Peter Franklin is an Associate Editor of UnHerd.
The resurgence of right-wing populism on the Continent doesn’t get the attention it deserves in Britain.
I realise that we’re out of the EU – but the latest poll shows that 49 per cent of Britons would vote to re-join. I wonder if the #FBPE crowd would be quite so keen if they realised how reactionary Europe is getting these days.
And just to be clear, I don’t just mean countries like Hungary and Poland, but Western Europe too.
Most obviously, there’s Italy where the populists – led by Giorgia Meloni – have already taken power. In France, Marine Le Pen has never been closer to the presidency. In the Netherlands, the government has just collapsed, which means a general election with the anti-establishment Farmer-Citizen Movement leading in the polls.
Meanwhile in Spain, the memory of the Franco dictatorship was supposed to have immunised the Spanish against the populist bug. But tell that to Vox, which commands the support of one in seven Spaniards and may enter a coalition with the Spanish conservatives, the People’s Party, following this month’s general election.
We also see advances for similar parties in Portugal, Sweden, Greece and Finland.
But perhaps the most important example is in Germany, where support for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is surging. It’s not just the historical context that ought to command our attention, the party’s ideological trajectory.
Founded a decade ago, the AfD started off as a moderate Eurosceptic party. Its founder and first leader was a mild-mannered professor called Bernd Lucke. In 2014 the AfD was admitted to the European Conservatives and Reformists group in the European Parliament, which David Cameron was instrumental in founding.
But then, in 2015, Lucke and his fellow moderates were ousted by radical right-wingers. AfD broke with the ECR group, eventually ending up in the much more extreme ID group, which includes the likes of Le Pen, Geert Wilders, and Matteo Salvini.
This drift to the right did not stop the AfD from growing in popularity. In the 2017 federal election it scored a shock third place, becoming the largest opposition party. For the British Remainers who’d held up Germany as the sensible, grown-up country that barmy Brexit Britain could only dream of becoming, it was all rather awkward.
So you can imagine their relief when the AfD bubble burst. Constant infighting was partly to blame, as well as the lowering of political temperature on issues like immigration. At the 2021 federal election, the AfD went backwards, losing votes and sinking from third to fifth place.
Similar trends elsewhere in Europe, combined with the defeat of Donald Trump in 2020, led some commentators to declare an end to the populist wave.
But they spoke too soon. Over the last year, right-wing populism has bounced back – often exceeding previous peaks in popularity.
AfD is an especially dramatic example. The party has more than doubled its support since 2021, and now routinely polls at around the 20 per cent mark. In the last few weeks it has pulled ahead of the governing Social Democrats to take second place, behind the Christian Democrats.
It could be argued that this doesn’t really matter, because there’s zero chance of any reversion to Germany’s old habits. Indeed, it is precisely because of the country’s past that an impregnable cordon sanitaire has been placed around the AfD, in which all the other parties work together against the populists.
Even Die Linke (‘The Left’), the successor to the old East German Communists, is allowed to participate in regional governments. Not so the AfD, which is excluded from power everywhere.
But for how long can the line be held? In a political system built on consensus and coalition building, excluding a party on 20 per cent of the vote is much harder than one on ten per cent.
Furthermore, in the states that made up the former East Germany (where the far-right NPD previously achieved regional representation in the Noughties), AfD support is much higher. For instance, the latest poll from Thuringia puts the party on 34 per cent. Can the representatives of a third of the electorate be frozen out forever?
Note that AfD doesn’t need to win the next election to trigger a meltdown. All that’s required is for its national support to continue rising to the 25 per cent mark.
At that point the mathematics of building stable coalition governments stops working. Indeed, the aftermath of the next federal election could plunge Germany into a full-blown political crisis.
Currently, there are six parties in the Bundestag: AfD and Die Linke at each extreme; the Christian Democrats and Free Democrats on the (centre-)centre-right; and the Social Democrats and the Greens on the centre-left.
Typically, a governing coalition is formed from two or three of the four centrist parties. For instance, the current government is a so-called traffic light coalition, after the colours of its component parties (red for the Social Democrats, yellow for the Free Democrats and, er, green for the Greens).
However, with AfD on 25 per cent it’s unlikely that that a red-yellow-green coalition could command a majority. The Christian Democrats (party colour: black) would have to return to government. But, of course, they too would need coalition partners.
The tried-and-tested option is to form a grand coalition with the Social Democrats. Alternatively, they might try a so-called Jamaica coalition (inspired by the black, yellow, and green colours of that flag) with the Free Democrats and the Greens. But, again, it’s questionable whether either of those two options could command a majority with the AfD on 25 per cent.
Within the established system, that would leave one last option: teaming up with both the Social Democrats and the Greens. This black-red-green (or Kenya – flags again) coalition would have a majority.
But the Christian Democrats would be outnumbered by the centre-Left parties, who could insist on their choice as chancellor.
The current Christian Democrat leader, Friedrich Merz, is not the emollient centrist that Angela Merkel was. Rather than propping up a red-green majority in the German Cabinet, his party may prefer a coalition of the right with AfD – not least to avoid ceding to them, after the Merkel years, even more space on the political right.
That would mean breaking the cordon sanitaire. But similar taboos have already gone by the board in countries like Austria and the Netherlands. If Germany’s neighbours can get away with it, then why not Germany itself?
Before the end of this decade, it’s not implausible that there’ll be populist governments in all the big five EU countries: Poland, Spain, Italy, France and Germany.
If so, British Remainers need to ask themselves whether re-joining a European superstate is really the best idea. They may have assumed that the EU’s ever-closer union was a way of locking-in progressive, internationalist values – but it looks like they might be spectacularly wrong about that.
If AfD ministers take office in Berlin then the pfennig might finally drop. Indeed, there might come a day when British europhiles realise they’re better-off sharing a sovereign Britain with us.