Geert Wilders’ surprise victory in last week’s Dutch elections portends an upheaval in European politics long in the offing, but provoked by two pressing events.
The first is the mass demonstrations in support of Hamas by Muslim migrants after October 7, a triumphalist assertion of power by a minority that believes that it may become the future majority.
This cast a harsh light on uncontrolled mass immigration, now Europe’s top political issue. The failure of the mainstream parties to address the continent’s most pressing problem opens a path to power for an opposition that only months ago was dismissed as a political fringe element.
The second issue is popular hostility to the Ukraine war, which Ukraine is visibly losing.
Long derided as extremist throwbacks, Europe’s right-wing parties have become the last bastion of what used to be conventional wisdom in the West. Their nationalism has more in common with Charles De Gaulle than Jean-Marie Le Pen, and their views on key issues – immigration, Russia, China, and the United States – are rational and considered.
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who describes himself as a Christian Democrat in the style of the late German chancellor Helmut Kohl, is the standard-bearer of the new European right, but prospective leaders are emerging in several European countries.
Wilders, to be sure, has taken colorful positions on his country’s Muslim problem, proposing at one point to ban the Koran and close mosques. These are rhetorical gestures rather than statements of policy. What qualifies the European right for a position of leadership is that it offers rational policy alternatives on economic, social and security policy.
Migration, legal and illegal, is transforming the character of European society. Officially, about 7% of the populations of France, Britain and Germany are Muslim migrants, but the actual numbers are higher.
In 2017, the Pew Institute estimated that 8.8% of French residents were Muslim, and that the total would rise to 18% by 2050. More than half of all schoolchildren in the German city of Hamburg are from migrant families.
An estimated 2.3 million people emigrated to Europe in 2022. The European Commission’s estimate of 331,400 “irregular border crossings” in 2022 is almost certainly a vast underestimate; Hungary alone has turned back 270,00 prospective migrants at its border during 2023, Orban reported in a speech last week.
Ukraine has been by far the largest source of immigrants to Europe during the past two years, but Europeans do not regard Ukrainians as a cultural threat. The public assertion of power by Muslim minorities after October 7, though, has radically changed public perceptions.
Wilders polled at just 10% of the vote before the October 7 Hamas massacre, but won 35% of the seats after European Muslims staged mass demonstrations in support of Hamas in most major European cities.
On October 19, Muslims in Berlin’s Neukölln district rioted, injuring 65 police officers after an Islamist Telegram channel called on its followers to “turn Neukölln into the Gaza Strip” and “burn everything,” according to the mass-circulation Bild-Zeitung.
A You.gov poll in early November reported that 59% of Germans fear a mass terror attack in their own country after the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, which killed more than 1,000 civilians. Only 27% of Germans polled thought that terror attacks were unlikely.
A poll by the German magazine Stern published on October 18 found that 58% of Germans thought the Israeli military response in Gaza “appropriate,” against only 23% opposed.
For the most part, the right-wing parties are strong supporters of Israel. Along with Croatia and the Czech Republic, Hungary was one of only a handful of industrial countries to vote against the October UN Security Council resolution calling for a Gaza ceasefire.
The Gaza war and, more importantly, the upheaval among Europe’s Muslims in response to the Gaza war, drove a wedge into European society that left large numbers of voters convinced that the Muslim minority was unassimilable and even dangerous.
This contrasts sharply with the response to then-chancellor Angela Merkel’s “We can do it!” approach to absorbing about 1 million Syrian and other Muslim migrants in 2016.
Migration accounts for the sudden surge in support for Europe’s right-wing parties, but deep dissatisfaction with the stance of Europe’s mainstream parties on the Ukraine war is an important contributing factor.
Speaking at the Swiss newspaper Weltwoche’s anniversary conference last week, Hungary’s Orban summarized Europe’s problem: “America loses ground, and Europe pays the price.” He called for an independent European strategic policy.
An up-and-coming leader of the Alternative für Deutschland, Germany’s right-wing opposition, is Dr Maximilian Krah, the AfD’s lead candidate in next year’s European elections. In an interview with The American Conservative, Krah described himself as a Gaullist who wants Europe to be an important pole in a multi-polar world.
“Let’s push back against a widespread misconception on the right, that right now the US is hegemonic and that the only alternative is Chinese hegemony,” Krah told the US publications.
“China and BRICS are an anti-hegemonic coalition. So I’d say it’s this way: We either have a Pax Americana, which I believe is necessarily woke and bellicose, or we have no sole global hegemony but regional hegemons instead who rule according to their own local preferences. And I’m not even saying that this latter model is better than the former. It’s just inevitable,” Krah said.
American hegemony in Europe will atrophy, Krah added:
How can a country that is moving away from Europe dominate it at the same time? This question poses itself very concretely in Ukraine. Obviously you see that the United States does not have the well-being of the Ukrainian population on the top of its mind. After all, we are right now sacrificing the Ukrainian youth in this moronic war: a war that could have easily been avoided. Clearly, this war is about America’s ambition to push back against Russia. It is a war for world order. And Washington has effectively taken over Kiev, which cannot do anything without American approval. The US finances Ukraine, arms it, makes strategic decisions on its behalf.
Bild-Zeitung, Germany’s largest-circulation news outlet, reported November 24 that Washington and Berlin are trying to persuade Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Russia can’t be defeated militarily and that he will have to negotiate a solution.
What Maximilian Krah qualified as “this moronic” war will haunt Europe’s mainstream parties, who will be perceived as Washington’s puppets. As Orban told American journalist Tucker Carlson in an interview last month, “Germany’s position on the Ukraine war is proof of lack of sovereignty.”
The AfD is polling in second place at about 22% of the German vote, ahead of the Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats who comprise the ruling coalition. Like Wilders’ party, the AfD has had the status of a political leper. The mainstream parties have all declared that they will refuse to work with them.
As the tectonic plates of European politics shift, none of the old Shibboleths will apply.
Follow David P Goldman on X, formerly Twitter, at @davidpgoldman