EU Far Right Still Faces Hurdles In Quest For Power

Paris, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 14th Mar, 2024) Far-right parties are scoring ever higher in elections across the European Union, but experts say hurdles remain to the movements making a concerted push for power.

How high the wave goes will largely depend on the response from traditional conservative and centre-right parties, outfits often balancing efforts to cling on to their electoral turf while trying to form workable governing coalitions.

In the past, far-right parties could be kept beyond the pale on two conditions: voters saw them as dangerous to democracy, and their election results remained relatively marginal at up to 15 percent, said Gilles Ivaldi of France's Sciences Po university.

But with much of the far right moderating anti-EU and anti-migrant rhetoric, "it's more difficult to maintain a quarantine when you have a party that people think is pretty much like the others," he added.

What's more, such parties are scoring much higher at the ballot box than in past decades.

Their electoral performance has made Brothers of Italy chief Giorgia Meloni prime minister of Italy and propelled Geert Wilders's PVV party to the threshold of power in the Netherlands.

Some regions of Spain and Germany appear ungovernable without inviting in the Vox or Alternative for Germany (AfD) parties, while Portugal's Chega is poised to play kingmaker following Sunday's national elections.

Such successes are founded on "the build-up of successive crises" generating "successive layers of resentment" at those in power since the last European Parliament election in 2019, Ivaldi said.

On top of the years-long fallout from the 2008 financial crash and the mid-2010s refugee crisis have come the coronavirus and the war in Ukraine "with all the social and economic ramifications... around purchasing power, economic crisis and insecurity," he added.