A lot of the press focus has been on the prospects for the far-right parties, which have been performing strongly in the polls. Similar to national parliaments, various parties in the EU Parliament group together in partisan caucuses the way individual parties typically form coherent factions in national parliaments.
The conservative bloc is known as the European People’s Party (EPP), which includes the longtime center-right parties like the Christian Democrats in Germany and Austria. Politico reports on the current polling results, which indicate that the far right could get a bigger number of seats than the EPP. But the far-right groups don’t have a single umbrella EU-wide party grouping:
According to a POLITICO Poll of Polls projection of the incoming legislature, the EPP would win 170 seats if the election were held now.So, this seems like a good time to look at liberal-democracy-vs.-authoritarianism in the EU.
The European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and Identity and Democracy (ID) — the two main right-wing groupings — are on course for a total of 144 seats.
There are also other parties in the mix, such as Alternative for Germany, which is projected to win 16 seats, and Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, which is in line for 10. France’s Reconquest is polling at five seats, Poland’s Konfederacja at six and Bulgaria’s pro-Kremlin Revival party at three.
That takes the projection of far-right MEPs to 184. (1)
The nativist/ethnonationalist position
Xenophobia has been a favorite issue for the radical right for decades. The so-called refugee “crisis” of 2015-6 sharpened their focus on this pitch even more. Since many of the refugees to the EU come from Muslim countries, the anti-refugee sentiment is closely connected with Islamophobia, a topic which French parties (and not just the far right) have promoted for a long time, going back particularly to the Algerian War and its aftermath.
From Deutsche Welle: (2)
I refer to the 2015-16 events as a “crisis” in quotation marks because that freak-out occurred when a year-long surge of refugees from various conflicts (Syria, Afghanistan, Libya) brought around 1.1 million of them to EU countries. In the year following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, around five million Ukrainian refugees came to the UN. It required effort on the part of governments to accommodate it. There was some xenophobic grumbling over the Ukrainians, but nothing on the scale of 2015-16.
So, if the EU in 2022 could handle five times as many refugees without a freakout or a breakdown in government services or massive homeless encampments in major cities, then what made 2015-16 a “crisis” was not the number of refugees. Give the EU credit: Part of the reason the Ukrainian refugees weren’t so controversial is that the EU had set up different policy arrangements for them. At the time of the Russian invasion in 2022, the EU had a policy in place that Ukrainians could travel to the EU for up to three months without a visa. So, Ukrainians were not instantly “illegal immigrants” from the moment they crossed the border without a visa. The EU also quickly made rules allowing Ukrainians to stay for what is now a three-year period from the 2022 invasion (i.e., until 2025) without having to go through the standard asylum process.
In other words, the EU formally and practically recognized they were facing a surge of refugees and made some sensible and generally humane provisions for the real situations.
The UN’s Ukraine Refugee Situation website (3) provides regularly updated statistics for Ukrainian refugees. The count is based on border crossing to and from Ukraine, so the current number of refugees has to be estimated from the net of those two numbers. There are a large number of crossings between Ukraine and neighboring Poland in particular, so the 20 million border crossing to Poland do not mean there are 20 million Ukrainian refugees currently in Poland. Poland easily has the largest number of Ukrainian refugees of any EU country. So it’s very notable that in the national Polish parliamentary elections last October, the authoritarian-leaning Law and Justice Party (PiS) lost control to a much more centrist government that is committed to preserving democracy and the rule of law – despite the heavy Ukrainian refugee burden that Poland is carrying.
The (ugly) Tunisia-plan farce
Unfortunately for the parties that present themselves as committed to democracy and the rule of law across the EU, the centrist parties really have been so compromised by their commitment to the neoliberal notion of technocratic governance that doesn’t challenge the “free-market” concepts favoring a continuing concentration of wealth and power at the top of the wealth and income pyramid that – not unlike the Democrats in the United States – they are often way too hesitant to fight for (what should be!) their own side.
To a large extent, the center-right and center-left parties have tried to adopt a me-too position aping the right’s anti-immigration agitation. We’ve seen the Democrats in the US do something similar with the Obama Administration and (far more so) with the Biden Administration. Instead of confronting xenophobic demagoguery head-on, which is the only approach that really works to discredit the rightwing versions, the centrist parties all too often take the position, “look, we hate immigrants and refugees, too, we’re just not quite so crass about it.”
Again, the experience with Ukrainian refugees over the last two years shows how a practical approach with real leadership supporting it can produce a different and far more decent result than what happens when the center parties pander to the xenophobes. Sadly, even some political figures like Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany that are very much identified with the left also adopt anti-refugee and anti-immigrant rhetoric, which surely should make people question how much “left” is left in those factions.
The EU came up with a plan this year that involves an agreement with the government of Tunesia to hold refugees there to apply for asylum in the EU without actually entering the EU. This plan is such a bad joke (and an ugly one) that politicians in experts in immigration practically roll their eyes at it. Amnesty International reported in mid-May:
Over the past two weeks, the Tunisian government has launched an unprecedented repressive clampdown against migrants, refugees, and human rights defenders working to protect their rights, as well as journalists, said Amnesty International today. This comes less than two weeks after a high-level coordination meeting with the Italian Ministry of Interior about migration management. [my emphasis] (5)The current Italian government is headed by Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, who is head of the far-right Brothers of Italy (FdI) party. She has also been working on setting up a dump-the-refugees-on-Albania-project. (6)
Britain’s Tory-sponsored Uganda plan is an uglier and arguably even more crackpot version of the EU-Tunesia plan. Britain’s plan involves sending asylum-seeker who arrive in Britain to Uganda to apply for asylum there – asylum in Uganda, not in Britain. (6) And those refugees deported to Uganda would be legally banned from ever returning to Britain. Britain is no longer and EU member so they are directly bound by EU rules as such. But they do recognize the jurisdiction of the European Court, which they are also blatantly defying with this scheme that throws the international-law regime for refugees established after the Second World War out the window.
The message that far-right and far too many centrist politicians are trying to send with these plans is: refugees are not our problem; we want to keep them out; and we want to dump them on countries outside the EU; and, we know that this means their rights are being disrespected and than many of them are being badly abused so, look, voters: we’re injuring and killing refugees just like xenophobes want us to do!
Centrist parties supporting such approaches can succeed in harming and killing actual refugees – the Mediterranean Sea is currently considered the deadliest border in the world because of the number of refugees drowning at sea. Sometimes with the active support of EU countries like Italy and Greece. So far, this brand of centrism is mainly succeeding in encouraging and spreading such brutal policies. What it is not doing is promoting the rule of law in the “rules-based-international-order,” as American liberals like to call it.
Democracy is hard
No one should assume that massive immigration and the handling of refugees is easy. It’s not. But there are policies that work well and treat refugees decently and in line with international law and that work to the benefit of both the home countries and themselves. The EU handling of Ukrainian refugees since February 2022 is one example that is working decently so far without either enflaming xenophobia or brutalizing refugees. With centrist parties pandering to far-right xenophobes, though, that could change at any time.
The international cooperation on the mass Vietnamese refugee crisis (the “boat people”) after 1975, which became especially acute in 1978-79, stands as a constructive example of what can be done when countries are willing to use good sense and to recognize the requirements of international law. (7)
Xenophobia and Islamophobia and the ethnonationalism of which they are a part strengthens only the right in the end. The current twist on the far right’s hostility to the whole idea of the European Union is to promote a Europa of “homelands,” i.e., one in which ethnic and national identities are primary instead of democracy and the rule of law.
The left, the center-left and the center-right can’t out-bigot the radical right when it comes to ethnonationalism. They have to fight it by confronting it for what it is. That is, if they are serious about saving liberal democracy from “autocracy” or rightwing authoritarianism.
Markus Linden recently wrote:
From the disparagement of democratically elected politicians all the way to massive threats and physical attacks during the European election campaign: the republic [Germany] in these days is experiencing attacks on democracy on a scale that has never been seen on such a wide scale in its 75-year history. In any case, the recent demonstrations against right-wing extremism testified to immense concern among the population. The open manifestation of these real majorities is to be welcomed, because it is obvious that in Germany in particular there must be a consistent reaction to anti-democratic-völkisch thinking – especially when it takes more and more positions of power regionally, builds alliances with parts of [the larger] society and thus insidiously normalizes itself. (8)
It’s also worth remembering that in Germany’s most infamous descent into dictatorship, it wasn’t the Nazi Party that gained a majority and ceased power. It was an alliance with the conservatives, above all Reichspresident Paul von Hindenburg – who was the winning candidate for President in the election of 1932 against Hitler – that willingly brought Hitler into the Chancellorship of the Weimar Republic in early 1933.
Notes:
(1) Cokelaere, Hanne (2024): Far-right MEPs set to outnumber EPP in next Parliament. Politico EU 05/29/2024. <https://www.politico.eu/article/far-right-meps-european-peoples-party-eu-election-eu-parliament/> (Accessed: 2024-30-2024).
(2) How campaigning EU parties keep migration on the agenda ahead of election. DW News 05/27/2024. <https://youtu.be/50GV9amfB9s?si=FUNoxGrGxR-K4z4A> (Accessed: 2024-30-2024). Note that “migration” is often used as a synonym for “refugees” or “asylum-seeking.” Xenophobes prefer to use the term to imply that people are just deciding for the heck of it to take dangerous and expensive trips to get into Europe, i.e., “migrating” not “fleeing.”
(3) https://data.unhcr.org/en/situations/ukraine
(4) Tunisia: Repressive crackdown on civil society organizations following months of escalating violence against migrants and refugees. Amnesty International 05/16/2024. <https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/05/tunisia-repressive-crackdown-on-civil-society-organizations-following-months-of-escalating-violence-against-migrants-and-refugees/> (Accessed: 2024-30-05).
(5) Albania ratifies migrant deal with Italy. DW News 02/22/2024. <https://www.dw.com/en/albania-ratifies-migrant-deal-with-italy/a-68336646> (Accessed: 2024-30-05).
(6) Geets, Siobhán & Tschinderle, Franziska: „Das Ruanda-Modell ist der Weg zu einem humaneren Asylsystem“. Profil 21:2024 (05/25/2024), 30-33.
(7) Sansonia, Mason (2019): 10 Facts About Vietnamese Boat People. The Borgen Project 10/06/2024. <https://borgenproject.org/vietnamese-boat-people/> (Accessed: 2024-30-2024).
Gerald Knaus also provides a good analysis of the “boat people” crisis in Welche Grenzen Brauchen Wir? (2020). München: Piper Verlag.
(8) Der Aufstieg der Mosaik-Rechten. Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 6:2024, 69. My translation from German.
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