After strong showings in recent elections, there are far-right parties in government in seven European countries. Global Insight assesses the threat to the rule of law and what can be done to protect it.
Seven EU Member States – Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Slovakia – now have far-right parties within government. A political party viewed as potentially ‘extremist’ by German authorities has won a state election in Germany. And far-right parties gave strong showings in the summer’s European Parliament elections, prompting a snap national vote in France, which risked National Rally (RN) gaining power.
As the far-right gains support among voters, it’s fast becoming clear that established democracies are facing significant efforts to shrink civic space and erode legal, judicial and democratic checks and balances – with significant implications for the rule of law.
The rise of parties such as France’s RN and Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) – given their regressive stance on climate action and immigration, and their overt opposition to sending further aid to Ukraine – has also sparked concern over how such nationalist and xenophobic ideas could gain traction within the political mainstream and affect policy at EU level.
‘There is a connection between the rule of law and the rise of these radical or right-wing ultra-conservative parties’, says Balázs Dénes, Executive Director of the Berlin-based Civil Liberties Union for Europe (Liberties). ‘The steady increase [in popularity] of these parties will eventually have consequences on the rule of law and on human rights and on fundamental freedoms.’
European upsets
Concerns about the far-right in Europe have taken on particular significance in 2024. In September, the AfD won almost a third of the vote in the eastern German state of Thuringia, marking the first time a far-right party has won in a state parliament election in the country since the Second World War. That same day the AfD came a close second in an election in the neighbouring state of Saxony.
Image of Bjron.
These dramatic results came despite a ruling by a German court in May that domestic security services could continue to treat the AfD as a potentially ‘extremist’ party and retain the right to keep the party under surveillance. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution – the German domestic intelligence agency – classified the AfD as potentially extreme in 2021. In 2022, a court in Cologne found that the designation was proportionate and didn’t violate the constitution, or European or domestic civil law. The party denies it’s anti-democratic and has said it’ll appeal the ruling, though it can only do so on procedural issues at this point.
Meanwhile, the AfD’s leader in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, has been fined twice in court for using Nazi slogans. He denies knowingly doing so. T party’s success also represents one of the most prominent recent examples of how far-right parties are striking a chord with younger voters. More than a third of those aged 18–24 voted for the AfD in Thuringia and Saxony.
Hans-Georg Dederer, a constitutional law expert at the University of Passau, says a combination of strong social media and communication skills have helped the party appeal to disaffected younger voters. ‘What is extremely important is that the AfD is very active on social media, especially TikTok, doing by far a much better job than any other of the old democratic parties’, he says. ‘What is more, these old democratic parties now take up issues such as migration [and] internal security [that] have already been consistently addressed by the AfD as pressing issues to be dealt with rapidly – so, what is wrong with the AfD [voters] may ask?’
The party’s successes in eastern Germany echoed the earlier campaign by the AfD in the European Parliament elections in June, where the party’s targeted approach saw it more than triple its share of the youth vote.
Those European Parliament elections represented another political upset for the bloc in 2024, as voters headed to polls in the EU’s first major electoral test since Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Early forecasts indicated that nationalist right and far-right groups could pick up as many as a quarter of the seats. Although their share of the vote wasn’t quite so high, there were significant gains by far-right parties, which only confirmed fears about the direction of the EU Parliament.
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