Brexit was just the beginning – how the EU became a hotbed of Euroscepticism

“The winds of change are here!” declared a jubilant Viktor Orban after Geert Wilders’ shock landslide triumph in the Dutch general election. The Hungarian prime minister was not the only Eurosceptic leader to congratulate Wilders on his campaign for “zero asylum seekers” and closed borders.

This summer, Europe witnessed the highest number of migrant arrivals since 2016; the year of the Brexit referendum. The EU’s response so far has been a stop-start effort to agree a system of migrant redistribution across the member states, with a fine for each refugee a government turns down.

It is not enough for European voters, who are turning to politicians that have Brussels and migrants firmly in their sights. Wilders called for a binding ‘Nexit’ referendum on Dutch membership of the EU in his manifesto. The victory of his Freedom Party (PVV), which secured 37 seats in the 150-seat Dutch parliament, making it the biggest winner, shows that continental Euroscepticism is back after its defensive crouch in the years following Britain’s referendum.

There was no appetite to endure the same punishing experience that Britain had as it tried to negotiate its future relationship with the EU. The hard-Right parties, many of whom were great champions of Vladimir Putin, were also briefly cowed by his illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Now the pendulum is swinging back and the hard-Right is notching up notable election results, or polling strongly, before next June’s European Parliament elections, a vote that is shaping up to be a war for the EU’s soul between nationalist and pro-European parties.

Joining Orban in his celebration of the Dutch result, Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Rally (formerly the National Front), predicted that Wilders’ victory was a harbinger of more success in the European election, as did Matteo Salvini, Italy’s deputy prime minister.

“A new Europe is possible,” he declared.

These leaders are not expecting a slew of new Brexits from the EU, which has so far always defied predictions of its collapse and pays out huge sums to many poorer European member countries. Instead, the hard-Right is aiming for as much influence in Brussels as possible to either change the EU or frustrate it.

It is a strategy some have described as “Dirty Remain”.

The Netherlands

It was the kind of question the European Commission had hoped it would never have to answer again.

“We continue to count on the Netherlands’ strong participation in the European Union,” Eric Mamer, the turtleneck-sporting chief spokesman of the EU executive, told reporters after being asked about Nexit.

The scale of Wilders’ victory was sinking in. He had won 37 seats in an election where voters were faced with a ballot paper containing 29 different parties.

None of those parties was predicted to win more than 20 per cent of the vote. Wilders, who for 20 years has tried and failed to get into government, got 25 per cent. The result gives him the right to make the first attempt to form a ruling coalition and an enviable springboard for next year’s European elections.

With widespread anger in the Netherlands over a lack of affordable housing and the cost of living, immigration – which is at its highest level for 20 years – was a bigger issue than Europe. In the EU’s latest official attitudes survey, 49 per cent of the Dutch population declared immigration to be the biggest problem facing the bloc – a larger share than any other member state.

Dilan Yesilgöz, a 46-year-old Turkish-born former refugee and the leader of the conservative VVD, was expected to win the election and become the Netherlands’ first female prime minister. The “pitbull in high heels” made her name as a hardline justice minister. She promised to crack down on migration and limit asylum seekers’ family reunification rights.

She did not rule out forming a coalition with Wilders at the start of the campaign, as her predecessor had in previous votes, and it was this decision, her critics say, that transformed him from political pariah to potential prime minister after 15 per cent of VVD voters switched to Wilders, costing the ruling party 10 seats.

It also condemned her to third place in the three-way election race with 24 seats, one behind Frans Timmermans, the former European Commission vice-president. The latter quit as the EU’s climate chief to fight a Project Fear-style campaign in which he warned he was the Left’s only hope to prevent a Right-wing coalition. He now expects to take his alliance of Left-wing and Green parties into opposition.

But forming a government could prove to be an uphill struggle for the divisive Wilders, even though he has promised to put his manifesto pledges to ban the Koran and close mosques “in the fridge” to tempt potential coalition allies.

This new, more moderate version of the populist, who travels everywhere with bodygards after decades of anti-Islam rhetoric, was swiftly nicknamed ‘Geert Milders’.

Those Right-wing parties willing to throw their lot in with his Freedom Party have warned a Nexit referendum is a non-starter – the Netherlands, after all, is surrounded by EU members and uses the single currency. In a survey in January, support for Nexit fell 8.4 percentage points to 13 per cent, compared with 2016-2017. Net trust in the EU – the share of Dutch residents saying they tend to trust the institution minus the share of those who tend not to trust it – has been in Brussels’ favour since early 2017.

The Right wing does, however, share Wilders’ determination to push back at EU overreach, to reduce cash sent to Brussels, and to limit migration. If he can become prime minister that would grant him a seat at the European Council, the regular summits of EU heads of state and government, where he can expect to be greeted enthusiastically by Orban, Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister of Italy, Robert Fico, the new leader of Slovakia, and, for now at least, Mateusz Morawiecki of Poland.

That Eurosceptic, anti-migrant group could also be bolstered by a new hard-Right Austrian chancellor after elections next year.

Austria

The hard-Right Freedom Party has led the polls in Austria for a year, overcoming a series of scandals and successfully exploiting fears over coronavirus, migration and inflation. The country absorbs more asylum seekers in an average year than any other EU member state, at 470 per 100,000 population.

Leader Herbert Kickl has called for a complete halt on asylum seekers entering Austria. The Freedom Party is already part of the Identity and Democracy group in the European Parliament, an expanded version of which could form a base for Eurosceptic MEPs.

Other members of the group include Le Pen’s National Rally, Salvini’s Liga and Germany’s AFD; all of whom share a distinct distaste for the EU. They also share an embarrassing and misplaced admiration for Putin. The Austrian Freedom Party has a “friendship contract” with the Russian president’s United Russia party.

The hard-Right is even gaining ground in Germany, which is particularly sensitive to drifts towards the extremes because of its wartime past. Olaf Scholz’s unpopular coalition is toughening up on migration as voters turn to the opposition centre-Right CDU but also the anti-migrant AFD.

Over a third of Germans, 36 per cent, believe immigration to be the biggest problem facing the EU, according to the latest Eurobarometer survey. In October, the AFD was polling between 19 and 23 per cent, better than the three parties in the centre-Left chancellor’s government.

In June, it scored a historic breakthrough when it secured a district council in a taboo-busting result for the German-exit backing party. As in the Netherlands, a German exit (or Dexit) is highly unlikely. Half of Germans have a positive view of the EU, slightly above the average in the bloc, and only 13 per cent view it negatively.

Italy

Thirteen months ago, Giorgia Meloni formed the most Right-wing Italian government since Mussolini. She forged an alliance with the League, led by her deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, and with Forza Italia, led by the now late Silvio Berlusconi.

Nowhere have hard-Right parties improved their political fortunes over the past decade more than in Italy, Meloni’s victory cementing them a 42 per cent gain in the Chamber of Deputies.

Italy has long been on the front line of Europe’s migration challenge, with most migrant arrivals this year crossing from Tunisia and Libya to reach the EU via the Italian coast.

Just under 144,000 illegal crossings have taken place on this route between January and October this year. Rome believes it has been abandoned to shoulder the burden by the other member states, who suspect the Italians of waving the migrants through onto their territory.

Meloni has been more moderate than expected since taking power. She even travelled to Tunisia, alongside Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, to sign a migrant deal with the country. But when that pact ran into problems this year, Meloni signed a Rwanda-style offshore migrant processing deal with Albania instead.

Spain

“The time of the patriots has arrived,” Meloni told supporters of the far-Right Vox party before Spanish elections that looked certain to oust a Socialist-led government in July. Orban and Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, also sent video messages urging Spanish voters to back Vox.

The prospect of the hard-Right entering national government for the first time since the days of Franco seemed a very real possibility. Vox was predicted to become the junior partner in a two-party coalition with the centre-Right Partido Popular.

In the end, however, the polls were wrong. Vox underperformed and the Partido Popular did not have enough votes to form a government, despite winning the election. Prime minister Pedro Sanchez cobbled together a large Left-wing coalition and stayed in power.

But such is the outrage at his pardon for leaders of Catalonia’s independence movement, Vox could benefit from the backlash in the European elections.

Poland

The incumbent Law and Justice party was aiming for a third successive term in October and the EU looked on nervously as Polish voters headed to the polls. The last years were punctuated by clashes with the European Commission over the rule of law, migration and a crackdown on gay rights.

EU funding to Poland had been frozen and Morawiecki had called a referendum on the EU’s migrant-relocation plan to run alongside the vote. In fact, the only thing Warsaw and Brussels seemed to agree on was a tough line against Putin and support for Ukraine.

Opposing Law and Justice was Donald Tusk, the former European Council president, who stood on a pro-EU platform. Tusk, a centre-Right politician, claimed victory in what was seen as the most pivotal election since the fall of communism. Law and Justice had the highest share of the vote, at 36.8 per cent, and will be the biggest party in the 460-seat lower house of the Polish parliament, but it did not have enough for a majority, while Tusk’s coalition does.

In the background, far-Right parties secured their largest seat share in decades, claiming 7.4 per cent of the house.

Law and Justice remain in power for now, until they admit defeat in their quest for coalition allies, but will be a force in the European elections next year.

Hungary

Law and Justice’s closest ally in its battles with Brussels is Viktor Orban’s Hungary, which has locked horns with the Commission over a crackdown on gay rights and media freedom. The EU has withheld billions of euros in funding to Budapest because of its concerns over Hungarian backsliding on the rule of law.

The overwhelming success of the Fidesz–KDNP Party Alliance, with Orban as its frontman, is key to the record high 70.9 per cent hold hard-Right parties currently have on the country’s National Assembly.

Orban rails ceaselessly against the failures of EU migration policy. He demands Brussels pays for a controversial fence he has built on the border with Serbia. Hungary was sued in the European Court of Justice by Brussels for breaking EU laws on asylum and refuses point blank to take in any asylum seekers.

“Many people in Western Europe would give half their lives if they could have a country without illegal migrants again,” Orban said after Wilders won in the Netherlands.

Hungary is, like Poland, hugely dependent on EU funding and has ruled out leaving the bloc.

Orban, who won a fourth consecutive term last year, is relishing the prospect of the European elections after he was effectively thrown out of the pro-EU centre-Right group in the parliament. He has appointed Judit Varga, his “woke warrior” justice minister, to take the fight to a parliament which has been scathing of Orban’s government.

Relations with Law and Justice were strained by Orban’s soft stance on Russia. He urges an end to EU sanctions against Moscow and has even signed new energy deals with Putin since the war in Ukraine broke out. But Orban has a new ally in Left-wing nationalist Robert Fico, a Eurosceptic elected in September on a campaign promise to not send “one more round” to Kyiv.

Scandinavia

Even famously liberal Sweden has not been immune to Europe’s swing to the Right. The country is racked by a brutal gangland conflict as immigrant gangs battle for control of the drugs trade and replaced its Left-wing government last year. But its Right-wing coalition is only possible with the support of the Sweden Democrats, a populist anti-migrant party with fascist roots.

In neighbouring Finland, voters jettisoned Sanna Marin, the socialist prime minister and poster girl for pro-EU Left-wing progressives. She was replaced by a conservative coalition, which opposes the surrender of any more national powers to the EU or increases to the bloc’s budget.

The anti-immigration Finns Party, which has called for Finland to quit the EU in the past, came second in the election behind a centre-Right party and is now part of the government.

France

If there is one continental Eurosceptic who can beat Wilders for longevity, it is Marine Le Pen. The leader of France’s National Rally first went out on the campaign trail with her extremist father Jean-Marie when she was 15. Le Pen has worked hard to sanitise the image of the party her father founded, and has been rewarded at the polls.

She has twice faced Emmanuel Macron, the ardently pro-EU centrist, in the run-off for the French presidential elections. In 2017, the year after Brexit, she lost to Macron after calling for a Frexit referendum. Five years later, she dropped the call for a vote on France’s EU membership, but Macron defeated her again after accusing her of pursuing a “Frexit by stealth”.

Le Pen had her revenge in the parliamentary elections held a few months later. When the dust settled, Macron had lost his parliamentary majority and was facing predictions he would be a lame-duck president.

The National Assembly’s opposition bench was stacked with 73 members of the hard-Left and anti-EU France Unbowed group and 89 National Rally MPs. It is the biggest foothold of the hard-Right in national government since the fall of Vichy in 1944.

The share of Right-wing and far-right parties is now up 15.3 points since Le Pen took over in 2011, gains surpassed only by Italy.

EU polling from the spring revealed the French to be the most distrusting of Brussels of all member states, with net trust in the country all the way down at negative 21 per cent.

Now there are the European elections to contest. Polls show the National Rally on course to win the June vote with 28 per cent of the vote, against Macron’s 20 per cent. At 55, Le Pen is young enough to try and make it third time lucky in the next race for the Elysee, when she will not be facing Macron.

After Wilders’ victory, Le Pen called for a “Union of European nations” rather than a technocratic EU that relied on punishing its members. She backed Wilders’ controversial call for a Nexit referendum, which suggests she hasn’t entirely given up on a Frexit vote herself.

“It’s up to the Dutch people to choose their destiny, as the British people did,” she declared as the shockwaves of the Wilders win rippled across Europe.

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