In Europe, The Center No Longer Holds

After years of a right-wing populist surge, 2025 gave progressives hope. In Germany, Die Linke (The Left) made a surprising comeback in the early federal elections last February and is now rising in the polling for Berlin local elections. The U.K. Green Party now has record-high support in polls, with their membership numbers passing 200,000 after a groundbreaking by-election victory in Gorton and Denton. In the Netherlands, the socially liberal Democrats 66 (D66) came ahead of the far-right, anti-Islam firebrand Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV) by small margins, and in the U.S., two major cities, Seattle and New York, elected socialist mayors. Yet this new global trend of progressive politics didn’t prevent centrist parties from appeasing the far-right: not in the U.K., not in France and certainly not in the European Union.

Since 2004, the European Commission has been led by the center-right. A grand coalition of liberals, Christian Democrats and Social Democrats has long been able to secure a majority within the E.U. Parliament and agree on key aspects of how the Union operates. They have since protected what many refer to as the “cordon sanitaire” in Brussels — a firewall keeping the far-right and Eurosceptics out of key decision-making procedures. In 2024, things started to change.

The European Parliament elections in 2024 resulted in a much more divided Parliament. Despite the center-right European People’s Party (EPP) coming in first, Social Democrats, Liberals and the Greens lost support, and the far-right groups made significant gains. The Parliament’s new arithmetic created room for the center-right to maneuver. The increased number of far-right seats simply gave the EPP a choice they were increasingly willing to make, as years of far-right normalization had eroded whatever political cost once came with crossing the cordon sanitaire. Now, for the first time in years, the EPP could rely on the right side of the political spectrum, bypassing progressive forces completely.

Considering that the far-right had been on the rise in Europe since 2015, the gains they made in 2024 were no surprise. As a result of the global populist surge in the aftermath of Brexit and Donald Trump’s first term, the political landscape changed in Europe, with once-outsider far-right figures moving more and more into the mainstream, and center-right parties increasingly choosing accommodation over confrontation. Thus, a question lingers: who bears responsibility for normalizing the far-right?

Seeing the far-right surge, mainstream parties on both sides of the political spectrum thought that it would be wise to move to the right in order to stop the far-right. They capitalized on the panic that the far-right fueled, particularly regarding immigration and environmental policies. All of a sudden, many mainstream leaders abandoned their self-proclaimed moral superiority and started to sound more like their extremist counterparts, whom they once described as the biggest threat to European democracy.

For example, despite his large majority in Parliament, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has shifted so aggressively to the right that a recent study now identifies him as one of the most right-wing MPs in the Labour Party. He has adopted far-right rhetoric and targeted the most vulnerable, significantly changing British policy toward migrants and asylum seekers. Most notably, his Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, outlined a measure to change the way the European Convention on Human Rights is interpreted by the British judges to stop asylum seekers using their rights to a family life to avoid deportation. More recently, the Labour Government stopped processing student visas from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan, citing “widespread visa abuse.” When Starmer shamelessly declared that the UK has become “an island of strangers,” his language and subsequent policy changes resembled those of his worst nightmare, the far-right leader Nigel Farage, rather than the fierce defender of international law he once was.

Similarly, in France, Macronism ended up feeding the far-right monster it initially promised to defeat. Emmanuel Macron secured his second presidential term in 2022 largely because he was the only viable non–Marine Le Pen candidate on the ballot, and, in each election cycle, he asked the country to rally into a “Republican Front” against Le Pen. Yet what that Republican Front ultimately produced was the opposite of a firewall — it was a politics that normalized hardliners and handed Le Pen concrete wins. His former interior minister complained that Le Pen was “too soft on Islam,” and Macron’s 2023 Immigration Bill was welcomed by Le Pen herself as “an ideological victory.” Nine years have passed since Macron became president, and the result is stark: Le Pen’s National Rally leads in every major poll, and her successor Jordan Bardella looks like a plausible next president. Ultimately, Macron’s deepening unpopularity has driven voters to opposite poles (Marine Le Pen on the right and Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the left) and left the country ungovernable with a hung parliament. 

What Macron and Starmer have in common is the belief that moving to the right on key issues such as immigration could stop the far-right’s momentum. However, not only has the success of an ideological shift rightward consistently proven to be short term, but it has also pushed the political center of gravity further to the right, which, paradoxically, has resulted in better results for the far-right. Adopting far-right positions on popular topics like immigration could limit losses in a single election but fails to reverse the far-right’s long-term trajectory, and, in fact, accelerates it by legitimizing the rhetoric. 

At the European level, the story is no different. In the European Parliament, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s EPP has not only adopted far-right stances on immigration by voting with Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán’s Patriots to toughen asylum policy, but they have also sided with other far-right groups to target a key environmental provision of the Green Deal. Even though von der Leyen secured her second term after receiving the support of the grand coalition and the Greens, her administration has repeatedly undermined the “cordon sanitaire” and sided with right-wing parties. Under her leadership, the EPP has held the center, yet the center itself has shifted to the right.

Even as progressive alternatives gained traction across the globe, European centrists kept borrowing far-right frames in Paris, London and Berlin. But neither anti-immigrant crackdowns, austerity politics nor the curtailment of trans rights has made mainstream parties more electable; it has only made the far-right more credible and mainstream. Imitating the language and policies of the far-right proved not to work to stop their surge. Olaf Scholz’s center-left coalition collapsed in Germany, and Macron and Starmer are historically unpopular in their national contexts. All this failure sends a clear message to Brussels — if only von der Leyen is willing to receive it.

Image from Raw Pixel, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International.