Why the far right is surging in Europe | FT Film

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The fight for the future and identity of Europe has already started.

The polls show there is going to be an increase in the share of the far right, possibly up to about 25 per cent.

The balance of power is going to shift.

Mass migration, energy politics, freedom of speech. People want to have a change of politics.

If you want to have a strong European Union, then you cannot vote right wing. You can't.

A right-wing coalition could water down regulation to protect the environment.

It's also a key moment in terms of the trajectory of Europe in the context of a war that's happening on its doorstep.

The polls are really troubling a lot of people. The stakes are very, very high.

In June, from June the 6th to June the 9th, there will be simultaneous elections in 27 countries to elect members of the European parliament.

The European parliament matters quite a lot because it has to vote through and negotiates a lot of laws that come through the EU and then will have to be implemented in the 27 member states, defence policy, security, agriculture policy.

Migration and asylum, carbon emissions reductions, there's almost no area of policy making that isn't covered to some degree by EU legislation.

We are sitting in this house, and we are making laws for almost 500mn people. And the way how this parliament is composed really matters.

In many European states, right wings try to get stronger. And if the European parliament has different seats and other minorities, then of course, the policy of the European Union will change.

The situation as it stands is that the centrist blocs, which is what we call the European People's party, which are the conservative centre right. We have the Socialists and Democrats, who are centre left. We have the Renew, which are the liberals. At the moment, those have over 60 per cent of the votes, and they tend to do deals among themselves. And they can usually secure the legislation they need.

What might happen after the election is that Renew, which are the liberals, could lose some seats and become the fourth biggest group, possibly, instead of the third. And then that brings in the ECR or the ID as a potential partner.

What you're going to see now is the potential for the centre right to form coalitions on different pieces of legislation with the populist right and potentially, even with the far right. That is a first in the way that the European parliament has operated. And it could mean quite a decisive change in the way the parliament shapes legislation.

Danes adopted amendment 16 in two parts. First part, by roll call vote, is open. With the shift of the centre of gravity and the parliament, will come the opportunity to have to create majorities around certain issues like immigration. Vote is closed.

Vote no.

The migration pact passed, in recent weeks, which was clearly one of the most contentious pieces of legislation to be passed by the parliament in the last five years. The rightward shift in European politics is already affecting, has already affected the way the European parliament has operated.

Public opinion in France and across much of Europe, has hardened against immigration in the past decade. You can maybe date that to the 2015 refugee crisis from the Syrian war. The traditional parties are shifting in response to what they can see as the shifting sands, politically, around them.

We have listened. We have acted and we have delivered on one of the main concerns of people across Europe.

Politicians read the polls and they open their mail bags and their emails. They thought, we need to have a policy to address this. We need something in the elections to go to the voters and say we're dealing with this. They're basically trying to fight the far right by moving onto their territory, to some extent, you know, a modest piece of their territory.

In terms of EU policy making, this will probably have most impact on immigration. But to understand the far right and the populist right, you've really got to understand that there are very many drivers in all of the different countries propelling them forward.

Far-right parties, across Europe, are polling strongly. We still don't really know what that will practically mean in the political direction of the EU and the parliament, in part, because the far right parties in Europe are not uniform. There's different ones in each country, and they don't actually all stand for the same thing.

Geert Wilders, the far-right, anti-Islam firebrand did extraordinarily well in national elections in the Netherlands. On the other hand, you could take a country like Spain, where the Vox party, its rise has been inspired much more by the rise of Catalan separatism than by anti-immigrant feeling.

One big question is whether the far right can actually unite on an agenda? The biggest increases in these groups' membership will come from the big countries of the EU - France, Germany, Italy. And therefore, they will also bring some of the national priorities of those member states with them.

The main contrast you can draw is between Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and Marine Le Pen in France. They're both far right on paper, but Meloni is obviously now in power at the top of a coalition.

She has played the game to many people's surprise and the discipline of governing ensures that you have to make rules and follow things and vote for things you might not agree.

For Le Pen, that contrast is quite stark. She's still outsider and trying to climb that last bit of the stairs. The Rassemblement National, under the Le Pen leadership, has been through this process of trying to normalise themselves. In French they call it dédiabolisation which literally means to detoxify the party. Everything they do has to be seen through that lens. They're trying to prove to voters that they can govern and that they're ready.

Whereas some populist, right-wing groups have actually moderated their positions in recent years, others have actually gone in a more radical direction. The Austrian far right is one. The other really noticeable one is Alternative for Germany.

They've gone in a different direction to the RN. And that's why, I think, Marine Le Pen distanced herself from Alejo Vidal and the leader of the AfD and from the party itself.

Le Pen's party even said, recently, it was no longer prepared to sit with the AfD in the European parliament because it deemed it too radical.

Over the years that I've covered them, they've become more right wing, more tainted by this sort of far-right ideology. And that makes them fascinating as a sort of case study.

The AfD's rise, last year, was very much propelled by public concern over immigration, but that's not, by far, the only issue. There's clearly more to the AfD's appeal. I think in Germany, particularly, there's been a big backlash against the green measures.

In Germany, 2023 was very, very difficult for Scholz's coalition government. They passed laws which were considered extremely unpopular, like, for example, the very controversial heating law which was supposed to persuade people to switch from gas and oil-fired boilers to heat pumps.

It led to millions of German households thinking that they were going to have to fork out tens of thousands of euros to replace their gas or oil-fired boiler in short order.

I'm really not a fan of AfD or things like that, but the energy building law, I call it like this. It really has been a own goal.

My name is Léon, Léon Henninger. I'm a professional showjumper, and this is my lifetime project. We're here making everything new and new riding areas and building a new stable and things like that. A heat pump, for us, was the most efficient thing in our energy mix because you put one kilowatt of electricity in and you get two kilowatts of thermal energy out of it. So this is absolutely amazing, but it's not something for all houses.

This view has become quite common, and this is a reason why more and more people are voting for AfD. If you look at this technology, how expensive it is.

So a heat pump could cost a German household up to 30,000 euros if you consider that you might also have to do renovations or changes to the way your heating system works to actually make it effective.

Not everyone can instal it in their house. Maybe the owners are even too old, no bank will give them a credit, and things like that. With this politics, they will build so many fears inside of the people.

That idea is getting traction. Everything related to sort of re-engineering industry to bring down emissions or renovating homes that all of that is just too much, too much too fast, and that it's unrealistic.

On the other hand, there were a lot of players in the field who really liked putting fear, wrong informations, chaos out there.

That is an issue that the right's been able to seize on. You know, they want to take your car away from you. They want you to take your boiler out of your house. So it feeds into this narrative of people feeling inflation's high, their pockets are pinched, and they want some relief. And instead, they're being told what to do.

What we've seen in recent weeks is that the Greens have really become a casualty of this sort of widespread anger at government policies. There have been extraordinary scenes where there's been so much disruption by protesters that Green politicians have had to cut short their public appearances and almost take shelter from the angry crowds.

I'm in politics now for over 10 years, and I did a lot of campaigns. If you are waking up and the first thing you read online is how silly you are or how you should be raped. I mean, that's not fun. And then if the threats, in real life, are getting closer to you, that's also something which is, yeah, which is hard.

The AfD has become the main beneficiary of popular dissatisfaction.

We never had as much success as right now, which is linked to the state of the country. This country is heading against the wall. And the AfD is the only party who is not responsible because we have never been in governmental power.

The AfD is still polling at around 18 per cent, which is pretty extraordinary given that large chunks of the party are actually under investigation by the German security services.

The Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, the German domestic intelligence agency, has been designating certain regional associations of the AfD as absolutely confirmed extreme right-wing organisations. And that makes them so unusual in Germany. They are an anti-party. They're an anti-establishment party.

This has become a Europe-wide phenomenon, tapping into dissatisfaction with the way that established politics and established parties work.

I very often feel that the political class has lost so much of the trust of the people. And if we just let all these areas of anxieties and emotions left to be exploited by the far right, then we are doing a huge mistake.

A lot of these far-right parties are tapping into an anti-elite narrative. There are voters who will think that the government is incompetent and are not doing its job properly. And there are others who just think the government and the people in it are not like them. They're an elite that protects themselves, feathers their own nests, and therefore, they're sort of right to move over towards the far right.

Populist and anti-establishment parties tend to do quite well in European parliamentary elections because voters will use them to cast a protest vote. France is the obvious example of that, where Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National is the biggest opposition party in parliament.

Going into the European elections, they have a really big polling lead, so they're polling first, in terms of polling intentions. They're still a bit far out, but they're polling at around 30 per cent of the electorate.

And it's setting itself up as an alternative to the sort of centrist brand of politics espoused by Emmanuel Macron.

I do think that the RN vote, for some people, is a protest vote, so it gives people a chance to say, we don't like the way the elites are governing us. So it's an essentially sort of... has that element of just I want to tear things down.

There's this emblematic moment, every year, in France. It's a farm fair called the Salon d'Agriculture, and it's a ritual. The president opens it on the first Saturday. And then there's a parade of politicians that go all throughout the week. It's in this massive conference hall on the outskirts of Paris. And this year, it was marked by the protest movement.

Farmers' protests have been on the rise. I think they quadrupled last year, compared to the year before.

We've seen farmers' protests in Brussels, in Berlin, in Athens, in Rome, and of course, in Paris. And this year's Salon d'Agriculture was a particularly rough occasion for France's president, Emmanuel Macron.

It was turned into a mess. The police had to put massive protection around him because some factions of the farmers were angry and trying to come in. And he ended up staying the whole day instead of fleeing back to the Elysee. But the images that were on TV were almost catastrophic.

I mean, there were images of him surrounded by dozens of police to protect him while he's like walking around this farm fair. And the RN has quite ably used this moment as a way to put pressure on Macron and also just cast themselves as, again, the ally of the working man.

The Rassemblement National has historically defended rural life. We are traditionally a party that has been denouncing the fact that so much money was invested in the big cities to the detriment of investing in the rural areas.

Farmers aren't traditionally a far-right electorate in France, but the party clearly thinks that many of their complaints are similar; anti-globalisation, anti-free trade, anti-environmental legislation, and the weight of, kind of, Brussels bureaucracy, as they see it, or EU rules and regulations.

I think the farmers' protests have offered the Rassemblement National a great opportunity to, you know, pose with tractors and bash Brussels.

The RN has ably surfed on this issue. They have a favourite term that they use a lot, which is, punitive ecology that the EU is a regulatory beast run wild. I mean, I'm speaking for them. I'm not saying that I actually agree with this. But the way that they do agricultural policy is too punitive for the farmers and that the farmers basically need to be liberated from all these environmental rules and free-trade rules.

That made many farmers stop being able to produce sugar beets, all while importing sugar from countries where these products are allowed.

When farmers say that they want to make a living of their jobs, that they know how to do, and that they don't need any interference from any bureaucrats sitting in fancy offices in Brussels, people understand this. They have interference in their daily lives, all the time, without asking for it.

Their difficulties in actually making money and keeping afloat, to some people, epitomise a kind of a bureaucracy that doesn't work.

The populist right, if we can put it like that, is divided up into two groups, the Identity and Democracy, which are the more hardline, eurosceptic, anti-immigration, anti-EU far-right parties.

They have people like Rassemblement National from France, Marine Le Pen's party. The other parties don't really collaborate with them. They don't involve them in decision-making process. They tend to be disruptors from the outside. The European Conservatives and Reformists, that's run by Giorgia Meloni of Italy, are more inside the tent. They chair committees. They produce reports. They vote on laws.

If we were talking about one far-right group, and if you joined the Identity and Democracy and European Conservatives and Reformists, they would be almost the biggest party. That would be a completely different situation. They would have a lot more power. But we're not in that situation. And as they are divided, they are a lot less influential than they could be.

We are different groups, obviously. We have on our side the APP, on the other side, the ID. These are the groups more similar to us, but especially with the ID, we have some important differences.

There are all sorts of disagreements and disputes between Meloni and Le Pen and between different parties within their factions. They obviously are nationalists, so it makes it hard to co-operate on transnational issues.

Attitudes towards Russia and the war in Ukraine are, if you like, the great schism that runs down far-right and populist-right parties in Europe.

The European council reconfirmed Europe's unwavering commitment to stand with Ukraine. We will support them with the necessary funding and provide them with a much-needed predictability they deserve.

On the key issue of Russia and Ukraine and how does Europe deal with this existential challenge on its doorstep, Meloni is on the von der Leyen-Macron line, which is, support Ukraine, arm Ukraine. Russia must be defeated.

If they fall, we risk a domino effect so that all the Europe could be on fire.

Marine Le Pen is on a line which is much more, I would say, muddy.

Our position on Ukraine is we need peace. We need peace. Of course, we will never, ever stop condemning Putin for having invaded a free nation. However, today, we really need to be looking for a peace solution.

And that's a massive difference in the moment we live in. That's not nothing. It's huge. And that is kind of what potentially just makes them irreconcilable. They're far rights that might just be, in this current moment, irreconcilable.

As long as that continues, that will, if you like, soften the kind of radical influence that these right-of-centre parties will have on EU policy making.

A parliament that is dominated by the far right would be a very different parliament. And I honestly feel that the deep existential challenges of our times are ones that have to be fought in this parliament, as well.

If you want to have a strong European Union who has the values of human rights, women's rights, climate and environmental protection, you cannot vote right wing. You can't.

We want Europe. We want a different kind of Europe, not a bureaucratic, technocratic, imperialistic structure that they've created here in Brussels.

It's going to be a little bit of a free for all. You might have far-right sympathising parties coming out ahead, but fundamentally, if they don't reconfigure in a way where they can all weigh together on the line of the parliament, it might end up not changing very much.

I think we can see some signs of how European policy is going to change over the next five years already, which is this less ambition on the climate, a harder edge towards the rest of the world.

You are likely to see tougher policies.

Vote is closed.

But it's a sort of rightwards evolution and a slightly more nationalistic evolution. It's not a revolution that will upend the way the EU works.