Realignment for real, part 3

Last week we looked at the way the Republican Party in the United States is divided on the parallel lines of sympathy for Donald Trump and antipathy for Ukraine. The US, however, has always been distinctive among western democracies; it would not be very surprising if political alignment there departed from the norm. If we are looking for a general trend, Europe is the more likely place to find it.

Europe has no Trump, although a few countries have half-convincing imitations. But it does have Russia’s Vladimir Putin on its borders. Putin was not really an issue in domestic American politics before 2016, when Trump sought his assistance in his election campaign. For some years prior to that, however, he had been seeking to sow divisions in Europe and neutralise opposition to his geopolitical aims by, among other things, subsidising parties of the far right.

Sympathy for Putin therefore became over the last decade or so one of the markers for distinguishing far-right from centre-right parties. It was not infallible: Poland’s far-right leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, has always been anti-Russian, while some notable centre-right figures, including Silvio Berlusconi and Nicolas Sarkozy, were close to Putin. But it worked well as a generalisation.

Then came last year’s invasion of Ukraine, and overt support for Russia became politically toxic. Almost all far-right leaders condemned the invasion. The majority, however, clearly remained Putinists at heart, and over time have drifted back towards, if not open support for Russia, at least hostility towards aid for Ukraine. Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orbán are typical of this group.

But others seem to have had a genuine conversion. Then-president of Czechia, Miloš Zeman, repudiated his previous support for Putin; Italy’s post-Fascist leader (now prime minister) Giorgia Meloni became a strong backer of Ukraine; and far-right parties in places where the Russian presence was keenly felt, such as Finland and Estonia, performed an abrupt U-turn.

There’s now a good correlation between the Putinist/anti-Putinist divide on the far right and the split between the two far-right groups in the European parliament. The moderate Eurosceptic group, European Conservatives and Reformists (which includes Kaczyński’s Law & Justice and Meloni’s Brothers of Italy), has been pro-Ukraine, while the smaller Identity and Democracy group (whose biggest components are Le Pen’s National Rally and Matteo Salvini’s League) are at best lukewarm in their support.

Scare stories about the far right’s return to respectability, however, typically fail to make this distinction: instead they give the impression of a uniform tide threatening European democracy. The warnings are not out of place – even some of the anti-Putin far-right parties, such as Spain’s Vox, are pretty scary – but in terms of understanding the continent’s party dynamics they may now be somewhat behind the curve.

The two wings of the far right still have a lot in common. They are both anti-immigration, anti-feminist and hostile to the sort of progressive policies that they label as the “woke agenda”. These are also signature policies for Putin, so there is going to be a continuing tension in the moderate far-right camp: in due course it’s possible that some of them will shift away from other parts of the Putin agenda, just as America’s anti-Trump Republicans have started to abandon [link added] some other traditional right-wing policies.

This all has an impact on the centre-right as well. Last month I reported on the clash between Manfred Weber, the leader of the centre-right group in the European parliament, and his more moderate colleague, EU prime minister Ursula von der Leyen. A big part of the conflict there, repeated in a number of countries, is over how much ground to concede to far-right parties. As Paul Taylor put it recently, “The longstanding ‘cordon sanitaire’ against cooperation with the hard right is fast crumbling, first at local and national level and now potentially in Brussels too.”

But again, there are differences. The relative success stories in such co-operation have come in countries like Denmark and Sweden where the far right is anti-Putinist. The more traumatic experiences are going to come in places like Germany and Austria – and France, where the centre-right Republicans have moved sharply rightwards in an attempt to differentiate themselves from the centrist president.

In the US, with its institutionalised two-party system, the Republican Party has mostly been left to sort out its own problems. The European party systems are much more dynamic, so what happens on the right will also influence, and be influenced by, what happens on the left – which has its own complex set of relationships with war, democracy and Putin. That will be a topic for part four, next week.