The extreme right, with its speeches against the European Union and migration, mainly, has seduced more and more voters in Europe, fed up with traditional politics.
The most recent example of this trend is the Italian Georgia Meloni, the leader of the Brothers Italy party, who, together with Matteo Salvini, of the anti-immigrant League, and Silvio Berlusconi, swept the legislative elections this Sunday.
At the beginning of the month, the extreme right surprised in the elections for the Swedish Parliament.
These are some of the ultra-conservative politicians who have become relevant in recent years.
Italy (Giorgia Meloni)
Giorgia Meloni is the first woman to serve as Italy’s prime minister as head of the country’s most right-wing government since World War II, after leading a conservative alliance that won Sunday’s election.
Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party won 26% of the vote in Sunday’s election, giving the right-wing coalition he leads a comfortable majority in parliament, according to final results released on Tuesday.
The right-wing coalition, which includes Matteo Salvini’s right-wing League and Silvio Berlusconi’s conservative Forza Italia, will have 237 seats in the Chamber of Deputies out of a total of 400.
That coalition will also have a majority in the Senate with 115 seats out of 200, well above the necessary majority.
The anti-immigration formation, the Salvini League, obtained 8.8% of the votes, while Berlusconi’s Forza Italia obtained 8.1% of the votes in the Chamber of Deputies, according to figures from the Minister of the Interior.
Meloni tried to reassure investors during the electoral campaign and his speeches were less radical than those he had made in the past, in which he virulently defended his ultra-conservative and anti-European creed.
Hungary (Viktor Orban)
Hungary’s nationalist President Viktor Orban won a fourth consecutive victory much more easily than expected on April 3 in war-torn general elections in Ukraine.
To confront him, an unprecedented and very disparate alliance of six parties had been formed, determined to overthrow the “authoritarian” 58-year-old leader. However Fidesz and its minor coalition partner, the Christian Democrats, achieved a landslide victory, winning around 48% of the vote.
Turnout was high and approached the record mobilization of the 2018 elections.
He told his supporters that, with the victory, “the Hungarians have given us a directive on three things: firstly, to stop immigration throughout Europe; we have been commissioned to defend the Europe of the nations; and we have been commissioned to defend Christian culture in Europe”.
Relations between Orbán’s Hungary and the European Union have been tense. In February, the Court of Justice of the European Union began the path to restrict the sending of funds to Hungary for failing to comply with European standards, especially by imposing political controls on the judicial system and the media and restricting basic rights.
In addition, Orbán has forged close ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin in recent years and is highly critical of European sanctions against Moscow, something that has further complicated his relationship with Brussels.
Poland (Mateusz Morawiecki)
Another great critic of the European Union is the Polish Prime Minister, Mateuz Morawiecki, who told a press conference: “In Poland, centralization, bureaucracy and federalization is a dangerous process.”
The ruling party in Poland, Law and Justice (PiS), and the Brothers of Italy are part of the right-wing group European Conservatives and Reformists. When he took the reins of the Executive in 2017, he projected towards Europe the classic profile of a stable technocrat for investors and Brussels, in the shadow of former Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the strong man of Poland.
In his youth, “he directed the dissident press and cut his teeth ripping down communist flags and painting anti-system slogans on the walls,” indicates the Spanish newspaper
During his government, the right to abortion suffered significant setbacks. They have also been accused of maintaining stigmatizing and harmful rhetoric against the LGBT population and have denied or frustrated the attempts of these people to protest, according to Amnesty International.
“Illegal restrictions, requirements and harsh sanctions imposed on LGBTI people and their supporters have reduced the space for them to freely exercise their human rights and created an atmosphere of fear,” says Anna Błaszczak-Banasiak, Director of Amnesty International Poland. , it’s a statement.
France (National Front, Marine Le Pen)
Marine Le Pen joined the National Front, founded by her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 1998. With this political group, she reached the second round of the 2017 presidential elections, in which she was defeated by Emmanuel Macron.
In the April 2022 elections, Le Pen was once again placed on the ballot, now with the modernized Rassemblement National (National Group), with a strategy defined by the media of “demonization” of the National Front. Just like five years ago, Le Pen faced Macron in the second round and lost the election.
The far-right leader is offering her traditional hard line on immigration and French identity, but alongside a program aimed at helping struggling households.
He promised to ban the Muslim headscarf in all public places and hold a referendum on the introduction of strict controls on immigration, including a requirement that residency applications can only be made outside of France.
On foreign policy, Le Pen has distanced herself from Russian leader Vladimir Putin, but is proposing to withdraw from NATO’s joint military command, in line with her promise to bolster French sovereignty. He has also proposed changes to France that would challenge the foundations of the European Union.
Sweden (Sweden Democrats, Jimmie Akesson)
Sweden, a country that normally leans towards center and center-left options, surprised in its legislative elections on September 11 by giving an unprecedented victory to a bloc of right-wing and far-right parties.
At the end of a last day of counting votes after very close elections, the outgoing prime minister, the Social Democrat Magdalena Andersson, recognized the defeat of her bloc and announced her resignation.
“Thank you for the trust. Now we will put order in Sweden!” The call to be his successor, Ulf Kristersson, head of the conservative party, immediately reacted on Facebook.
With 176 seats, of which 73 correspond to the vote for the extreme right of the Sweden Democrats (SD), the bloc of four right-wing parties narrowly surpasses the left-wing bloc led by Andersson, which won 173 seats, according to results. with more than 99% of the votes counted.
The change is historic: never before has a Swedish government supported itself to govern in the SD, the great winner of this electoral appointment with 20.6% of the votes and the recently released title of second party in the country.
“Now the work begins to make Sweden go well again,” reacted its leader, Jimmie Åkesson, on Facebook, promising to be a “constructive and proactive force”.
Heir to a neo-Nazi formation, the party founded in 1988 was normalizing itself in the Swedish political landscape and increasing its representation until entering parliament in 2010 with 5.7% of the vote. From there, it has been rising in each election.
But although the SD is the first party of the right-wing majority, its leader is not capable of gaining the support of the other formations to become prime minister, a position promised to Ulf Kristersson.
Experts believe that he will end up supporting the future Executive in parliament without being part of it.
Spain (Vox, Santiago Abascal)
Vox has occupied more and more spaces in Spanish politics for several years. With her speeches against migration from Muslim-majority countries and the so-called “gender ideology” —that is, feminism and the defense of the rights of LGBT+ minorities—, she has become the banner of the extreme right in his country.
With Santiago Abascal at the helm, it became the third political force in Spain in the elections of November 11, 2019, obtaining 3.6 million votes and surpassing other emerging political groups, such as United We Can and Citizens.
This party is the main opposition to the government headed by Pedro Sánchez, president of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), in alliance with Unidos Podemos, an anti-system organization that emerged from the protests in Spain at the beginning of the last decade. These two organizations have a liberal left ideology.
Vox emerged last decade as a split from the Popular Party (PP), Spain’s traditional conservative party. In 2014, several former members of the PP, including Santiago Abascal, founded their own political party with a view to collecting the votes of the “disenchanted and disappointed” right-wing of then-president of the Spanish government, Mariano Rajoy.
Abascal’s group defines itself as the only political party in Spain that fights “against suffocating political correctness”, as indicated on its website. The party points out that its intention is to defend private property and an increasingly thin state, which could bring it closer to a neoliberal discourse, at least economically.
“Our project is summed up in the defense of Spain, of the family and of life; in reducing the size of the State, guaranteeing equality among Spaniards and expelling the government from your private life”, indicates the party’s website.
With information from AFP and Reuters
