Víctor Alay
Translated from https://litci.org/es/elecciones-al-parlamento-europeo-2024-ue-acentua-su-decadencia-y-crece-la-ultraderecha/
The elections to the European Parliament 2024 have been marked by a major rise of the extreme right in the European Union (EU) as a whole[1]. A rise that has been facilitated by its growing legitimisation of the parties of the traditional European right, as has become evident with Georgia Meloni.
The far-right Rassemblement National (RN) has taken first place in France, one of the EU’s two core countries, ushering in a deep political crisis that is shaking the whole of Europe. In Germany, the EU’s most powerful country, the far-right Alliance for Germany (AfD) has come second, overtaking the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and leaving Scholz’s coalition government on life support. They have also won in the key country of Italy. And the same has happened in places like Hungary, Austria and Poland (if we count the votes of the two far-right parties that contested). In the Netherlands the government dominated by the far-right Wilders. Similarly, the far right is involved in coalition governments in Sweden, Finland and Latvia.
The results of the European elections have brought political crisis to the heart of an EU with its main powers, Germany and France, weakened and in crisis. They have brought a clear rise in nationalist tendencies, just at a time when the EU, caught in the middle of the clash between the two main world imperialisms, the US and China, plays an increasingly subordinate role in the world economy and politics. An eventual Trump victory in November in the US would undoubtedly contribute to accentuate this deep crisis.
The election results, although anticipated by the polls, are nevertheless a clear threat to the working class and the popular and oppressed sectors of Europe.
The European far right
The electoral advances of the extreme right are undoubtedly relevant. The current far right has points of contact and, in many cases, historical links with the old fascist parties of the 1930s. This is the case of RN in France or Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia. The German AfD assumes the entire history of Germany, which includes, of course, the Nazi era. However, this being true, in the present circumstances we cannot equate them with their origins and must analyse their particular characteristics in relation to the old fascisms of Hitler, Mussolini or Franco.
The extreme right does not rely, as it did in the 1930s, on the arming of armed fascist bands[2], composed mainly of desperate social sectors of the petty bourgeoisie. It relies instead on the parliamentary cadre. Despite the fact that they more or less claim the fascist heritage, that there are violent Nazis in their structures and that they maintain relations, not always easy, with armed fascist groups. The European far right is not currently working with insurrectionary perspectives but with the idea of using parliamentary channels to curtail democratic freedoms and rights and establish an authoritarian Bonapartist state. They have, in general, great sympathy and support among the police and military, which represents a great potential danger.
They are chauvinist, patriotic, in fact national-imperialist parties in the case of the imperialist European countries. Their slogan is Less Europe, more Fatherland[3] and they are against the recently approved new EU eastward enlargement project. They define themselves as sovereigntists and patriots. They counterpose their country’s national sovereignty to that of the EU and call for the return of competences to the states. As Germany’s AfD puts it, they stand for a new home for a community of sovereign states. Today, however, they no longer advocate leaving the EU as they once did. Unlike Meloni, the German far right also advocates the withdrawal of US troops and the closure of the American base in Ramstein, although it is divided over Germany’s NATO membership.
The main banner of the far right is the fight against immigration. Xenophobia, Islamophobia and racist supremacism are central to their programme. They support the conspiracy thesis of the Great Replacement of Western Christian civilisation and culture by an Islamic mass invasion and advocate border closures and mass expulsions. Last November, exponents of the German extreme right met in Potsdam in defence of the Great Re-emigration to North Africa of two million people including asylum seekers, foreigners with residence permits and unassimilated German citizens.
The huge increase of migrants from ruined, plundered, oppressed and oppressive semi-colonial countries with servile governments, with their populations hit by war, famine, drought and lack of outlets, is combined with capitalist decadence in the host metropolises, where the poorest sectors of the working class and peasantry live worse and worse and suffer greater deprivation. The ultra-right takes advantage of this dramatic circumstance, demagogues the crimes or certain excesses committed by foreigners and pits the poor against the poorest, presenting immigrants as the ones to blame for their situation: as thieves of their benefits and as responsible for their low wages and working conditions.
The economic agenda of the far right is ultra-liberalism and the repudiation of labour rights and social gains, although not all far-right parties express this with equal clarity. It is no coincidence that Milei was the main guest at the far-right meeting in Madrid organised by Vox shortly before the European elections.
The far right questions the very existence of climate change and climate emergency. They rely on the recent mobilisations of European farmers (mostly led and influenced by the big agricultural bosses) to oppose any climate mitigation measures head-on (it must also be said that, without going as far as the far right, the traditional right is reaching agreements with them in this field in a growing number of countries). The far right openly presents itself as anti-feminist and a defender of the oppressed male and openly confronts the movement in defence of women’s rights and the LGTBI population.
In international politics, all of them, Le Pen, Meloni or the AfD defend their own imperialism. All of them also support rearmament and militarisation (together with the governments of the right and social democracy). They also support, without exception, the Zionist genocide against the Palestinian people. However, they are divided on Russia. On the one hand, there are Putin’s friends (Orbán, the AfD, the Italian Salvini or, more discreetly, the French RN), who are against any military or economic aid to Ukraine and in favour of handing over the Ukrainian Donbass to Russia. AfD expressly advocates the restoration of relations with Russia, an end to economic sanctions and a return to gas purchases. On the other hand, Italy’s Meloni and Spain’s Vox are clearly aligned with NATO and against Russia.
The advance of Alliance for Germany (AfD)
In Germany, the main governing party, the social democratic SPD, has fallen (with 14% of the vote) behind the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany) with 16%. The AfD has become the second largest political force in the country (behind the Christian Democrats CDU-CSU with 30%) and the largest in the former East German Landër.
It achieved these results despite pre-election scandals (pro-Nazi statements by its first candidate, Maximilian Krah, and prosecutions of some of its leaders for espionage on behalf of Russia and China).
Before the elections, Germany’s 300 largest employers’ corporations publicly took a stand against the AfD, which they consider, in the current historical circumstances, to be an obstacle to their interests. The big German employers, with strong investments abroad and large export interests, vitally need the EU for their business, both in Europe – their main export market – and abroad, as well as to try to exert political influence in an international context dominated by the confrontation between the US and China. It also needs skilled workers for its industry, a need that Germany is unable to meet. That is why it does not share the AfD’s ultra-nationalist, anti-EU positions. Nor does it share their extreme xenophobia. Although it makes full use of the native-foreigner divide within the German working class, big business does not share theses such as the Great Re-emigration, which would imply the mass expulsion of legal foreigners and unassimilated German citizens that it nevertheless needs for its factories and businesses.
The rise of the German far right is proportional to the country’s decline. German capitalism, which already stood out as the most powerful in Europe, got a huge boost in the 1990s with the German unification (in truth the annexation of East Germany) and the expansion into Eastern Europe, semi-colonised by German capitalism on the back of EU enlargement. The former Glacis was turned into a new market and a base for relocating factories to countries with lower wages and rights and few environmental and social regulations.
But East Germany was never really equated with the West. Even today, there are still two Germanies, with first and second-class Germans. Seventy percent of East German industry was dismantled and the rest was handed over to the big corporations in the West, with lower wages and pensions, lower labour regulations, worse access to education and health care. East Germany became a kind of laboratory for social experiments to be applied in the West.
Then, in 2003, social democratic chancellor Gerhard Schröder (today a prominent businessman and Putin’s partner) became, with his Agenda 2010 and the support of the SPD, the European vanguard of labour market deregulation, cuts in unemployment benefits and the introduction of a low-wage sector with no rights.
Now, however, we have reached the end of German exceptionalism. German capitalism is experiencing the exhaustion of the momentum provided by unification, expansion to the East and Schröder’s Agenda 2010. Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine has led to the breakdown of access to gas and the Russian market. Lagging far behind the US and China in new technological branches as well as stagnating economically, Germany finds itself without new export markets and with a substantially different relationship with China compared to the 2000s. German corporations are now competing with China in the EU and in Germany itself, for example with the electric car (which has not yet gained momentum) or solar panels. At the same time, an exporting power like Germany cannot, as the US does, promote protectionist measures against China, especially when large German companies have huge investments there geared towards the Chinese market. As expressed in the Zionist genocide in Gaza, German imperialism acts as a political dwarf subservient to the US.
The rise of the AfD is based on this decline and uncertainty of German imperialism. It draws strength from the deep sense of frustration in the east of the country, from the hopelessness of sections of the middle classes, from the loss of purchasing power due to inflation, and from the deterioration of the wage and working conditions of the most impoverished sections of German workers. It appears as an alternative to social democracy and the parties of the right. Its main expression is the xenophobic rejection of the foreign population[4].
The BSW, a red-brown force led by former Die Linke leader Sara Wagenknecht, which won 6.2% of the vote, with a particular impact in the eastern Länder, should be closely watched. This party claims to be a defender of workers’ rights, reclaims the Stalinist past of the GDR and takes up the main banners of the AfD: it is against immigration and is Islamophobic and nationalist; it supports the Israeli genocide; it is against any aid to Ukraine and is pro-Putin; it rejects the green agenda and gender equality policies. The upcoming autumn elections in the Landër of Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg in the east will give us clues about its future (and that of similar forces in other countries).
RN’s victory in France triggers a deep crisis in the country, which drags the EU into the crisis
The results of the European elections in France, although anticipated by the polls, came as a great shock. The collapse of Macron (14.6% of the vote) and the triumph of the far-right RN (31.37%) placed the government and President Macron in an untenable situation. His unexpected and denounced decision to dissolve the National Assembly and call an immediate general election has placed France in a new and dangerous scenario and the EU in an uncertain future.
Macron’s collapse is a true reflection of the decline of French imperialism, the second largest European country which, together with Germany, forms the pillar of the EU. Macron’s arrogance has not been able to hide this reality. France is being expelled from its former African colonies, its public services are in serious decline, its economy is stagnating, with high levels of indebtedness (110.6%) and public deficit (5.5%). Since the mobilisations of the Yellow Vests (2018-2019), it has been at the forefront in Europe in the repression of dissent and attacks on democratic freedoms and fundamental social rights such as public pensions. The main beneficiary of this decline is currently RN, which aspires to form a government and which, as its aspiring prime minister, Jordan Bardella, says, wants to put order in the street and in the accounts and to heed the principle of reality (i.e. not to fulfil some of its old demagogic promises such as that of withdrawing Macron’s pension reform).
The street demonstrations on 9 June and after, led by the youth, and then the demonstration of several hundred thousand of the “people of the left” on 15 June, were encouraging.
Taking up the old name of the Popular Front of 1936, the political left has constituted itself as the New Popular Front (NFP). It ranges from the openly bourgeois Place Publique¸ to the ex-Trotskyist NPA-canal historique, encompassing parties (La France Insoumise, the PS, the Greens, PCF) and with the support of the trade unions and a hundred or so associations.
The electoral agreement includes some particularly odious figures on the lists, such as Aurélien Rousseau, chief of staff of Macron’s former prime minister for 2022-2024 and architect of the pension reform, or François Hollande, socialist president from 2012-2017, who became even more unpopular than Macron due to his rabidly neoliberal and anti-worker policies.
The programme of the NFP, which moves in the framework of French imperialist capitalism and the EU, contains demands like the cancellation of Macron’s pension reform and unemployment insurance, the increase of the minimum wage, the price blockade of basic necessities, the indexation of wages with the rise of prices or the effective free public schooling.
But if they manage to get into government, they will have to face a boycott by the Macron presidency, a rabid offensive by the ultra-right and the right, and economic sabotage by the big French and international bosses. Facing up to this joint offensive and guaranteeing the fulfilment of the promised social measures is impossible without raising a revolutionary mass movement to expropriate the banks and the big corporations, to put the means of production in the hands of the working class and to put an end to French imperialist domination abroad. All of which is impossible in the framework of French capitalism, the Fifth French Republic and the EU, which is nothing but the Europe of capital.
There are moments of enormous importance for the working class in France, Europe and the rest of the world in the coming times, whether the far-right RN or the NFP wins.
June 2024
[1] Although in some small countries such as Sweden, Finland or Portugal it has experienced setbacks.
[2] The exception was the Greek Golden Dawn.
[3] Just the opposite of Mario Draghi’s recent report for the EU, where he argues that “Europe must act as an economic nation, not as an asymmetric federation”.
[4] Germany is the second country in the world, after the US, in terms of the number of immigrants. In 2015-2016, one million Syrian nationals arrived, and in 2022, one million Ukrainians. There is also a large number of people from Turkey, many of them naturalised, but not culturally integrated, like the vast majority of immigrants. In 1990 there were 5.9 million; thirty-one years later, according to UN data, there were close to 16 million, 16% of the total population.