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Can Nationalists Work Together? Europe’s About to Find Out

Europe’s Far Right May Soon Dominate the EU Parliament

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Angelo Ciocca of Italy’s League party is in the European Parliament’s plenary chamber in Strasbourg, France, railing against the European Union’s “crazy, criminal project” to let Muslim Turkey in. Never mind that, minutes earlier, the body called for suspending Turkey’s membership talks, which anyway have been stalled for a decade.

Welcome to what some have called the YouTube parliament, where populist members such as Ciocca make speeches aimed more at energizing voters back home than shaping EU legislation. The closer the May 23-26 EU-wide elections get, the more inflamed their speeches are. The League and other nationalist parties expect big gains, winning as many as one-third of seats. Steve Bannon, former strategist for U.S. President Donald Trump who’s advised many in Europe’s insurgent right, has predicted May’s elections will be a political “earthquake.” Hyperbole notwithstanding, the 60-year-old bloc is about to see a significant change.

Can Nationalists Work Together? Europe’s About to Find Out

Power in the bloc’s parliament depends on the size of the group of parties you belong to. The euroskeptic Right has a history of squabbling that’s marginalized it in the past—it’s presently split among three parliamentary groups—but there’s reason to think that may change. League leader Matteo Salvini convened a group of representatives from like-minded parties in Milan on April 8 to forge a preelection coalition around a new, more nation-focused vision of the Continent—though in a sign of challenges ahead, just three other countries showed up.

Should they manage to consolidate, the populists would be entitled to committee chairmanships and other posts with the power to shape legislation. They could also coordinate to influence the EU’s other two pillars, the European Commission and the Council of national leaders and ministers. That would require drawing in Poland’s Law and Justice Party and Hungary’s Fidesz, led by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, says Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Marco Zanni, who’s from the League.

Can Nationalists Work Together? Europe’s About to Find Out

Law and Justice currently shares an EU parliamentary group with Britain’s Conservatives. Fidesz, meanwhile, was recently suspended from Europe’s largest parliamentary group, the European People’s Party, for abusing some of its core values. Add in the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which is projected to gain nine seats (it has one), some smaller governing parties from southeastern Europe, and League allies such as Marine Le Pen’s National Rally of France, and the Italian party could soon head one of Parliament’s biggest voting blocs. Now that the U.K. will have to participate in May’s election, Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party and his former colleagues in UKIP are expected to do well, too. To the extent Britain remains in the EU after the vote, that would further swell Parliament’s populist numbers.

Can Nationalists Work Together? Europe’s About to Find Out

“It would be a big challenge, shifting from a small party in opposition to the pivotal party in the rising group that is challenging Europe’s traditional powers and leaders,” says Zanni, speaking between plenary sessions at his office in the Winston Churchill office building block of the Parliament’s occasional home in Strasbourg, where it moves from Brussels for one week each month.

The hope of liberals such as Jean Arthuis, the Parliament’s budget committee chairman, is that any such threat from the far right will galvanize centrist parties to unite and fight back. “Europe has advanced only through crises,” says Arthuis, a supporter of French President Emmanuel Macron and a former French finance minister.

The wise won’t discount the possibility that any far right alliance will be felled by the fractiousness that’s plagued past attempts to form a bloc. Parties such as UKIP and Le Pen’s National Rally have struggled to work together, or even with themselves: One UKIP member was famously left sprawled unconscious on the Parliament floor in 2016 after being clocked by another. Both parties have torn into multiple parts since the last EU parliamentary elections in 2014, when the populist right also made big gains.

Nationalism and ideology can also get in the way. Before splitting, Farage’s UKIP wouldn’t work with the National Front, as Le Pen’s party was known. “He thought it was too extreme, while the National Front says it can’t work with Jobbik, because it’s too extreme. Which says it can’t work with Golden Dawn, and so it goes on,” says Richard Corbett, a British Labour Party MEP. Jobbik and Golden Dawn are ultranationalist parties in Hungary and Greece.

The League, meanwhile, disagrees with the hard right Freedom Party of Austria over the status of South Tyrol, still a largely German-speaking part of the Hapsburg Empire that Italy annexed after World War I. It disagrees with the AfD about the euro area’s budget deficit restrictions, which the Italians want loosened or lifted but the Germans don’t. Salvini, like Orbán, is a fan of Russian President Vladimir Putin and wants to normalize relations with Russia; Poland’s Law and Justice is opposed. Mario Borghezio, one of the League’s longer-serving MEPs, has switched groups seven times. “If your main line is that you hate foreigners, it’s a bit difficult to work with foreigners,” Corbett says.

Ironically, Britain’s tortured effort to leave the EU without damaging its own economy has prompted other nationalist movements to drop the idea. That’s hardly reassuring, says Jaroslaw Walesa, son of the Solidarity leader and former Polish President Lech Walesa. He fears that the populists—still hostile to the EU in their guts—will unpick the bloc’s achievements through a kind of malicious recklessness.

As for their uniting into a single, organized bloc, Walesa, an MEP from Poland’s opposition Civic Platform says, “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jillian Goodman at jgoodman74@bloomberg.net

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