No matter how you look at it, the seismic movement of the European elections is worrying and begins to reveal a latent far-right effect in the European Union that seriously threatens the foundations of the original Community members. There were six countries, France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and The Netherlands, that signed the treaty establishing the European Economic Community (EEC), in the city of Rome on March 25th, 1957, and after last Sunday all of them, except the Netherlands, in a certain way, have turned towards far-right or Eurosceptic positions. France and Germany, with serious political crises; Belgium, with the resignation of the prime minister (liberal Alexander De Croo); Italy, with the strengthening of Giorgia Meloni's party; The Netherlands and tiny Luxembourg, which only elected six seats out of 750, giving entry to Eurosceptics from the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group.
Undoubtedly, the deepest crisis has opened up in France, where Marine Le Pen has won thirty seats and 31% of the vote, crushing president Emmanuel Macron's party, whose voting strength she more than doubled. Macron has made a gamble, dissolved the National Assembly, and called legislative elections for the end of the month. For the first time, Marine Le Pen's party has real options to govern and for the cohabitation to be truly explosive. In case any ingredient was missing, the statements of the president of the French conservative party, the Republicans, Éric Ciotti, positioning himself in favour of building an alliance with Le Pen's National Rally, until now kept away from power thanks to a cordon sanitaire, has opened up Pandora's Box in the land to the north of the Pyrenees. The Republican party, founded by Nicolas Sarkozy, is not what it used to be, but it retains power centres which came out en masse to speak out against its leader, from regional presidents to prominent deputies and senators. In any case, a crisis has opened up between those who believe that the unity of the right and the far-right is essential and those who do not see it that way.
To talk about the three leading economies of Europe and the main continental reference points in these terms would have been unthinkable a few years ago
The situation is no less grave in Germany, where the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has achieved 16.4% of votes, which represents a strong increase in support compared to the 11% it won five years ago. It is a clearly Eurosceptic party that bases its programme on the rejection of the euro, bailouts for peripheral countries and the defence of a return to the German mark with an orderly and gradual dissolution of the eurozone. A scenario, that of the AfD and the very solid first position achieved by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which greatly complicates the situation of the Social Democratic (SPD) chancellor Olaf Scholz, who will have a very difficult time to make it alive to the legislative elections scheduled for 2025. The governing alliance of the so-called traffic light coalition, formed by the "red" SPD, the liberal FDP and the Greens, may end up being a short parenthesis between Angela Merkel and the current CDU leader, Friedrich Merz. The convergence of France and Germany through problems that are not very different, given the growth of the far right and the fact that early elections have also been called for in the Germanic country, is bad news.
And thus we arrive in Italy, where, in comparison with the extremist parties that are growing on the continent, it seems that the rise of Meloni - who, at least, is not Eurosceptic - causes some to think that Brussels can cope. Her showing of almost 30% strengthens her and although the party she leads has its roots in a neo-fascist group, there is a certain European comfort with many of its policies. Meloni emerges as a popular ruler capable of leading a country in the face of a retreating and fragmented left. That we are talking about the three leading economies of Europe and the main continental reference points in these terms would have been unthinkable a few years ago. It must be that the human condition is above all a story of adaptation to new circumstances, much more than digging down to the roots of why these situations occur.