Far-right parties have made major gains in the European Union parliamentary elections, delivering humiliating defeats to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, French President Emmanuel Macron and Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer.
In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) took second place in Sunday’s EU election, underscoring the party’s resilience ahead of next year’s federal election.
The Eurosceptic party secured more than 16 percent of the vote, its best-ever showing and a higher share of the ballot than all three parties in Scholz’s coalition.
The conservatives, who are in opposition at the federal level, have been forecast to come first, rising slightly to 29.5 percent.
Germany’s Greens were the biggest losers on Sunday, falling by 8.5 percentage points to 12 percent, punished by voters for the cost of policies to reduce CO2 emissions – in line with expectations for environmental parties across Europe.
Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the third coalition partner, the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP), also fared poorly, expected to win 14 percent and 5 percent of the vote respectively, down from 15.8 percent and 5.4 percent in the previous election.
The results are in line with an expected broader shift rightwards for the European Parliament across the bloc of 450 million citizens.
The strong showing comes as Germany’s party landscape undergoes its biggest upheaval in decades, with new populist parties vying to take space vacated by the shrinking mainstream parties that have dominated since reunification in 1990.
This looks set to make it much harder for established parties to form workable coalitions, and is coarsening the political climate, say analysts. The campaign was overshadowed by a surge in violence against politicians and activists.
The AfD was plagued by scandals in recent months, with its lead candidate having to step back from campaigning in May after declaring that the SS, the Nazis’ main paramilitary force, were “not all criminals”.
“We’ve done well because people have become more anti-European,” the AfD’s co-leader Alice Weidel said on Sunday.
“People are annoyed by so much bureaucracy from Brussels,” she added, giving a plan ultimately to ban CO2-emitting cars as an example.
In France, the National Rally party of Marine Le Pen dominated the polls to such an extent that Macron immediately dissolved the national parliament and called for new elections, a huge political risk since his party could suffer more losses, hobbling the rest of his presidential term which ends in 2027.
Projected results from France put Le Pen’s far-right National Rally at about 33 percent, with 31 seats in the incoming European Parliament – more than double the score of Macron’s liberals, at 15 percent.
Macron acknowledged the scale of the defeat.
“I’ve heard your message, your concerns, and I won’t leave them unanswered,” he said, adding that calling a snap election only underscored his democratic credentials.
Austria’s far-right Freedom Party gained nearly 26 percent of the vote, topping a nationwide ballot for the first time.
The governing conservative People’s Party (OeVP) picked up 24.7 percent, followed by the Social Democrats with 23.2 percent and the Greens at 10.7 percent.
Chancellor Nehammer pledged to address voters’ concerns ahead of national elections due to be held in Autumn, including cracking down on illegal immigration.
Meanwhile, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni saw her position bolstered after her right-wing populist Brothers of Italy won the most votes, exit polls showed.
Left-wing and green parties had a better showing in the Scandinavian countries, with far-right and populist parties in Sweden, Denmark and Finland seeing their vote shares decline.
In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s nationalist Fidesz won the most votes but lost significant ground compared with the 2019 elections.
Fidesz had 44 percent of the vote with nearly 90 percent of votes counted, down from 52 percent.
Still, Orbán claimed victory in a speech to supporters at a party event on Sunday night.
“Today, we defeated the old opposition, the new opposition, and no matter what the opposition will be called the next time, we will defeat them again and again,” he said.
Orbán’s main challenger, Peter Magyar’s Tisza party, picked up about 30 percent of the vote.
Overall across the EU, two mainstream and pro-European groups, the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, remained the dominant forces. The gains of the far right came at the expense of the Greens, who were expected to lose about 20 seats and fall back to sixth position in the legislature.
Reporting from Berlin, Al Jazeera’s Step Vaessen said that the Eurosceptic parties appeared set to form a large bloc in the next European Parliament.
“With this very large bloc of far-right parties, there can be an influence on climate policies, for example … Also, [the EU’s] agriculture policies… and migration policies, which is a very important issue here in Germany and in the Netherlands,” she said.
However, Vaessen noted that the far-right parties are not united.
“They have a lot of divisions among themselves and they have been trying to reach out to each other. We’ve seen [France’s] Marine Le Pen, for example, reaching out to [Prime Minister] Giorgia Meloni in Italy,” she said.
“But after tonight, we will have to see how these groups will be formed and what kind of influence they will have.”
Source: Al Jazeera
BDST: 0821 HRS, JUN 10, 2024
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