The European elections, which are being held from June 6 to 9, are expected to see a strong surge in the far right within the European Parliament, while parties from this movement already sit in the governments of several member states.
On this occasion, The world carried out a detailed mapping of the vote in favor of the extreme right within the Twenty-Seven. To do this, we selected the radical right and populist parties for each country, and extracted the votes cast in their favor during the most recent national legislative elections.
To try to understand the mechanisms which favored this evolution in the contrasting territories of the EU, we contacted the geographer Béatrice Giblin, founder of the French Institute of Geopolitics (Paris-VIII University) and director of the journal Herodotuswhich from 2012 in one of its issues, revised and expanded in 2014 (The Far Right in EuropeLa Découverte) questioned the common causes behind the rise of these parties.
All polls predict a strong surge in far-right parties in the European elections. If it is sometimes difficult to clearly classify certain parties as far right, the fact remains that this movement shares common denominators.
At the forefront is immigration, whether it is strong or not in their country: everyone voted against the pact on migration and asylum, considered too lax. The European Union (EU) is accused of favoring the arrival of foreigners without taking into account, especially if they come from Muslim countries, a supposed opposition of “peoples”, for fear of losing their ethnic, religious or cultural identity.
However, although the far right is now present in all EU states, some, especially in the East, are significantly more affected than others. Areas where far-right parties score very high are generally rural and sparsely populated. In these countries, however, integration into the EU in 2004 was approved by a clear majority of citizens. Today, some of them are seduced by the nationalist, identity and conservative discourses of these parties, which they see as the only ones knowing how to understand and defend them, or even protect them from a European elite who would ignore them, would despise them and impose economic and societal policies on them that they reject.
Demography in crisis
These countries, in addition to being led by communist parties, have all experienced more or less traumatic national histories. Poland was twice wiped off the map, divided between Germany and Russia. Hungary lost a large part of its territory and population after the First World War. The Czech Republic lost Bohemia for a time. All have demographics in crisis – population decline, very low birth and fertility rates, exile of young graduates, aging of the population – which fuels the feeling of part of their population of being abandoned and of seeing themselves disappear. forever its way of life, in these regions which are still rural but where the common agricultural policy has strongly contributed to modernizing agriculture and, therefore, to accelerating the rural exodus.
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