Just how dangerous is Europe’s rising far right?

PARIS — Jordan Bardella, 28, is the new face of the far right in France. Measured, clean-cut and raised in the hardscrabble northern suburbs of Paris, he laces his speeches with references to Victor Hugo and believes that “no country succeeds by denying or being ashamed of itself.”

That phrase, at a recent rally in the eastern town of Montbéliard, brought a chorus of “Jordan! Jordan!” from a crowd that had lined up for hours to see him. Cries of “Patrie” — homeland — filled the hall. Bardellamania is in the air.

Bardella, the son of Italian immigrants and a college dropout who joined the National Front party (now National Rally) at 16, is the protege of Marine Le Pen, the perennial hard-right French presidential candidate. Moderate in tone if not content, he is also the personification of the normalization — or banalization — of a party once seen as a quasi-fascist threat to the Republic.

Across Europe, the far right is becoming =N:E==N:E= right, absent any compelling message from traditional conservative parties. If “far” suggests outlier, it has become a misnomer. Not only have the parties of an anti-immigrant right surged, they have seen the barriers that once kept them out crumble as they are absorbed into the arc of Western democracies.

In France, Bardella, as president of the National Rally, is leading his party’s campaign for the elections in June to the European Parliament, a relatively powerless institution, but one still important for being the only directly elected body with representatives from all European Union countries.

Precisely because the Parliament is relatively weak, the election is closely watched as a measure of uninhibited popular sentiment, where voters register their discontent with potentially powerful downstream effects on national politics.

This year the far-right surge across the continent looks dramatic. The latest polls show the National Rally with a clear lead, set to take some 31% of the vote in France compared with about 16% for the centrist Renaissance coalition of President Emmanuel Macron. Bardella is the only politician among France’s 50 “favorite personalities,” according to a recent ranking in the Journal du Dimanche newspaper.

The result is that anti-immigrant parties may win as many as one-quarter of the seats in the 720-seat European Parliament. This could lead to a hardening of immigration regulations Europewide, hostility to environmental reform, and pressure to be more amenable to President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

For France, it means that a party that is nationalist, xenophobic and Islamophobic may well emerge reinforced — accepted, legitimized and eminently electable to high office in a way that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago.

France used to call its barrier to the hard right “la digue,” or the dam. The floodgates are now open in France, but also beyond. Macron’s successor in 2027 — he is term limited — may well come from a party whose founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, called the Holocaust a “detail” of history.

Could this resurgence of parties with fascist roots really overturn European freedom and democracy? The optimistic view is that they are no more than pale descendants of history’s tyrants, constrained by the existence of a European Union that was created to guarantee peace among its members. That is a lulling view. The language of these parties may be less incandescent than former President Donald Trump’s invocations of “bloodshed,” but as they whip up support by scapegoating immigrants, and even move to lock in systems that could perpetuate their power, the threat to the postwar order seems real enough.

Not a monolith

Historical lessons, it seems, fade after three generations. Warnings of the disasters that engulfed 20th-century Europe under fascist governments tend not to resonate with 21st-century supporters of xenophobic nationalist movements that have none of the militarism of fascism, nor the personality cults of its dictatorial leaders, but are fed by hatred of “the other” and jingoistic hymns to national glory.

Europe’s collective cataclysm between 1914 and 1945 seems like ancient history to many people, even if the blood shed in the trenches of Ukraine summons images of that time. “You can no longer rely on saying, ‘This is evil, because look what happened in the fascist past,’” said Nathalie Tocci, a leading Italian political scientist. “You have to have an argument for why those ideas are bad today.”

The post-fascist or fascist-lite European right of today is not monolithic. At the most menacing end of the spectrum stands the Alternative for Germany party, founded in 2013 and now polling as high as 20%. It contains about 10,000 extremists, according to the country’s domestic intelligence service. Plans for mass deportation of immigrants and even a plot to overthrow the government have been linked to it.

The National Rally in France began life in 1972 as the National Front, the creation of Le Pen, who described the United States as a “mongrel nation” and the Nazi-puppet Vichy regime in France as not “especially inhumane.”

As for Meloni, she got her start in the postwar Italian Social Movement, founded in 1946 by Mussolini supporters bent on defending the legacy of fascism. It had violent strands into the 1970s, but it eventually folded and its leaders broke off to start new more moderate parties, though still proud of their lineage. The symbol of the Brothers of Italy is a tricolor flame, previously used by a neo-fascist party, and its hostility to immigrants remains firm.

The path to power, or the brink of it, by the far right has been a long one. Over the almost 80-year arc of the postwar period, the once-dominant center-left and center-right — represented in France by the Socialists and the Gaullists, and in Germany by the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats — have seen the foundations of their support (labor unions for the left and the church for the right) gradually erode.

This accelerated with globalization after the end of the Cold War and the onset of atomization with the arrival of the smartphone (that prodigious generator of status anxiety), leading to more unequal, more polarized, more fretful societies. The political commons shrank. The definition of truth wobbled. Parliaments and parties grew more marginal as political heft shifted to social media.

Increasingly, with major ideological disputes over the place of the state in the economy settled, moderate right and moderate left began to feel indistinguishable to many people. They had no answers to mass migration. The working class, long the cornerstone of socialism in Europe, migrated en masse to the anti-immigrant right as an expression of frustration at growing inequality and stagnant paychecks.

The core confrontation in Western societies is no longer over internal issues. It is global vs. national, the connected living in the “somewhere” of the knowledge economy vs. the forgotten living “nowhere” in industrial wastelands and rural areas. There lies the frustration, even fury, on which a Trump, a Meloni, a Wilders, a Le Pen could build.

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