For almost all of 2024, we have been warned about the “rapidly rising Right” in European politics. This seems to have been punctured by British and French elections in the last week, in which the Left has gained political power while only marginally increasing in popularity. With the Left-wing Jean-Luc Mélenchon opening his victory speech at a rally on Sunday by saying “Arise, oh wretched of the earth,” the Left now clearly wants to portray itself as the ascendant force. But is this to be believed?

Germany is still governed by a Left-wing coalition, and despite having only 31% voter approval, Chancellor Olaf Scholz will most likely remain in office until 2025. Spain continues to be governed by the socialist Pedro Sánchez, while Portugal’s centre-right barely managed to edge out a minority government. Over in the UK, Labour has just swept to power after 14 years of Conservative rule.

Even in supposedly neo-nationalist Eastern Europe, the winds are changing. Once solidly Right-wing, earlier this year Poland handed over power to a more liberal government under former European Council president Donald Tusk; and Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party stumbled in the most recent EU elections. So, was all that talk about a Right-wing wave much ado about nothing, or is there something beneath the surface that these election results are obscuring?

While the Right may not be in power, it has not lost popularity. Sometimes peculiar electoral systems can disguise broader trends in politics. For example, although it looked like Starmer’s Labour had won a landslide, the party in fact received fewer votes than it did in 2017 under Jeremy Corbyn. The true story was the split of the Right-wing vote between the unpopular Tories and Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK.

In Spain and Poland, conservative parties remain in the lead among the public, and it is their inability to enter into effective coalitions with the alleged “far-Right” that often prevents them from taking power. While Le Pen’s National Rally came third in terms of parliamentary seats — which is what matters, of course — the party won the popular vote with 37.1% compared to the Left Alliance’s 26.3% and Macron’s 24.7%.

The difference between the Right and the Left in Europe is that the latter is capable of building alliances across ideological differences, held together solely by a rejection of conservative rivals. Two years ago in Hungary, there was an alliance formed including the Greens and the neo-fascist Jobbik party, whose only commonality was the rejection of Orbán’s government. Similarly in France, there is now a de facto electoral alliance between the “bourgeois” centrist Macron and the socialist Mélenchon, who both want to prevent a majority for the National Rally.

In other words, the problem of Europe’s Right-wing parties is less the decline of the popularity of conservative ideas, especially on crime and immigration, and more an inability to forge durable electoral coalitions. When the leader of the French Republicans, Éric Ciotti, suggested precisely such a coalition with the National Rally, he was almost immediately ostracised from his own party.

Contrary to what most of the media is reporting, there are no longer Right-of-centre and Left-of-centre political parties, but instead an electoral bloc of Left-leaning parties on the one side, and one or two parties on the Right often collectively smeared as “far-Right”. Rishi Sunak and Macron are not Right-wing politicians when measured on their governance, which has often prioritised progressive policies on environmentalism or mass immigration.

There are many lessons to learn from the recent elections, but the idea that Right-wing populism has been defeated is not one of them. Really, these politicians just need to pay attention to the Left, and figure out how they can work together.

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Ralph Schoellhammer is assistant professor of International Relations at Webster University, Vienna.

Raphfel

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