Garvan Walshe is a former national and international security policy adivser to the Conservative Party
Expectations are everything. When the Law and Justice became the largest party, with 36 per cent of the vote, after Polish elections in October, it was understood as a historic defeat for a populist government. When Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party also came first, with 25 per cent of the vote in the Netherlands, it seen a shock victory, even the Freedom Party has only a slightly greater chance of forming a government than the zero percent possessed by the Polish Prime Minister, Mateusz Morawiecki.
The reality is different. European anti-immigration nationalism got two boosts in the last two decades: Islamist terrorism pointing to the difficulty of integrating large numbers of immigrants, or descendants of immigrants, from countries where Islamism was on the rise as a revolutionary movement, and the expansion of the EU to Eastern Europe.
The latter allowed Dutch nationalists to argue, as Catalan nationalists do with respect to Madrid, that their taxpayers’ money was being sent to line the pockets of ultramontane Catholics with regressive social values. Polish nationalists, many of whom are ultramontane Catholics, complained about interference from Brussels and the imposition of what in its most recent form gets called “LGBTQ ideology.” The refugee crisis flowing from the Syrian and Libyan civil wars also sparked superficial unity, which broke down as soon as it became clear that Italians, with a long Mediterranean coastline, wanted to send migrants to the rest of the EU, while Hungary and Poland wanted to avoid them being sent their way.
Periodic attempts to hold a “nationalist international” founder because it appears to be impossible to get Orbán, Wilders, Le Pen, Morawiecki, Santiago Abascal (leader of Spain’s Vox), and Meloni into the same room. They mostly agree on supporting Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel – however incongorous this may be for a party, like Meloni’s, that considers itself in part a successor to Mussolin’s. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has split them further between pro-Russian Orbán and Le Pen, and anti-Russian Law and Justice and Meloni.
These inconsistencies are not however their biggest difficulty, which is posed by the existence of the EU. Brexit did not trigger what Michael Gove excitedly hoped would be “the democratic liberation of a whole continent” but the consolidation of European institutions. After a few initial hiccups, the EU proved able to order Covid vaccines at scale, and if its latest tranche of support for Ukraine hangs in the balance, so does that in the United States.
The EU has two extremely powerful instruments of integration that make Nexit or Italexit, or even Polexit or Huxit extremely difficult: the single currency, the leaving of which would produce enormous monetary dislocation (the direction might differ – the new guilder would skyrocket rendering Dutch exports unaffordable, while the new Lira would probably crash – but the dislocation would be equally difficult to manage); and the Schengen border-free area. Both Hungary and Poland joined Schengen and benefit enormously from having industrial facilities near the Polish and German borders that can take part in central European supply chains. Italian industry likewise depends on being able to integrate with France, Germany, Switzerland (in the EEA), and, increasingly Croatia. Dutch industry is in practice part of a single zone that includes Flanders and the Ruhr. Any state that left Schengen would find itself with the Northern Ireland border problem on a much larger scale.
The huge costs — essentially the result of policy following the logic of geography — limit the appeal of nationalist Eurosceptic politics, particularly in Western Europe, to around a quarter of the electorate. A successful right-wing nationalist project needs to win over other parts of society, including elements of the business community.
Poland’s Catholic church provided PiS with significant support, but its overreach on abortion is a main reason why it lost this year’s election. Orbán had the advantage of exploiting disgust at his main opponent who, as though a Hungarian equivalent of Gerald Ratner, told a party congress that “you cannot quote any significant government measure we can be proud of, other than at the end we managed to bring the government back from the brink. Nothing.”
Meloni, who needs the support of Italy’s business community (and who works in a country where European politicians are often more trusted than national ones) has become to experiment with a new kind of right-wing politics. Socially conservative: sono una madre, sono una donna, sono italiana e chretiana (I am a mother, I am a woman, I’m Italian and Christian), hawkish: she has been a strong supporter of Ukraine in a country whose foreign policy establishment would prefer to appease Russia; harsh on illegal immigration (but displaying a certain flexibility by increasing the number of work permits issued), and pragmatic on Europe. This enables her to win the support of a reasonable proportion of Italy’s private sector, who are suspicious of the opposition Partito Democratico’s left-leaning Elly Schlein, and give her party a commanding lead.
Her politics tone down the nationalism to win on culture, immigration, and defence and security. Though the social conservatism would struggle in more socially liberal countries like Spain or France, tough immigration policies, strong defence, and economic pragmatism have a chance of drawing significant support in many European countries, and provide her with a practical agenda to develop at the European level. This European “nationalism” could well produce a considerably more populist EU. Whether that would be good for the UK is another matter.