Predictions regarding the outcome of elections to the European Parliament scheduled for early June are disturbingly uniform. Whether the rune-reader is a political commentator or a polling organisation wrestling with endlessly shifting data, the prognosis points to unprecedented gains for the parties that constitute Europe’s far right. As things stand, 2024 looks to be the year of the Great Leap Forward for racist and reactionary forces across the European Union.
Although dwarfed by India’s current electoral mobilisation, elections to the European Parliament—the only EU institution that is directly elected by the Union’s citizens —share something of its logistical complexity. In simple terms, the electorate, 400 million strong and stretched across the EU’s 27 member states, has the task of voting in a total of 720 members (MEPs) to the Strasbourg-based legislative body, an increase of 15 seats over its current composition. But in a continental context riven by varied national jurisdictions, a plethora of voting systems and 24 official languages, the operation assumes a labyrinthine aspect as it seeks to straddle and accommodate divergences.
Adding to the complexity is the “group system”: the European Parliament’s distinctive organisational principle, by which MEPs sit as members of cross-national, ideologically distinctive blocs (or as independents: there are currently 50). There are currently seven such groupings, each comprising a minimum of 23 members drawn from at least a quarter of the EU’s member states. Two blocs have long dominated the show: the EPP (European People’s Party) on the centre right and the S&D (Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats) on the centre left. The EPP forms the largest group in the outgoing Parliament, with 178 members, versus the S&D’s 139.
Next in order of size, with 102 members, is Renew Europe: an alliance of liberal, free enterprise-friendly parties. Then there is the Greens-EFA (European Free Alliance), a 72-member strong coalition of green and regionalist parties. Not far behind, with 68 seats, is the ECR group (European Conservatives and Reformists), a right-wing Eurosceptic and anti-federalist alliance opposed to further European integration while vocal in its support for Fortress Europe and stricter immigration controls.
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The sixth largest group, with 59 members, is the ugly new kid on the block: Identity and Democracy (ID), an alliance of far-right neo-fascist formations set up in 2019. Comprising representatives of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (National Rally/RN) in France, Germany’s AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), Italy’s Lega (the former Northern League), along with assorted neo-fascists from Austria, Belgium, and Estonia.
Trailing the field, with just 37 members, is the GUE-NGL, more readily known as The Left in the European Parliament. This bloc unites representatives of a range of broadly anti-capitalist left forces, among them La France Insoumise (the party led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon); Die Linke in Germany; Syriza in Greece; Podemos in Spain; Independents 4 Change in Ireland; and the Portuguese Communist Party. Despite its relative numerical weakness, this group consistently punches above its weight; its combative, consensus-shattering interventions often puncture the dull, listless character of parliamentary debates while also reaching a broader audience via social media. A star speaker over recent months has been the Irish MEP Clare Daly, whose passionate advocacy of the Palestinian cause has been embellished by fiery condemnations, often in the most lacerating of terms, of the EU’s hypocrisy, moral vacuity, and active complicity in the Gaza genocide.
Highlights
- The EPP forms the largest group in the outgoing Parliament, with 178 members, versus the S&D’s 139. Next in order of size, with 102 members, is Renew Europe: an alliance of liberal, free enterprise-friendly parties.
- Then there is the European Free Alliance, a 72-member strong coalition of green and regionalist parties. Not far behind, with 68 seats, is the European Conservatives and Reformists, a right-wing Eurosceptic and anti-federalist alliance.
The context for the June elections is one that has undergone major modifications and disruptions since the previous vote in May 2019. While the intricate process of detaching the UK from EU membership was by then well advanced, Brexit would officially take place only the following year, on January 31, 2020. For voters back in 2019, the notion of a deadly pandemic about to sweep the world would have seemed fanciful and redolent of Hollywood. If things were simmering away in Ukraine, with government forces battling armed separatists in the eastern Donbass region, few could have foreseen the full-on Russian invasion that would leave the world reeling in February 2022. And if West Asia was experiencing a revival of the 2011 Arab Spring, with popular uprisings against corrupt rulers, economic stagnation and mass poverty sweeping Algeria, Sudan, Iraq, and Lebanon, life (of sorts) in the Gaza Strip and the Occupied West Bank was plodding along within long-established, Israel-policed constraints.
As elsewhere, the arrival of COVID-19 in Europe would expose the fragility and inability to cope of health services long starved of adequate investment. Confronted with the pandemic’s catastrophic impact, the European Commission, the unelected executive that actually runs the EU, found itself obliged to relax austerity measures imposed in the wake of the 2008 economic crash.“Between March 2020 and June 2021, the European Commission approved over Euros 3 trillion in state aid measures to face the demands of the health crisis and support affected companies,” notes the Belgian Left bloc MEP Marc Botenga. “In addition, a Euros 750 billion European economic recovery package named NextGenerationEU was put in place to support member states’ recovery”.
Post-pandemic, matters swiftly reverted to form: last December, EU Finance Ministers approved budget cuts projected to reach Euros 100 billion in 2024. Military spending has been explicitly exempted from the belt-tightening, and is set to rise as European leaders, Emmanuel Macron chief among them, push the EU in growingly hawkish directions. “Europe is now thinking about its own defence,” the French President declared during a speech at a gunpowder factory in April. “This has been a real revolution in recent years, and it’s a revolution that has been pushed forward by France.”
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Another beneficiary of extra funding is the EU spending category euphemistically known as “Migration and Border Management”—Fortress Europe by any other name. The consequences of this will be measured in the defeated hopes of thousands of asylum seekers and the washing up of further corpses along Mediterranean shores.
A return to austerity; slashed public services and little prospect of significant investment in housing, health, education, or employment; rising militarisation, including talk of once again burdening young people with compulsory military service; state-sponsored, openly racist stigmatisation of immigrants and minorities, with people of Muslim heritage specifically targeted; and nothing on the horizon that remotely addresses the existential challenge posed by climate change. This is the context in which voters across Europe may (or may not) exercise their franchise in June. As such, it constitutes the sort of sludge in which far right forces can readily fester and thrive.
Susan Ram has spent much of her life viewing the world from different geographical locations. Born in London, she studied politics and international relations before setting off for South Asia: first to Nepal, and then to India, where fieldwork in Tamil Nadu developed into 20 years of residence.
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