From Protest to Power Far Right Takes Over Europe. Wider View from Brussels

Will European integration survive past the end of this decade? That by no means is certain. Next year, France, a founding member of the European Union, will hold a presidential election which may bring to power a Eurosceptic national rally of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella. Poland will also hold a parliamentary election which may return Eurosceptic forces to power. Should these political forces prevail, what would that mean for the future of the European project? Will these buildings, the buildings you see around here, of European Parliament, the commission just around the corner, will they come to serve a very different purpose? These are the questions Europe cannot avoid and we will take on with them with our guests. I am Marcin Zaborowski. Join me for the next wider view from Brussels. Last week, Jordan Bardella, leader of the French national rally, visited Warsaw where he was hosted by the Polish far-right party confederation. Bardella and the leader of confederation, Krzysztof Bosak, agreed that the EU is sick and that power must be returned to national capitals. To unpack the consequences of these leaders coming to power, I'm joined by Zoya Szewtalowicz of Politico and Garvan Walsh of Unhack Democracy. He's a co-founder of the outfit. Well, thank you for stopping by. Much appreciated. And let me just go straight into the issues that we have to unpack. So, to start with, not all of the far-right parties are the same. They tend to be quite different. For example, Melania's party seems to be quite moderated at this point in time. The Polish confederation is not law and justice. What are we talking about here when these people come to power? Do we talk about the rapture or a shift? I think there's two groups here. There's one group which we might say is led by Maloney's party, Brothers of Italy, Fratelli d'Italia. They want to move European institutions in a right-wing direction. So you can see them thinking, OK, we want strong defence, strong borders, little immigration, more economic protectionism. But they want to do a lot of that, actually, while keeping institutions more or less as they are. Contrast that with Bardella, or law and justice, or obviously confederation, who really want to go back to the idea of a Europe of nations. They want to devolve European power to member states. They think that it's better if member states try and work in a more intergovernmental kind of way. And this division has been running through groups on the right, like the ECR, the European Conservatives and Reformists like this, other groups, the Sovereignists, and also the so-called Patriots for Europe. And that's one of the reasons they haven't been able to actually coalesce in one group, because they don't actually agree. There's this big division over whether you want to move Europe collectively to the right, or whether they want to go back to having nationalist member states in Europe, cooperating or not cooperating, as the case might be. So Zoya, your newspaper has interviewed Bardella before his trip to Warsaw. So in a sense, you had an opportunity to witness his appeal, or a lack of first hand. What do you think is happening here? Is it the fact that the far right has just more appealing answers right now, or the centre, the mainstream parties just don't have any suitable answers right now? I think the appeal of Jordan Bardella in France, I mean, the appeal of the far right has been growing over the years. The polling has been showing that in the last few elections, the far right has managed to capture more and more of the vote share. And I think it's pretty consistent in a few countries, the AfD in Germany has a similar level of support. I think the Bardella kind of platform, he's saying that he's not going to be a Maloney, and he's not going to be a Viktor Orban. In our interview, when he was speaking with my colleague, he said, I'm going to do things my way. So he's not going to be a Maloney who comes together and kind of seeks compromise and has been seen as a very constructive person on that EU stage. And he's also said that he's not going to be an Orban who vetoes everything. So he's going to do things his own way. But certainly the message was quite fiery in that interview. And he said that his intention is to do things like ensure that France's national interest is protected, ensure that the budget, the EU budget is smaller. So he's definitely throwing his weight around. OK, so I wanted to move straight into the implications for European integration. And let's listen to what Bardella had to say about the future of Europe, if he ever comes to power. As for a new European architecture, I find today that the European Union no longer corresponds to the march of the world, the European Union and globalization, the happy, all-powerful market, immigration out of control and with the power over the economy, business and European industry. All of this is profoundly outdated. While all of this was deeply desired in the prime years of Europe, today, the European Union is totally obsolete in its current form. In its present shape, it is no longer capable of responding to the major challenges that will arise tomorrow. Our country has talked a lot about the economy, defense and migration control, but also about climate, artificial intelligence and space exploration. All of this should function primarily through European cooperation and cooperation between European states before being a federal vision of Europe. Therefore, we must change the way the European Union functions. So, quite strong words. Garvan, let's look into that scenario that, hypothetically speaking right now, Bardella or Le Pen is coming to power in April 2027, quite soon. Law and justice returns to power in Poland or governs together with confederation, which could make it actually even more extreme. The alternative for Germany dominates East Germany. And actually, can Europe survive that? Can the European Union survive that? Well, the first thing is what Bardella is saying here is not new. This is what the far right have been saying in their European policy for the last 30 or 40 years. What is new is they're slightly larger in France than they used to be. So, there's a chance that he might actually win rather than losing in the second round, like various Le Pens have done over the last five or six presidential elections in France. Not being called Le Pen probably helps because the name is a bit toxic among right-leaning voters who still think, hold on a minute, we remember Jean-Marie, we remember him actually being anti-Semitic, actually being as close to Nazism as you could get in France. But Bardella is a different guy. He can present himself as a new kind of figure and he can, you know, try and hoover up suspicion of the left. Particularly if Mélenchon, the far-left candidate, is his opponent, he has a pretty good chance of winning. In head-to-head polling, he tends to meet Mélenchon, he tends to lose to the centrist Edouard Philippe. So, you can see them kind of having a chance to say, okay, let's go. But on the other hand, some of the far-right surge has kind of peaked. The right-wing populist got into government in the Netherlands, messed it up majorly. Viktor Orban is out of power in Hungary. Poland is, you know, a mixed case. Obviously, the coalition are ahead at the moment in the polls, but whether they can form a government is the question. It's kind of the reverse of 2023 in Poland. I don't think we can jump straight towards saying, okay, what happens if they're definitely going to get in everywhere? I don't think that's going to happen. What is going to happen is they're going to be against any new integration initiatives. It's going to be harder to cooperate on defence. Enlargement is going to be very difficult because perhaps Montenegro will still manage to squeak in in such a scenario, but they'll make enlargement to Ukraine very, very hard. Whatever happens with the Western Balkans will be difficult too. You might have to start looking at defence integration outside the European institutions rather than inside them if someone like Bardella starts running France. So, let's be an optimist for a moment and look into an argument which also exists in the debate, which is that the EU survived 16 years of Orban. It survived eight years of law and justice. It converted Meloni. So, maybe the EU itself has this power and ability to survive the surge of the far right and the far right coming to power. Do you agree with this argument or not so much? I don't really have a position on that. I think it depends on the circumstances. It depends on what Bardella does if he does actually come to power. I do think the EU's institutions are obviously quite strong. Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, has a pretty tight grip on the levers of power. And I think ultimately the thing that the EU has is this kind of powerful argument for itself, which is that people who join the EU get richer. Countries that join the EU get richer. Countries that leave the EU spend 10 years debating how they're going to leave, and it's a whole mess. So, I think that's kind of the powerful argument that the EU has on its behalf. But I don't know. I mean, I think we would all be silly to try to guess what Bardella might do if he should get into power. And of course, there's plenty of opposition as well. There are lots of decisions the EU can make without unanimity. So, you know, perhaps it's slower on things like enlargement, but there's a lot that it does that doesn't require every country to agree. I wanted to move now into transatlantic relations, another important area here. What happens if this country, if these parties come to power? What that would mean for the relationship with the United States? They tend not to be strong Atlanticists in the sense of support for NATO. Do you see a danger here? Vo Bardella recently played it down in his interview. He played it down, but, you know, there's a strong trend in French nationalism to be anti-American, to have independent French foreign policy. That's different from, you know, the Polish, at least the law and justice position, which is, you know, if not necessarily systematically institutionally Atlanticist, certainly very strong bilateral relationships with the United States are crucial to them. That's a difference between Poland and France here. Maloney is now having an enormous spat with Trump because he claimed that she was begging for an interview with him. The trouble is, if we had a sort of rational J.D. Vance type mag of saying, we're going to leave Europe to the Europeans, we're going to concentrate on Asia, we're going to be nationalist Americans and pretty transactional, you could see the far right in Europe having a relationship with that kind of American administration that would probably go quite well. The trouble is Trump is so unreliable, so likely to double cross his friends that it's very difficult to even have any kind of relationship with him. If you're a European nationalist of some kind, you probably need to think about defending Greenland. You probably need to think of resisting American encroachment in international institutions, and you're also probably going to be a bit worried about China. These things make the relationship difficult just because of Trump's personality, but a long-term practical co-operative with MAGA is something that you could see. About a year ago or so, most of these West European far-right parties were big fans of Donald Trump. AFD, Melania's party, the national rally in France, of course, all the far-right parties in Poland, Romania and so on. That no longer seems to be the case, especially in France or Germany or Italy. So what happened there? I don't think it was ever the case in France. I think in France it's always been pretty toxic to be overly friendly with any US administration or overly deferential to any US president. So I didn't see too many signs of Le Pen being particularly close to MAGA world. I think in the other places, certainly things have changed. Obviously, Georgia Maloney was seen as the closest friend of Donald Trump on that EU level for a long time. And then that really kind of took a hit because of the trade war, because Trump ended up implementing tariffs on goods that are particularly important to the Italian economy, pasta being one of them. But I think it's the same thing for Germany, you know, when you've got Trump slapping mega tariffs on the auto industry, threatening the EU, I think that's a pretty big hit to anyone who wants to align themselves too closely with Trump. And I think the most recent example as Garvin brought up was this spat with Georgia Maloney and Donald Trump. Time and again, European politicians have learnt that Donald Trump does not treat his friends better than his enemies. And so I think that is a pretty clear lesson if you're an EU politician on the far right in how not to behave and how to behave. So I think it's just been a year of Trump has kind of shown people what positions Trump respects. He respects power. He doesn't respect friendship. So I think that is behind a lot of this. And also because Donald Trump is pretty deeply unpopular, even among far right voters in a lot of countries. And I think Poland is a bit of a, a bit of an outlier on this. But ever since the threats to remove troops from Poland, NATO troops, American troops from Poland, I think that was a big wake up call to Poles and to the Baltics. And in my conversations that I have with diplomats from those countries, there's been a huge shift. Greenland, first off, the threat to Greenland was a huge wake up call. So any sort of threat to take territory from an EU country by a NATO ally, particularly the most important NATO ally, I think that's always going to have a huge effect. And then you follow that up with troop withdrawals and undermining NATO at every step. So I think it's pretty logical that far right leaders have looked around and seen, well, firstly, Trump isn't particularly good to his friends. And secondly, our voters don't like him and don't like his policies. So they've just gone in the direction of public opinion. So I wanted to now shift to the issue of Russia and Ukraine. Also another important paradigm in the far right discourse. Poland until recently was an outlier in the sense that the Polish Law and Justice Party tended to be quite pro-Ukrainian. But even that is changing. And only a couple of days ago, in fact, the day before yesterday, we had a major spat between Poland and Ukraine on historical grounds. And let's take a listen to the president of Poland talking about the affair. In light of President Volodymyr Zelensky's consent to name one of the units of the armed forces of Ukraine heroes of the UPA. And after consulting with the chapter, I have decided to revoke the order of the White Eagle from the president of Ukraine. At this point, I would like to emphasize this decision is not directed against the Ukrainian people. It does not signify a change in the strategic direction of Polish security policy. We have supported and continue to support Ukraine because we know that Russian aggression poses a threat to the security of Poland and all of Europe. Nothing has changed in this assessment. Russia is the aggressor and Putin is a criminal who bears responsibility for unleashing a war that has brought Europe its biggest armed conflict since the end of World War II. So let's start with a general observation here. The Ukrainian president names a military unit after the formation responsible for ethnic cleansing in Volhynia, which was part of Poland before the war. In return, Polish president stripped Zelensky of Poland's highest honor, meaning the Medal of the White Eagle. All of this is happening at the time of war, where Ukraine is effectively fighting war against to defend its borders against Russia. So can we just say that in both countries, nationalist discourse is taking over? I mean, part of this is also Navrotsky's personality. The guy will start a fight in an empty room. Whenever there's an opportunity to have a spat with one of Poland's neighbors, he takes it. And in this case, he took advantage of a serious mistake by Zelensky and used it to try and build up his own nationalist support. There's a lot of factional infighting on the Polish nationalist right at the moment, and he obviously wants to be in the most prominent position combined with his instincts. That's why we have this completely unnecessary altercation. And this shows us the kind of trouble with nationalism as an ideology. It appeals to this sense of pride that nations have. And in a continent like Europe, most nations have committed atrocities against each other. There are always going to be historical events that can be exploited by nationals to generate unnecessary conflict. I will say that European institutions, if anything, were designed to stop this kind of thing happening, considering the thousand years of fighting between France and Germany. And if we can get over the fighting between France and Germany, we can get over the fighting between any other group of countries that exist. What we have to do now is calm this tension down, work out something less symbolic. It's probably important that Zelensky sent back his medal before the prime minister, Donald Tusk, had countersigned it, so it keeps him out of this particular spat. And I hope that we can soon put this behind us and recognize that the real aggressor here is Russia, and that all European countries need to get together and suppress these national instincts, which are understandable and historical, but they need to be suppressed in the common cause of defeating a Russian aggression, because Russian aggression won't stop in Ukraine. They're aiming at other European countries, and we need to stick together in this fight. And Poland has a particularly important role in leading this fight in Central Eastern Europe. It is one of the largest countries in the region, but it's also not so large it can do it itself. It needs allies, and it needs to work constructively with other European countries to foment and develop and strengthen those alliances, not weaken them. Why do you think President Zelensky chose to honour and glorify the formation which was responsible for the ethnic cleansing of Poles? Did he not foresee the consequences, the implications of that? What it could mean for Polish political scene? I think, again, I can't speak for what advice he got. In Ukraine, this UPA is seen as a formation that fought against occupying Nazis and Soviets, and as defending Ukrainian independence or attempting to defend Ukrainian independence. So I think there is a symbolism there. If you look at what Ukraine is doing now, fighting against the Russians, I think that's the kind of the thinking behind that. And look, I think it's one of those things where it was probably a misstep if you look at kind of the fallout from it. Certainly, it has hit Ukraine's diplomacy and particularly given a gift to Kaczynski and to Nawrocki to be able to kind of use that as a cudgel against Ukraine. I do think two things. Firstly, look, obviously, the Polish election is coming up and there are attempts being made to create certain kind of stories out of these sorts of things to appeal to people. And I think we could already see it. It's not this isn't a particularly new thing either. This has kind of bubbled up every so often these sorts of spats between Poland's nationalist politicians and Ukrainian politicians. So I think this is kind of an extra step in that direction. But I think ultimately, it was pretty clear from those comments from the president, from Nawrocki, that this doesn't change Poland's support for Ukraine on the battlefield. So I think that was an important thing for him to have said to demonstrate that this is not going to mean that Poland stops backing Ukraine or stops sending money or weaponry. Now, very shortly, Garvan, if I can just ask for your comment on whether you think that that spat can mean that the next year election in Poland will be fought by the right and far right on anti-Ukrainian platform. This spat doesn't necessarily mean that what matters then is how the forces on the Polish right align in the ultimate election campaign. Who ends up being understood as the likely prime ministerial figure they would have if they win. It doesn't depend on this spat. It depends on the internal divisions within the Polish right. And we'll see how they evolve over the next few months. OK, so the final question for both of you for one minute and not prediction but prescription, which is what the pro-European, in your view, what pro-European parties in Paris, Warsaw, Madrid, what are they getting consistently wrong? What is happening there that they appeal to the voters seems to be going down and the appeal of the far right seems to be going up? What is it what they should change? I think at the moment there's the kind of more centrist forces, the sorts of policies that they're backing, environmental policy and so on. I think they can seem a bit out of touch for voters who are really struggling with the cost of living and with energy prices being very high in some parts of Europe with the impact on people's lives from interest rates, from stagnating wages, from a lack of economic growth. From competition from China and from the US that's driving prices up, employment struggling in response to that, the economy struggling in response to that. So I think there is a sense when you look at the polling, people do seem to think that while these kind of fat cats living in the capitals who are suckling on the teat of the state, they're having a great life, they're really enjoying themselves sipping champagne and lattes and I'm having a terrible time here. And they're looking, they're angry and they're looking for someone to blame and those people are the establishment and so they're looking for those counter-establishment forces that are promising to clean up their act and crack down on corruption and crack down on all of this stuff. So I think probably it is a question of messaging and acknowledging people do have these concerns that are real and rooted in a reality that people are living. So I think anything that can address those concerns would be helpful to those parties because the far right, particularly in places where they don't have power, are able to sort of say, well, when we're in charge, we'll make your life better. Thank you, Zoya. Garvan, you're one last minute. Yeah, the Republicans in France have tried to address those concerns. What's happened to them? They're down to, you know, low double figures, 10, 12%. The Partito Populare have been trying to do that. They've moved to the right. Their vote is getting eaten by Vox. The centre-right parties in Italy all got consumed by Fratelli d'Italia. The trouble is, addressing their concern strategy keeps being tried. It never works. The centre-right need to find something else. The difficulty is that actually trying to govern from the centre-right also doesn't seem to work. If you look at New Democracy in Greece, which has tried to be pretty centrist, they've now got three, perhaps four parties to their right jumping up to meet that unmet demand. This is a real dilemma for the centre-right parties. I'm afraid I don't have an answer, other than, you know, political skill and charisma for getting them out of this particular hole. Well, two very different prescriptions. Thank you, Zoya Sheftalovic of Politico, Garvan Walsh of Unhug Democracy. Thank you for stopping by. Thanks. Thank you.