With all eyes on this fall's historic presidential election, most Americans may be paying less attention than usual to political developments overseas. But European politics often serve as a harbinger of shifting political winds. In 2016, for example, the shock Brexit vote foreshadowed the populist rise that propelled Donald Trump to the White House for the first time. Will history repeat itself?
This time, the spotlight is on France, not Britain. After his party suffered a major defeat in European elections earlier this month, winning fewer than half the seats as Marine Le Pen's Rally National, French President Emmanuel Macron shocked his own party and other heads of state by calling for early parliamentary elections for June 30.
Macron's rise in 2017 was hailed as proof that populism could be thwarted — that Western democracies still had stable, technocratic, centrist leaders committed to international institutions. But Macron has seen support drift away from Le Pen, once seen as a pariah for her fierce anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rhetoric. Now Macron is betting that the right's victory in the European elections was merely a protest vote, and that voters will come to their senses when faced with the possibility of actually giving the National Rally control of the French National Assembly.
Some commentators see this as a shrewd political calculation, arguing that it would be better for Le Pen to win these parliamentary elections rather than the presidential elections in 2027, and that the Rally National's popularity stems mainly from its insurgent outsider status, and that experience in governing would make it less appealing. But most commentators and European leaders seem to think this is the moment when the sky is falling for the European Union. “This could be the most destructive national election in the 70-year history of the European initiative,” one columnist breathlessly warned.
After all, Le Pen, an open critic of the EU and its immigration policies, is guilty of the far-right sin of believing that borders should matter again in Europe. This is enough to make the Rally National “far-right” according to European standards of political propriety, but with the party now leading decisively in the opinion polls, “far-right” now seems to have gone mainstream.
What European leaders fail to understand is that marginalization and exclusion only breeds more resentment.
It's not hard to explain why support for parties like the National Union and its German counterparts, the AfD, is growing across Europe. Many European countries, proud guardians of cultural heritage, feel their historical identity is being threatened by immigration, which has particularly surged since 2015, as some immigrants embrace violent Islamism. At the same time, decades of undemocratic rule by the EU's centralized bureaucracies have fueled growing discontent among voters who are determined to take back their own destiny by bringing government back home. And with climate policies hurting farmers and sparking an energy crisis, many ordinary, non-ideological citizens are yearning for change.
To be sure, the Rally National and similar parties sometimes flirt with racist rhetoric, and there is no doubt that some of their supporters represent a dangerous form of identity politics that channels pent-up anger against immigrants. It would be premature to ignore the risk that such sentiments could spark real violence in a country with a demographic like France’s. Yet European leaders seem unaware that contempt and exclusion only stoke further resentment.
If we continue to tell an entire side of the political spectrum that they are simply off-limits and should never be allowed to participate in government, then we should not be surprised to find unpleasant extremism among them. On the other hand, when so-called “far-right” leaders actually get the chance to govern, as in the case of Giorgia Meloni in Italy, they have proven to be less frightening than the experts predicted. In fact, Meloni is now seen as a competent, practical leader willing to work within real-world constraints to achieve results, and he has established himself as a dominant force on the world stage.
Europe’s predicament has many lessons for American politics. Here, too, for more than a generation, elites have tried to politically ban certain sentiments and denigrated their supporters as extremists, even if they spoke for broad swaths of ordinary Americans. Here, too, this simply stoked further resentment and backfired electorally; once in 2016 and likely again in 2024. Here, too, elites’ refusal to seriously debate the importance of borders and the national interest makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish healthy right-wingers from the genuine extremism and racial ideology that is thriving in polarization. And here, too, we can hope that conservatives, if given the chance to actually govern, will learn from examples like Meloni’s and be able to translate populist rhetoric into serious policy.
