When Pan-Nationalism Veers Nationalist
Far-right gains in EU Parliament, and Macron's ensuing national gamble, paint a complex portrait of global politics in an already war-stressed world
Even if we knew it was coming, it’s been hard to watch the world’s mediocrity play out in real-time. And this past week, we’ve seen a lot of it—from the environmental front, to our war fronts, to election results for European parliament and its regional fallout.
On Friday, Azerbaijan—the host for COP29, this year’s international climate change mitigation conference—affirmed its commitment to growing fossil fuel production. This is not surprising if you’ve been following energy politics in Europe amid Russia’s war in Ukraine, in which high-minded ideological principles have collided with the consequences of our failure to divest from oil and gas sooner. (But we’ll return to the Russia-Ukraine war in a beat, because it ties in to EU election results.)
Then Israeli Knesset-member Benny Gantz, the moderate who joined Israel’s war cabinet as a show of political solidarity after October 7 (despite years of vehement criticism of Netanyahu’s erosion of democratic planks of Israeli society, and his deference to far-right extremists), stepped down on June 9. This took place after a weeks-long call for Netanyahu’s coalition to provide a coherent day-after plan for Gaza that wouldn’t leave Israel as the occupying force.
This was not the only time that Gantz had threatened to leave—there were fierce, months-long arguments over the military exemption of ultra-Orthodox citizens, many of whom are simultaneously the most vehement advocates for total war and accelerating settler violence—but the fear of giving more political control to those extremists with his withdrawal from the war cabinet was a pressing concern.
And it still is, because when Gantz accused Netanyahu of avoiding a ceasefire and failing to secure the return of hostages so as not to incur the wrath of his far-right coalition, he was speaking a well-known truth in this scenario: Netanyahu’s fragile government hangs on keeping its far-right extremists appeased. And its far-right extremists do not want a ceasefire, or any end to this scenario that doesn’t involve fuller Israeli sovereignty over the whole surrounding territory.
(In other words, this has rapidly become a conflict in which old-order illusions are utterly destroyed, but I recommend reading Sam Kahn’s latest thoughtful, grief-informed piece, as a US citizen and diaspora Jewish person, to get a sense of just how hard that realization is now hitting some of our fellow witnesses to atrocity.)
And that pressure point, on the far-right side of Israeli government, also means US President Joe Biden is learning the hard way that he can’t just speak a ceasefire into being. On June 10, the UN Security Council passed a resolution endorsing Biden’s peace plan, to immediate criticism of a senior Israeli official and a murky game of double-speak in Israeli media, where a missive associated with the PM’s office is both stating that they support the ceasefire and that Israel will maintain the freedom to keep fighting and achieve all its war aims. This stance is in keeping with Netanyahu’s own comments on June 9, when he reaffirmed his commitment to “the achievement of all the objectives of war, primarily the release of all our hostages and the elimination of Hamas” and offered an open door to working with any Zionist political parties “disposed to come to the table and help achieve victory over our enemies”.
In light of this news, it’s no surprise that Biden also recently admitted to considering a unilateral deal for the return of US hostages, to be negotiated through Qatar. There are signs of movement in ceasefire diplomacy, but it’s still all gamified at present.
All of which brings us to the other political mess happening concurrently: the fallout from European Union’s parliamentary elections, held from June 6-9.
The far-right’s wins and wobbles
Now, to be clear, these election results, writ large, should have surprised no one. Back in January, the European Council on Foreign Relations predicted a strong shift to the far right, and their forecasting was accurate in broad strokes (if leaving something to be desired in the turnout for specific parties). I’d written a piece then for now-defunct OnlySky offering a cultural explainer for the rise of the Alternative for Germany Party in particular, which was prompting local counter-protests—but not enough, clearly, to offset a growing lack of confidence in more mainstream political groups.
It’s a nice rainbow, isn’t it? Too bad actual politics aren’t as simple.
One of the biggest news items out of these provisional results involves the Renew Europe Party, which was strongly backed by French President Emmanuel Macron, and which lost out hugely to the Identity and Democracy Group (ID), the EU party that supports France’s far-right National Rally (RN). French voters lent 31% to the latter list of candidates, next to a mere 14% to Macron’s list.
And what did the French President decide to do next, despite the next national election not being until 2027?
Why, call a snap election in France, of course!
Macron has always been a bit of a gambler, so he’s clearly trying to leverage the shock of these EU results to shift the National Assembly to grant him the majority he didn’t get in 2022. But his gamble might come at a much more serious cost to the country’s future. It’s not just that a Monday forecast for this late-June/early-July election suggests that the NR is currently poised to win. It’s also that the usual stronghold against far-right extremism—the traditional conservative party, Les Républicains, which inherits from a strong Gaullist history of mainstream liberal-conservatism—is now in turmoil after its leader suggested a willingness to work with NR in a coalition.
That party will doubtless undergo some internal reshuffling over the comment, but it also reflects a deeper mess surrounding what to make of far-right European gains.
Serving as a democratic check-and-balance to the European Commission, the European Parliament is an assembly voted in by EU citizens, with no power to introduce legislation, but with voting power that extends to the approval of the EU’s budget and Commission nominees. It also allows for the platforming and normalizing of political ideas, union-wide, that might otherwise only be found in one country—and in this way, it often helps parties to boost subsequent national showings, too.
On paper, far-right parties saw a significant rise. Not everywhere! Finland, Sweden, and Denmark saw a left-wing surge instead. But the far right isn’t the same as traditional conservative offsets to everyday policy concerns. The far right operates on an extreme distrust of international projects, and leans hard on anti-immigrant and racist dogwhistling (or overt whistling) to whip up populist support for insular politics.
Giorgia Meloni of the Brothers of Italy, saw huge gains in the European elections, and these are expected to boost her populist radical-right party’s share of seats in future Italian elections, too. Far-right parties won in Austria, tied in the Netherlands, and took second in Germany and Romania.
And even where the gains weren’t quite as clear as raw numbers suggest, there’s also a significant conservative “creep” in other EU alliances. As the Chatham House independent policy institute recently noted, Renew is still toying with whether or not to boot the Dutch Conservatives from its coalition, based on Dutch Conservatives allying themselves locally with Geert Wilders’ far-right Freedom Party. Renew also has fewer friends in the Christian Democrats (EPP) these days, as the EPP sidles up more to the European Conservatives and Reformists Group (which includes Meloni’s Brothers of Italy)—to the dismay of the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) block.
Nevertheless, the strong difference between traditional conservative parties and the mad array of populist far-right parties now on the rise matters, because even with an overall surge in extremists in this latest election, the EU is not going to find its most conservative members all playing nice together as a matter of course.
This is because many of them are deeply divided on key questions, like ongoing EU support for the Ukraine in its defence against Russia, and other EU investments in pan-continental projects for trade and climate change.
The ID is an especially big question mark for overall efficacy, because it’s made up of many nationalist splinter groups that fundamentally do not agree with the pan-European nature of the EU, and are not inclined to involve themselves in policy agreements at all. (In the past, many just failed to show up for EU votes.)
Their presence, in other words, is often less about “trying to take over the EU” and more about telling the EU to butt out of regional affairs—while also gumming up the works on key financial measures. If some of the far-right gets their way on war funding, too, Russia will have all the help it needs not just to crush Ukraine, but also to encroach further on the political futures of other countries in Eastern Europe.
In the end, though, even if traditional conservative and far-right blocks of this latest European parliament end up splintering around such issues, the sheer presence of so many more far-right members in European Parliament can still do tremendous damage to the overall promise of the EU, as a broader coalition meant to serve as a check-and-balance against local extremism. When national blocks strongly vote in favour of isolationist politics while electing members to more globalized posts, what they’re really signalling is a promise of many more local sites of democratic degradation—and with it, serious threats to human thriving—in the years ahead.
The wars and the politically weary
As I noted last week, we are a small-c conservative species, much as I’m sure we’d love to be otherwise. For all our grand notions of unity and brotherly love, we fragile, fleeting biochemical wonders are easily pushed into more antagonistic and risk-averse positions by just a few socioeconomic, environmental, and political pressures.
Watching the world’s most powerful people and corporations show utter indifference to the urgency of climate change mitigation has an impact on us.
Watching war after war waged with brutal human costs and no end in sight, all in service to abstracted imperial, state, and religious projects, has an impact on us.
Watching those around us snap and turn ugly when talking about the lesser value of some human beings, on account of the aforementioned strain, has an impact on us.
Watching migration levels rise alongside stark economic divides, housing crises, job crises, and related everyday strains on our families’ livelihoods has an impact on us.
I don’t think a lot of people who now find themselves stumping for far-right groups necessarily thought that they’d end up on that part of the political spectrum.
I also suspect that they view their current politics as the logical end result of a series of coherent responses to very real sociopolitical stressors all along the way.
This, then, is the real danger we face, as the world continues to under-perform in response to an immense polycrisis with no clear exit.
As the world gets hotter, we’re getting hotter under the collar, and “tribing up” with desperate intensity in response to new breaking points. And it’s not going to get better any time. We’re increasingly going to believe that our tribal divisions are everything. My nation above your nation. My people above your people.
At least…
That’s the path we’re going to keep walking unless we can accept that maybe—just maybe—all the pressures we’re witnessing, and all the failures of leadership we’re moving through, are not leading us into deeper tribal extremes out of “reason” at all.
The European Parliament elections are a wake-up call, but not in the way that people like Macron seem to think it is: not as a game, that is, to be won solely at the polls.
We have been living through a galling decade of global political failures.
And we may not be able to fix this state of affairs, as individuals.
But if we’re to preserve even a shred of our humanity through the coming turn in political society writ large, we can and must pay attention to the psychological work that this broader normalization of nationalist extremism is doing upon all of us.
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML