On September 30, Austria’s far-Right party, the Freedom Party, founded by former Nazi functionaries and SS officers, scored its strongest results since the Second World War. In the weeks before that, regional elections in Germany’s former East granted heavy wins for the far-Right Alternative for Germany, which has had countless party members demonstrate neo-Nazi ties and sympathies. The day after far-Right gains in eastern elections, Germany imposed border checks, potentially violating European Union laws on free movement — a worrying step away from the project of European federalism that was built to create peace and unity after the Second World War.
The far-Right, anti-Islam, pro-Putin, anti-EU contingent of European politics has been winning across the continent, from the Netherlands to Italy and in numerous local and federal elections in between. And yet real, total power that the authoritarian far-Right craves often seems to be just out of reach. Often without being able to win outright majorities, they are unable to form functioning governments as Centrist parties refuse to form coalitions.
But these far-Right politicians are Icaruses flying too close to the sun of actual public governance, their wax wings made of the most vile, hateful rhetoric imaginable and a drive to use whatever it takes to rile up voters.
Take Geert Wilders for example. The Dutch firebrand politician, whose far-Right Freedom Party won last year’s parliamentary elections, gave up his bid to become prime minister just half a year after his victory so that his party could form a functioning government. A similar scenario may well play out in Vienna, where the Austrian far-Right FPÖ is likely to enter government only if it distances itself from its party leader, philosophy student-turned-right-wing ideologue Herbert Kickl. The party may even be excluded from government altogether if the Center-Right Austrian People’s Party manages to cobble up a three-way coalition with the Social Democrats and the liberal NEOS.
Kickl, who wants to shut Austria’s borders to migrants and erect a “Fortress Austria” while calling himself “the people’s chancellor”, is yet another example of a far-Right leader who is able to energise a hard-Right base with incendiary rhetoric, but whose toxicity then becomes the very thing that bars him from real power.
But that is only the case for now. Even if the far-Right does not win power immediately, victories by extremist parties do impact the European political landscape. Consider how far the far-Right has advanced in the near decade since the refugee crisis first began to make headlines in 2015. The AfD was a fringe party of mostly economics professors while the slogan of the era towards refugees desperate to flee violence was the infamous invocation of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, “Willkommenskultur”. Merkel’s former party, the Centre-Right Christian Democratic Union, now leads the Opposition against the barely stable ruling coalition. Hardly a day goes by without the CDU calling for harsher limits on migration, while the AfD clobbers established Centrist parties despite its members getting caught in scandal after scandal linking them to neo-Nazism.
What will happen as more voters elect far-Right parties based on their extremist policies but their divisive leaders remain far from power is that Centrist parties will adopt increasingly far-Right agendas. Consider Germany’s decision to tighten controls at every one of its land borders. Berlin decided earlier in September that controls in place at its border with Austria since 2015, and since last year with Poland, the Czech Republic and Switzerland, would be extended to France, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark. Nancy Faeser, the interior minister of Germany and a member of the Centre-Left Social Democrats, made the decision after a stabbing attack by an Afghan refugee on a police officer and immediately following the devastating results of the elections in Germany’s east in favour of the far-Right.
The decision came after months of negotiating over stricter limits on migration. There is currently no Centrist party in Germany other than the Greens, which is also rapidly losing support, that opposes tighter restrictions on immigration. Germany is not alone: Italy, Norway, Sweden, Slovenia and Finland are also operating border checks, variously citing terrorist activity, the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, Russian intelligence activity, increased migration flows and organised crime in the Balkans.
The decision to close borders seems to be driven chiefly by politics and potentially violates EU laws. It is troubling for those who believe in the European project of freedom of movement and work. It strikes at the heart of what the EU has sought to achieve since the passport-free Schengen zone was created in 1985 which now includes 25 of the 27 EU member states: a United States of Europe, so to speak. A Europe of free travel, trade, and work. While it might not sound strange that Germany may want to control its borders, it does so within a larger territory of freedom of movement. Imagine how shocking it might be if Oklahoma in the United States of America suddenly closed all of its borders to the rest of the country, or if Madya Pradesh closed its borders to its surrounding states in India.
It undermines not only the project of a united Europe but also the free and cooperative market that holds it together. A European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs estimated as far back as in 2016 that the reintroduction of internal border controls would cost Europe an estimated 5 billion to 18 billion euros annually. If Europe’s self-conception has been moving toward a collection of cooperative nations, this is a threat to that vision.
And these decisions are made on the basis of far-Right electoral success. The future of the far-Right will wear the calm, rational guise of Centrism. Centrist parties, long the gatekeepers of liberal democracy, now tiptoe around the far-Right’s talking points, fearful that ignoring voters’ simmering concerns will only speed up their own political demise.
The far-Right may not yet be fully in control, at least not its most recognisable leaders. But it is hard to argue that they have not already won.
Carol Schaeffer is a journalist based in Berlin, Germany and is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington D.C
