Europe Swings to the Right — Led by France

Europe’s center of political gravity is veering to the right.

Center-right and far-right parties are set to take the largest number of seats in Sunday’s European Union election in the most populous nations: Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Poland.

France led the rightward lurch with such a crushing victory for the far-right National Rally that liberal President Emmanuel Macron dissolved France’s parliament and called an early election. Early results suggested the National Rally would win some 32 percent of the vote, more than twice that of the president’s party.

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In Germany, the center-right is cruising to a comfortable victory, with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) coming second and beating Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Socialists into third place.

Voters across 27 nations have voted over the past week to select 720 members of the European Parliament, who will serve over the next five years. Their first main role with be to approve or reject the main candidate for Europe’s top job: president of the European Commission.

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Collected together, the radical right parties would theoretically represent the second biggest bloc in the Parliament — being on track to come first in France and Italy, and second in Germany, the three biggest and most important countries in the 27-nation bloc. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing party secured the most support, projected to be about 28 percent.

The far-right is also expected to win in Hungary, and picked up five more seats in the Netherlands. The center-right was comfortably first in Greece and Bulgaria.

The single most ominous warning signal for the future of the EU is France, given the scale of the far right’s win over Macron. All eyes will now be on whether France’s populist wave can maintain its momentum through the impending parliamentary elections and on to presidential elections in 2027 — where a victory for far-right leader Marine Le Pen would threaten to throw the whole EU into turmoil.

The official winner of the evening looks set to be European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen whose center-right European People’s Party will still make up the single-biggest bloc in Parliament.

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