“A hard-right tidal wave is about to hit the EU,” warned former prime minister Gordon Brown in the Guardian this week. “Ultra-nationalist demagogues and populist-nationalists are now leading the polls in Italy, the Netherlands, France, Austria, Hungary and Slovakia,” he continued, ominously claiming that “these factions are forcing the hand of the traditional centre-right parties — which, one by one, are capitulating to ever more extreme anti-immigration, anti-trade and anti-environment positions.”

As EU parliamentary elections approach on 6-9 June, such doom-laden prophecies are nothing unusual. Warnings of the calamitous effects which will supposedly result from predicted Right-wing gains are growing ever more insistent, and as Brown indicates, speculation is rife as to whether the expected increase in Right-wing representation could bring about major change in the EU’s political centre.

In a debate this week, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen refused to rule out collaborating with the Right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists parliamentary group after the election, saying this would depend “on the composition of the parliament, and who is in what group”. The coy response of this champion of centrism to the question of potential cooperation with parties such as Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy or Poland’s Law and Justice provoked howls of outrage from the Left. “Either you can deal with the extreme Right because you need them, or you say clearly that no deal is possible because they do not respect fundamental rights,” expostulated Nicolas Schmit, the lead candidate for the Party of European Socialists.

Yet in recent months von der Leyen has drawn increasing ire for appearing to flirt with more conservative ideology. While she has pursued agreements with North African states, in collaboration with the likes of Meloni, to try to clamp down on illegal immigration — an approach which Left-wing EU parliamentarians decry as “throwing money at dictators” — her election campaign team has crafted a more traditionally conservative personal image emphasising family and security. “As a mother of seven, I want my children’s children to grow up in a safe, prosperous Europe,” reads the lead statement on von der Leyen’s campaign website.

Still, although centrists are likely to be increasingly influenced by the Right on crucial matters such as immigration and security after the elections, another ideological dividing line may grow starker. While leaving the door open to potential collaboration with the ECR, von der Leyen slammed the Identity and Democracy (ID) EU parliamentary faction — which includes France’s Rassemblement National and Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland — as “Putin’s proxies”. It is equally hard to imagine that centrists would ever form an alliance with “pro-Russian” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán or Slovak leader Robert Fico, neither of whose parties currently belong to any EU parliamentary faction.

As Right-wing policies and rhetoric on matters such as immigration become more mainstream across Europe, issues around foreign policy interventionism appear likely to come to the fore as the new fundamental dividing line. This, like the enduring divisions over the EU’s Green Deal, highlights disagreements between nationalists and federalists, isolationists and interventionists, which will persist regardless of election results. What’s more, they will ensure that, even if a surge in Right-wing representation does come to pass, certain parties will remain, for centrists, forever beyond the pale.