because the centre right would rather govern with its rightwing rivals than depend on Green, liberal left and leftwing support. The fact that conservative-green coalitions have either been ruled out by conservative parties or been made impossible by a leftward shift among the green parties has also made rightwing coalitions more likely.

Foreign policy

Some hope that, if the far right participates in government, it will ‘de-demonise’ itself not just rhetorically but also in substance. There are precedents for this: Geert Wilders; the Belgian government formed by former Flemish separatist Bart de Wever in 2025; and the Meloni government, which has adopted a cooperative approach in its dealings with the EU, despite retaining its radical cultural policies. This approach was triggered by the overwhelming support for Ukraine shown by European governments and the European Commission in the face of Russia’s war of aggression. The pro-Russia countries in the EU, again following Orbán’s lead, opposed this support, leading to splits within the Visegrád Group. The AfD, which has particularly strong support in eastern Germany, still wants to end all support for Ukraine, along with sanctions on Russia.

These obstructionists have inflicted massive harm not just on Ukraine, but also on the EU’s capacity for integration and action, thereby exposing the military and civilian capacity gaps in European security. The EU’s vulnerability to blackmail – a result of its energy dependence on Russian oil and gas supplies – has increased. Many far-right parties have not just embraced Putin ideologically but have also accepted material support from Russia, which comes with a Moscow-initiated propaganda campaign to destabilise European liberal democracies.

For Meloni, by contrast, Donald Trump was a role model until his erratic policies massively increased tariffs and unleashed several wars of aggression of his own – with the friendly acquiescence of Moscow and Beijing. All attempts to ‘be nice’ to Trump failed. Abandoning its traditional anti-Americanism, the AfD has also turned to Trump and, to some extent, his vice president JD Vance, thanks to the American right’s interference in the European election campaigns (which turned out to have been unsuccessful in Hungary).

None of this changes the uncomfortable situation into which the Big Three – China included – have plunged Europe. In the face of the collapse of social democracy, the isolation of the green parties, antisemitic radicalism in parts of the far left and the numerical weakness and functional fragility of the resulting coalitions, two questions remain. First: how would a partnership, whether formal or not, between conservatives and rightwing populists safeguard liberal democracy in a Hobbesian world? And second: can liberals, leftwingers and conservative constitutional patriots find the pragmatic policies required to win over voters in the few remaining months before crucial elections in individual member states?

This article is published with the support of the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius