As Portugal has just elected its new parliament, the far-right “Chega” party won 18% of the votes, a record. This score echoes the progression of the far right throughout Europe, just three months before the European elections.
Never has the far right been so on the rise in recent years in Portugal. The “Chega” party (“Enough” in Portuguese) made a historic breakthrough there on Sunday March 10, winning 18% of the votes in the legislative elections. Coming third behind the left and the center-right, the far-right party is thus redrawing the contours of the political game in Portugal and in Europe.
Indeed, while the citizens of the European Union will go to the polls in three months, between June 6 and 9, to elect their MEPs, the RN (National Rally) and its European allies are setting out to conquer the European institutions to better weaken them. An appetite reinforced by their breakthrough in almost all EU countries. In recent years, Italy, Hungary, Slovakia and the Netherlands have joined the list of countries where the far right has emerged victorious from local legislative elections.
Xenophobic discourse and authoritarianism
How common is the phenomenon to European states? To verify this, political science researchers have since 2019 identified the parties assimilated to the ideology of the extreme right, giving birth to the project The PopuList*. A reference database, which covers the analysis of 31 countries, including the 27 of the EU.
What precisely do these researchers mean by “far-right parties”? They consider the formations which defend a nativist ideology, that is to say establishing a hierarchy between individuals according to an alleged degree of belonging to the majority ethnocultural group and seniority in the territory. These parties thus hold a xenophobic discourse, where the “non-natives would constitute a threat to the homogeneity of the Nation-State”, explain the authors of The PopuList. Another characteristic criterion: authoritarianism. The far right promotes “a vision of society where order reigns and attacks on authority must be severely repressed”emphasize the researchers.
If we take these criteria into account, almost all European countries had training courses‘far right within their Parliament in 2023. In nine of them, they even exceeded 20%. In the ranking of EU countries where the far right has the most votes, France comes in 8th position. In 2022, the parties of Marine Le Pen, Eric Zemmour and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan won 24% of the votes between them. Or 10 points more than in 2017.
Only two states stand apart from this observation: Malta and Ireland, where no far-right party, according to the nomenclature established by the researchers, was not in the running for the legislative elections.
An accelerated rise in power since 2010
The extreme right, although coming from very diverse histories, developed strongly in the 2010 decade. Researchers also prefer to “extreme right” the term “populist radical right”. “It makes it possible to bring together the populist rights playing the parliamentary game, differentiating them from small far-right groups”explains Nonna Mayer, political science researcher at the Center for European Studies at Sciences Po.
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“That includes parties like the RN, which has a far-right tradition, counting among its founders former Waffen-SS, collaborationists, those nostalgic for Vichy, supporters of French Algeria, former Poujadists and parties from the parliamentary right like the Party for freedom by Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, from the liberal VVD party, taking up the Islamophobic line of Pim Fortuyn’s party”, completes the researcher.
While these parties experienced their first electoral successes in the 1990s, several factors explain this breakthrough. “It is a reaction to economic globalization and the crisis of political representation, the distrust of traditional political parties perceived as powerless”explains Nonna Mayer.
During the 2010 decade, economic factors were added: “the recession of 2008, the refugee crisis of 2015 or the Islamist terrorist attacks”, lists the specialist.
More votes and more parties
Long marginalized, far-right parties have, like the National Rally (RN) in France, established themselves in the political landscape. The Sweden Democrats party, founded in 1988, remained confined below 2% in the legislative elections until 2006. In 2022, it came in second position, winning 20.5% of the vote.
Among the other political forces which have come to swell the ranks of the far right are the right-wing parties, which nevertheless had a parliamentary tradition, and which have appropriated the discourse of the far right in recent years. The authors of The PopuList thus believe that the New Slovenia party, existing since 2000, made such a shift in 2015. A phenomenon that Nonna Mayer insists on: “We must distinguish a party which comes from the parliamentary right and which is becoming radicalized from a party which initially came from a long extreme right tradition like the National Front and which tries to make us forget it.”
The parties concerned have not only made progress at the polls: they have also multiplied. In the Netherlands, during the 2007 general election, the only nativist and authoritarian movement was the Party for Freedom. In 2023, it had not only won 28 seats compared to 2006 out of the 150 to be filled, but two other political organizations identified with the far right (Forum for Democracy and Just Response 2021) had emerged. “They are all the more successful electorally as abstention is high among their adversaries, particularly on the left”analyzes Nonna Mayer.
Very heterogeneous radical and populist rights
However, this global rise in power hides significant divergences. “If these radical rights have in common their authoritarianism and their nationalism, they carry different economic and cultural values”, underlines the political science researcher.
She cites the example of Hungary and Poland: “There, the radical and populist rights are on a very conservative line in terms of morals, which is not that of Marine Le Pen but which would rather be closer to that of Marion Maréchal. And they are more liberal on the economic plan.”
Even within the European Parliament, the extreme right is tearing itself apart. They are not part of a common entity, but are divided between the Identity and Democracy (ID) group and that of the European Conservatives and Reformists (CRE). Their shared distrust of Europe fails to make them overcome their national interests. “They are on the same nationalist line, with the same slogan: French first, Italians first, our country first. But they are too divided to constitute a force blocking European institutions”assures Nonna Mayer.
*Methodology
Franceinfo relied on the work of The PopuList, conducted since 2019 by eight political science researchers from different European universities. They list far-right parties (“far right”) in Europe in a database reviewed and corrected by around a hundred peers. She covers the analysis of the political life of 31 countries, including the 27 of the EU to which Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Norway and Iceland have been added. Regularly updated, this directory has been restricted to political organizations active between 1989 and the end of 2022.
To establish the total votes of far-right parties in the legislative elections of each country since 2010, the scores of each formation classified to the extreme right by the authors of The PopuList were added by franceinfo.fr. For example, in France, in 2022, 18.7% of the votes were in favor of the RN (National Rally), 4.2% in favor of Reconquête and 1.1% for Debout la France. The far right thus won 24% of the votes. To carry out this calculation, only parties having exceeded 1% at least once or obtained at least one seat in Parliament between 2010 and 2023 were studied.
Seven parties are nevertheless considered by The PopuList as “borderline cases”. The authors of the study therefore cannot decide whether or not they belong to the extreme right. These are: the New Flemish Alliance (Belgium), the Party of Finns, Bulgaria without censorship, Solidarity (Cyprus), the Farmer-Citizen Movement (Netherlands), the Croatian Democratic Union and the Progress Party ( Norway). Franceinfo therefore did not count these training courses.
When far-right parties allied with traditional parties, they were also not counted by franceinfo. Despite the high scores of the extreme right in certain countries, this is therefore a minimum presentation.
Franceinfo, on the other hand, has decided in one case: the Spartans party (Greece). Until 2022, it had never exceeded the 2% mark. However, this recent period is not covered by the study of The PopuList. Therefore, even if researchers The PopuList were aware of its existence, it was therefore considered too insignificant to be examined and whether or not it belonged to the extreme right..
However, for the year 2023, franceinfo.fr considered that it met the criteria for the extreme right defined by this study. This movement is close to the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, convicted in 2020 and considered by Greek justice as a criminal organization. In its founding declaration, Spartans also announces that its “priority is Greece and the Greeks” and that he opposes “any attempt to modify [son] cultural identity and the attempt at Islamization”.