Populists Have Their Sights on the European Parliament, Despite Their Own Divisions

Could next week’s European Parliament elections lead to a grand realignment of the continent’s politics, with the populist right wielding unprecedented influence? Hungary’s pugnacious and controversial prime minister, Viktor Orban, certainly hopes so. Poland’s de facto leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the head of the ruling, arch-conservative Law and Justice party, PiS, is also eyeing the leadership of an invigorated right. So too Italy’s deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, the figurehead for a potential new bloc of hard-right populist parties and governments opposed to immigration and aiming to reconstitute European politics.

But even if they all do as well as predicted next week, with far-right, populist and other euroskeptic parties projected to win around a quarter to a third of the seats in the European Parliament, the question remains: Can the disparate forces of Europe’s populist right coalesce into a coherent whole and put their plans into action?

In the run-up to the vote, Orban has heaped praise on Salvini, whom he recently described as a “hero” and “the most important person in Europe today.” At a joint press conference in Budapest with Salvini in early May, Orban said that “Europe’s borders must be defended against the migrant invasion.” Salvini, who visited Hungary’s southern border fence with Orban, pledged that he and the Hungarian leader would work together “if there are any legal disputes with Brussels,” and said that he hoped a new nationalist bloc would help forge “a new history for Europe and the peoples of Europe.”

Back in January, during a meeting with Kaczynski in Warsaw, Salvini said that “we have to counter the Franco-German axis with the Italo-Polish axis.” With rightist parties also performing strongly in a number of other elections in Western Europe, there is a specter of a nationalist-populist surge on the continent. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, and Spain’s Vox are among those considered possible members of a new, far-right force in Europe, led by Salvini.

Orban’s Fidesz and Kaczynski’s PiS, already in power with majorities in their own countries, have been seen as harbingers of this takeover—an image Orban has happily promoted as the champion of what he calls “illiberal democracy.” Naturally, he was warmly hosted by President Donald Trump in the White House this week.

Orban’s expressed hope is that next week’s elections see a new European Parliament and, in turn, European Commission, dominated by a coalition of right-wing and far-right parties. He hopes it would lead to the current European People’s Party, or EPP, a grouping of moderate and conservative parties, abandoning its cosy relationship with the center-left Party of European Socialists and joining forces with the likes of Salvini and the Austrian Freedom Party. But Orban’s political party, Fidesz, is just barely a member of the EPP, since its membership was temporarily suspended in March over its alleged violations of the rule of law in Hungary, after years of tension between Fidesz and some other EPP members. Critics at the time condemned the temporary suspension as being typical of the EPP’s dithering approach toward its Hungarian member, regarded by some as being authoritarian, corrupt and xenophobic.

There are, however, wrinkles in Orban’s plans for the European Parliament. “There are multiple incompatibilities in the European right,” says Roland Freudenstein, the deputy director and head of research at the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies, the official think tank of the European People’s Party. “They are much faster at learning methods in campaigning and social media than adopting one another’s content. It’s completely nebulous what this bloc will look like.”

A populist uprising might make for an attractive narrative, but it doesn’t match the reality of intra-populist divisions in Europe.

Milan Nic, an expert at the German Council for Foreign Relations, adds that there are many differences among the populist right that would make up this proposed grouping, including over the single market, Russia and even the lightning rod of migration. While Salvini supports quotas for the distribution of migrants already in Europe across EU member states, Orban is staunchly opposed. Orban is also among leaders said to be wary of an alliance with Le Pen, who is deemed both controversial—given her party’s past and its relationship with Russia—and potentially too vocal in a part of the political spectrum already replete with strong egos. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Salvini is also an open admirer of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and has been accused of taking funding from Kremlin-linked businesses. While Orban has a cordial relationship with Putin, Kaczynski, like many Poles, regards Russia as an existential threat. Indeed, as Salvini was lauding the Italo-Polish axis on his Warsaw visit, Kaczynski and his representatives were rather muted in response.

Then there are the somewhat byzantine issues within the political groupings in the European Parliament. On May 6, the leader of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union—which, along with its sister party in Bavaria, the CSU, forms the largest party in the EPP—said that she expected Fidesz to leave the EPP following Orban’s public repudiation of its lead candidate for the European Parliament elections, Manfred Weber. Weber, a CSU member, had said that he did not want to rely on Fidesz’s votes to become the next president of the European Commission—who is appointed after taking account of the European Parliament election results—but it seems that Orban’s meetings with Salvini in early May caused a final rupture.

Nic sees Fidesz’s likely exit from the EPP as a defeat for Orban, whom he says will not be able to gather the support he would need to form a blocking minority in the European Parliament. “The media have portrayed Orban as playing a very smart game between two blocs”—the EPP and the hard-right—“but he is seeing his influence being curtailed. This is not his trajectory of choice.”

Dynamics in Poland are also at play. With parliamentary elections later this year, PiS has tacked toward the center in recent months in a bid to win over other Polish voters. In the European Parliament elections, seen as a dry run for the domestic poll, PiS faces an unusually united opposition coalition, known as the European Coalition, spanning parties from the left to the center-right. The opposition has focused on PiS’ euroskepticism, while PiS in turn has accused the opposition of wanting to lead Poland into the eurozone. After next week’s elections, PiS may be reluctant to relinquish its opportunity to become the biggest force in the European Parliament’s euroskeptic and center-right European Conservatives and Reformists group, or ECR, once Britain’s Conservatives depart following Brexit.

“I suspect the ECR or some kind of ECR-plus will be one of the two big formations on the right, in which the Poles would call the shots, and Fidesz might join,” says Freudenstein. Thierry Baudet, the rising star of the Dutch radical right, he points out, has pledged that his growing Forum for Democracy party will join the ECR following the elections. Finally, if Brexit happens, the euroskeptic, hard-right in the European Parliament will immediately lose what are expected to be up to two dozen U.K. Brexit Party MEPs, potential members of Salvini’s bloc.

“I wouldn’t exclude Fidesz joining the ECR,” says Agata Gostynska-Jakubowska, a Brussels-based research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, citing PiS and Fidesz’s slightly less diametrically opposed views on Russia. Gostynska-Jakubowska is skeptical that Salvini’s party and other populists will join forces. “I’m not sure whether they will be able to reconcile their differences.”

A populist uprising might make for an attractive narrative, but it doesn’t match the reality of these intra-populist divisions—to say nothing of the eclectic mix of parties, reflecting a wide range of issues, that voters will send to the next European Parliament. Next week’s vote is far more than a referendum on migration, or a test of populism’s strength.

Andrew MacDowall is a correspondent covering politics, business and economics, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, where he has lived and worked for more than a decade. He has written for publications including The Financial Times, The Guardian and Politico Europe.