Year XXXVII, Number 2, July 2024

Lucio Levi
Member of UEF Federal Committee, Former President of UEF Italy

The results of the European Parliament elections indicate a widespread increase in nationalist, populist and eurosceptic political forces. The far-right has made significant gains especially in France and Germany. In France, the Rassemblement national led by Marine Le Pen was supported by 31.37% of voters, with more than double the votes of Macron’s Renaissance party, thus making it the strongest political party in France. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland, the far-right party openly sympathetic to Nazism, has become the second most voted party with 15.90% of the votes, ahead of the Social Democratic Party of the Federal Chancellor Scholtz and the first in all five Länders of Eastern Germany.

But this significant success was not enough for the far-right political forces to win a majority in the European Parliament. Democratic political forces still have a clear majority in the European Parliament. The coalition of People’s, Socialist and Liberal parties, which has governed the EU since the first direct elections of the European Parliament in 1979, is confirmed and has, for the moment, no alternative. But this outomce will not lead to an undisputed dominant role in the European Parliament. It should be kept in mind that at the European level there is no party discipline that guarantees unity and cohesion among party members. This means that the traditional coalition of parties of the centre may not be enough to ensure a stable majority in the European Parliament. Hence the negotiations to expand the majority to the left through the inclusion of the Greens or to the right through the inclusion of the Conservative group (ECR) or a part of it.

On the other hand, the European elections have marked a historical novelty: the Franco-German engine has halted. The breakdown of the Franco-German Axis in European integration has destroyed a crucial source of cohesion, stability and guidance in European policy. Of course, negotiations for top positions in the EU are underway. Giorgia Meloni is the only leader of an EU government to have confirmed and even increased her position in the European elections. Therefore, she may be tempted to accelerate her march towards a top role in the EU. She has accepted the Atlantic and European options and is in the most favourable position to influence the formation of a larger majority in support of the new European Commission. The result of the European elections in Eastern Germany, where (especially in Saxony and Thuringia) AfD received 31% of the votes, has called into question the theory of “cordon sanitaire”, endorsed by Angela Merkel, which aims to exclude the extreme right and the extreme left from governing coalitions.  Moreover, we must not forget that behind the growth of the far right there is an international factor, namely Russia and Putin, who holds the EU responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union. To thwart the EU, Putin has fought against the primacy of the West, overthrowing the global order and the rules governing international relations through the use of military aggression and violence. Furthermore, Russia is responsible for disinformation activities, interference in the electoral process and other hybrid destabilisation activities to exert its influence over Europe’s position on the war in Ukraine.

The EU is facing many existential challenges: environmental and digital transitions, migration, inequalities, reform of institutions, etc. Furthermore, the ongoing conflicts (in Ukraine and that between Israel and Hamas) pose a significant challenge to the EU’s ability to pursue its federalist principles. War diverts available resources away from long-term goals like deeper integration. This is why stopping wars should be the top priority in the EU’s international strategy.

Europe suffers from a flaw since its origin: the European integration process, started during the Cold War, when the world was divided between the Western and the Soviet blocs. The division of labour in the Western bloc assigned the protection of Europe to the US military, while the EU focused on economic integration. Following the defeats in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the US has been planning to withdraw from Europe, but the EU lacks the means to protect itself from threats and aggressions from emerging empires. The idea that political and military unification would automatically follow economic integration turned out to be a pure illusion. A new system of government for the Union is needed, which allows us to face the dangers of a radically changed world. The EU should have its own foreign and security policy to be able to speak with one voice in the world.