Spain looks set to be the next country to turn right at a snap general election called in desperation for 23 July by Socialist prime minister Pedro Sànchez after his party suffered a crushing defeat in regional and city elections at the end of May.
At the election, the conservative Partido Popular – currently 10 points ahead of the Socialists in the polls – is expected to win most seats and be able to govern with the support of right-wing nationalist Vox party. Its leader is a man, Núñez Feijóo, but its guiding force and rising star is Isabel Dìaz Ayuso, 44, who has just been re-elected president of the Madrid Region.
In Italy, the right-wing coalition led by prime minister Giorgia Meloni, 46, which came to power last September with a large majority won a similar crushing victory in city elections at the same time. It triumphed even in traditional red strongholds that Italy’s communist and post-communist left have never lost such as Siena in Tuscany, and Ancona in Le Marche.
In France, centrist president Emmanuel Macron, whose approval rating is rock bottom, is barred from standing for a third consecutive term in 2027. But if he could, Marine Le Pen, 55, leader of the right-wing nationalist Rassemblement National (RN), would comfortably defeat him in a second ballot run-off according to polls – by 55% to 45%.
The right has won power during the past year in Italy, Sweden, and Finland, and retained power in Hungary. In Greece, it won the general election in May but without a working majority and there will be a new election on 25 June, It is already in power elsewhere, most notably in Poland.
Meanwhile, especially in the two countries that dominate Europe, France and Germany, the Socialist and Social Democratic left are in deep trouble.
In France, the Socialist Party which produced a president as recently as 2012, has been wiped out. The more extreme alternative, La France Insoumise, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, holds it own because it is more nationalist and less woke. But the French working class still prefer “far right” Le Pen.
In Germany, support in the polls for the Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats, which was never high is now only 19%, just one point more than the nationalist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), and nine points behind the conservative Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands. Scholz is famous only for bequeathing to the world a new word in English: to “scholz”, i.e. dither.
The European working class is rejecting the left. It is not hard to fathom why.
What the popolo wants is protection from the destruction of their jobs, way of life, and culture, caused by the rampant globalization of goods and people.
But what has allowed this globalization to cause such devastation is an unholy alliance between right-wing global capitalism and left-wing no borders socialism. For the globalist right, nations are a barrier to profit; for the no borders left the root of all evil.
Everywhere in Europe, the left has failed to defend the jobs and wages of the working class – and their way of life, culture and country – often in favour of defending the “rights” of minority groups such as illegal migrants and men who call themselves women. The modern European left talks to the media, not to the people.
Italy is a perfect example. The Italian left, fresh from humiliating defeat at the general election, appointed Elly Schlein, 38, as its leader. But Schlein, who currently identifies as lesbian and has three passports (Italian, Swiss, American), is classic woke.
She is both gender fluid and border fluid: determined to defend the desire of a trans man to use a woman’s toilet, and of an illegal migrant to live in Italy. She of course wants to ban cars that run on fossil fuels,
In this her first test at the ballot box as leader, voters made it clear what they think.
But this is not the only reason the popolo is turning right.
The conservative right that is now winning in Europe is not the same as that of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher for whom free trade, however unfair, and private enterprise, at all costs free from state intervention, were sacred cows.
On both social and economic questions, the new right – which is increasingly called National Conservatism - is much closer to a far older conservatism in the tradition of Edmund Burke, whose most effective modern champion was the English philosopher Roger Scruton who died in 2020.
Scruton, for instance, believed in free trade but only so long as it does not destroy families, communities and their culture. He also believed that the state should intervene in the economy to conserve those vital elements that combine to create a nation.
The female standard bearers of the new right in Italy, France and Spain win because they are – to use a new definition - reactionary feminists who are women not men.
When they oppose the participation of trans men in women’s sport because it is unfair they cannot be accused of misogyny.
When they propose to abolish income tax – as Meloni has done in order to combat the collapse of Italy’s fertility rate – for couples who have three or more children they cannot be accused of male chauvinism.
Staunch defenders of traditional right-wing social values they are also quite capable of left-wing intervention in the economy if necessary.
And they often regard the big banks and multi-nationals as the enemy when, for instance, they exploit their international status to avoid tax. In a recent speech, Meloni prompted huge approval from supporters and howls of outrage from opponents, when she said that of course she wants to stamp out tax evasion but only “where it exists: in big companies and banks”, not in small businesses already crippled by “the pizzo di stato” (the government pizzo). The pizzo is the fee the Mafia demands for protection.
There are two types of nationalism - defensive (good) and aggressive (bad). Today's European nationalism is good because it aims to defend countries, their cultures and ways of life - but not to impose them on other countries as, for instance, did Hitler's nationalism.
These right-wing women have seized from the left the national flag held high by the topless Marianne in the famous 1830 Delacroix painting called Liberté Guidant Le Peuple.
In the case of Ayuso and Meloni at least they are also brilliant public speakers.
Ayuso, a divorcee with no children, wins over the Spanish people in speeches and on tv with her brazen descriptions of her opponents as “communists” and nurses as “lazy”. During the Covid pandemic, in defiance of the national government and the health authorities she lifted lockdown in September 2020 in Madrid’s bars and restaurants and was hailed as their “patron saint”. She is often defined as “chulapa”, an old-fashioned word used to describe a young working class woman who is charming and insolent.
But it will not be Ayuso who governs Spain if the right wins in July, and Le Pen is still years away from another chance at becoming French president.
Meloni, who unlike Ayuso really was brought up in a working class family, is the one to watch.
The Italian prime minister who famously said “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother and I am a Christian and they will not take it away from me” is steadily filling the vacuum left by Angela Merkel as the European Union’s de facto leader which both Macron and Scholz have so conspicuously failed to fill.
Last week (30 May), she told a conference in the Italian Senate, entitled “Nazione e Patria”, that such concepts which were regarded for decades as “retrograde, reactionary, obsolete, if not downright dangerous” are now back as “central to the political, historical, philosophical and judicial debate”.
A key aim is for the European Conservative and Reformist party (ECR) of which she is president to play a pivotal role in the European Parliament after next May’s elections.
Traditionally, the European People’s Party group (EPP) – which comprises mainly Christian Democratic parties – has controlled the European Parliament. Currently, it has 176 MEPs out of 705 but has only been able kept control by allying with its natural opponents the Socialists, on 144 MEPs, or occasionally with Renew (formerly the Liberals), which has 102 MEPs (including Macron’s MEPs plus Guy Verhofstadt).
Its share of the seats has decreased substantially in recent years and thus its need for allies has increased. Meloni’s ECR which includes Vox and Poland’s Law and Justice Party, will inevitably increase dramatically its 66 MEPS next May.
As will the third right-wing group, Identity and Democracy (ID), which has 62 seats and includes the Lega, her coalition ally in Italy, Germany’s AfD and Le Pen’s RN. The ECR and ID do not see eye to eye on several issues especially Russia. Meloni is a fervent supporter of arms to Ukraine. Le Pen against. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban’s Fidez Party is not a member of either group. But on all else, they are more or less on the same side.
The European left’s only hope of defeating National Conservatism may well be to refound itself as National Socialism. But that was what the Nazis called themselves wasn’t it?
Nicholas Farrell