Much of the talk these days is about Europe’s swing to the right, and indeed, centre-right and right-wing parties are doing rather well across much of the continent. In recent years, Italy, followed closely by Sweden, Finland and Greece have taken steps of varying sizes in that direction, as has the Netherlands most recently. At the same time, Germany’s AfD, while suffering a dip following January protests, is still riding relatively high.
Of course, Gript readers will be well aware of the situation on our own shores, with Government and opposition parties struggling to drum up support or interest as dissatisfaction with their performance on a range of issues surges. Parties looking to seize on the electorate’s disillusionment with the status quo are springing up at pace. Just this week, the ‘100% Redress’ party which is campaigning for 100% redress for homes affected by defective blocks confirmed four candidates who will run in the local elections in Donegal. Clearly, the winds of change are blowing in Ireland too after years of socially liberal governance.
Despite all of this, I think viewing Europe’s current trajectory as fuelled by resurgent right-wing sentiment, as the argument goes, is a mistake too many are making, although surely that element is in the mix. Rather, I think just that – dissatisfaction with the status quo, whatever that may be in a particular country – is the primary driver making the change we’re currently witnessing in European politics. That doesn’t necessarily equate with the shift to the right that we’re constantly hearing about, although it’s manifesting itself that way in various places.
Take Europe’s right-wing stalwarts throughout the past largely liberalising two decades – Poland and Hungary – which have often been cast as the anchors dragging behind as the rest of the continent progressed on various issues such as immigration, same-sex marriage and abortion, to name but a few of the hot topics.
To Poland first. While the right-wing PiS party, which had been in power since 2015, won the largest share of the vote in last October’s election (which had a record turnout of 74.4% – the highest in post-communist Poland’s history), it decreased steadily in support in the run-up to the elections, for a variety of reasons, which ultimately saw it ousted from Government by a coalition of centrist and left-wing parties.
Poland-watchers will have seen PiS’s struggles coming from a mile away, but the reaction among conservatives abroad was largely one of surprise. Poland, which, as mentioned, held fast against the liberalising tendency of its European neighbours, seemed to do a 180-degree turn overnight to embrace ‘Europe’s man’ – Donald Tusk. While a culture war lens might encourage us to view him as a ‘leftist’, in reality he is centre-right. In Poland, though, this is enough to mark a departure from the right-wing political consensus of the past eight years.
How did this come about? The surprising success of the recently formed ‘Third Way’ (Trzecia Droga) party, which performed better than expected and won a larger share of the vote than anyone predicted, probably holds the key. They were seen as a viable alternative to both PiS, who’s popularity had wavered during its previous eight years in power, and as an alternative to Tusk’s PO party, who’d been the dominant party prior to 2015.
Poles wanted change, and the Third Way’s success is evidence of this. Backlash against the controversial 2020 tightening of Poland’s abortion law – which was traced back to PiS, particularly by younger voters -, unpopular farming policies, the economic fallout from both the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine soured many of those who otherwise would have voted for PiS. The perception that many in the upper echelons of PiS party circles, including officials appointed by the state, were reaping undue reward didn’t help either.
And so after holding the reins for eight years, power passed to a party that has set about dismantling PiS’s legacy, often using fairly heavy-handed tactics like a takeover of the state-owned media and dismissal of senior prosecutors appointed by the previous government.
Meanwhile, in Hungary, potential crisis besets Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party on a number of fronts. Just last month, then-President Katalin Novak resigned as a result of growing pressure after her controversial decision to pardon a man implicated in a sex-abuse scandal last year. At the same time, Judit Varga, the former Justice Minister who was expected to lead Fidesz into the EU parliamentary elections this year announced she was stepping down and “retiring from public life”.
However, as she’s stepped out of the limelight, her ex-husband and former Fidesz party official Péter Magyar has come forward with a tape of his ex-wife which apparently incriminates members of Orbán’s closest allies in a corruption scandal. Varga, for what it’s worth, has since come forward to accuse Magyar of blackmail and domestic violence, and said that she told him what he wanted to hear on the tape.
Needless to say, the Hungarian public has been watching the Fidesz drama unfold with interest, and it has left Orbán’s grip on power looking more tenuous than it has in a long time. Considering that the couple – Magyar and Varga –, who’ve had three children, had often been held up as the ideal for the nuclear family in Hungary, where family reigns over all, it’s no surprise that the ongoing scandal has taken the shine off Fidesz for many of its supporters.
This is all to say that while we hear much about Europe’s turn to the right, given the rumblings in Europe’s only influential right-wing members in recent years, it’s probably more accurate to say that the harder times befalling the continent as a result of previous poor political decisions and external stressors like pandemic and war are finally manifesting themselves in national politics.
After all, in our own case, the same electorate that recently delivered the largest referendum defeat in the State’s history also voted to liberalise Ireland’s abortion law by a decent majority and to legalise same-sex marriage before that in 2015. While those are just two examples from the recent past, they are significant, and speak not so much of a conservative, right-wing population, as a people fed up with ineffective, tokenistic governance.