On Nov. 22, Geert Wilders’s far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) won the most seats in the House of Representatives following national elections in the Netherlands. On the same day, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban gave a keynote speech in Zürich at the invitation of the conservative magazine Die Weltwoche. The latter event offers a key to understanding the former. Orban offered a preview of what Wilders wants to do with Europe.
On Nov. 22, Geert Wilders’s far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) won the most seats in the House of Representatives following national elections in the Netherlands. On the same day, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban gave a keynote speech in Zürich at the invitation of the conservative magazine Die Weltwoche. The latter event offers a key to understanding the former. Orban offered a preview of what Wilders wants to do with Europe.
Wilders, who has earned the right to try to form a governing coalition with several center-right parties that have already rolled out the red carpet for him, has repeatedly said in the past that he wants to take his country out of the European Union. The PVV program calls for a referendum on “Nexit.” But like other far-right politicians in Europe, Wilders has understood the lessons of Brexit: Countries standing alone in this turbulent world marginalize and weaken themselves, so instead of leaving the EU, it would be better to stay and change it from the inside. This is exactly the scenario Orban sketched out in Zürich.
For starters, Orban apologized to the audience because it had to put up with him, the leader of a small country, while in these challenging times it had deserved a speech by a real leader like Konrad Adenauer or Helmut Kohl—politicians who had ruled postwar Germany for years with a steady moral and political compass, shaping Christian democracy in Europe. But alas, Orban continued, Europe is in decline. It does not have politicians of that caliber anymore. It has lost its grip on the world because it is ruled by bureaucrats infected with the liberal-progressive bug, not by true politicians. If we want to stop this decline, he said, “we must return to classical European political and leadership culture.” This would mean national leaders taking the helm in Brussels, from now on treating European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen as “our employee, our paid employee, whose job it is to carry out what we decide.”
Wilders, whose wife is Hungarian, is close to Orban. He has visited him many times. He knows a large majority of the Dutch do not support a Nexit. Eighty percent think membership is beneficial for the country, which is higher than the European average of 72 percent. None of his possible center-right coalition partners advocate an exit from the EU. Moreover, like Orban, Wilders considers it unwise that the United Kingdom did not just leave the EU but also the single market. Orban told his Swiss audience that decisions taken in Brussels directly affect Switzerland as a participant in the single market, without Bern having any say in those decisions. All the more reason to stay and shape those decisions from the inside. For him, national sovereignty is key, and this would be better served by staying in the EU.
When it comes to Europe, sovereignty is also a key word in the PVV program. “Intensive cooperation between countries does not need a political union like the EU,” the program states. It calls for a smaller EU budget and the usage of opt-outs; for example, in the fields of asylum and migration. On election night, on television, Wilders mentioned the Dublin agreement (on asylum and migration) as a positive piece of EU regulation he wants to stick to. If European regulation is not good, he added, “we can always change it to make it better.” This did not sound at all like someone who wants to leave the EU. On the contrary, it sounded like someone who stays in to grab the steering wheel.
In fact, Orban is showing him the way. Orban currently is playing out several trump cards in Brussels. The European Commission is refusing to pay him around 30 billion euros in European subsidies, because those funds are tied to requirements connected to the rule of law and anti-corruption. Some cosmetic reforms notwithstanding, Orban is doing nothing to meet those requirements. Now, Orban is taking revenge. He keeps blocking Sweden’s accession to NATO. At a European summit in December, European government leaders are supposed to decide whether or not to start formal accession talks with Ukraine. In a letter last week, Orban announced that he does not want a decision yet. He is also threatening to block European financial and military assistance to Ukraine—50 billion euros over the next few years, plus joint arms purchases through the European Peace Facility. Finally, Orban has signaled that if he does not get his billions, he will try to prevent the reappointment of Ursula von der Leyen as president of the European Commission in 2024.
Meanwhile, he ordered posters to be put up all over Hungary depicting von der Leyen and Alex Soros—the son of George Soros and new leader of the Open Society Foundations he founded—with the text, “Let’s not dance to their tunes.” He has also organized a (nonbinding) national consultation on Europe, with 11 rather suggestive questions. One segment about EU financial assistance to Ukraine reads as follows: “They are asking Hungary for additional support [for Ukraine] even as our country has not received the EU funds due to it.” One of the possible answers says: “We should not pay more to support Ukraine until we have received the money we are owed [by the EU].”
Like Orban, many far-right politicians in Europe have concluded that now is not the time to leave the EU. Even a large country like the United Kingdom has lost influence since Brexit. The economy took a beating, immigration has doubled, hedge funds are buying up the country. Moreover, potential trade agreements with third countries have been revealed to be worse than the ones the U.K. had through the EU, with powerful countries like India or Australia taking the opportunity to squeeze concessions out of London they never managed to get from the EU. As former Prime Minister John Major noted in a lecture in 2020, the U.K. is a second-class power that has chosen to become more poor and more powerless—with the slogan “taking back control” more applicable to Europe than to the U.K.
It is no coincidence that both the U.K. and Switzerland are seeking rapprochement with the EU at the moment. The EU’s waiting room is full of candidate countries. Many countries in the EU’s orbit have discovered that with regional powers like Russia and Turkey bullying everyone at will, being part of a larger group can protect them from being eaten raw before breakfast.
The mantra of Europe’s nationalists used to be, “We lose sovereignty in the European Union, so let’s leave the European Union.” Now, many realize they actually gain sovereignty by being part of it. Figures like Orban suddenly emphasize the advantages of the European single market and other benefits such as cheap, common vaccines or the power to collectively discipline multinational companies such as Google or Microsoft.
If anybody embodies this U-turn on Europe, it’s Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni. The minute she took power last year, she started investing in Europe in a way no one had thought possible. She suddenly became supportive of the euro and European defense, and got herself constructively involved in the search for a better EU asylum and migration system. Only on environmental policy and cultural issues has she remained arch-conservative.
France’s Marine Le Pen, Italy’s Matteo Salvini, and Austria’s Herbert Kickl, like Wilders, all seem to realize that—contrary to what Orban says—EU member states already have almost all of the power in Brussels. And that if they manage to get themselves elected nationally, like Orban, they can actually play with that power to their advantage. Like him, they can inflate their position by threatening to use a veto now and then and take everybody hostage. They can open their doors, like Hungary, to those seeking a foothold in Europe in order to undermine it from within. Moreover, they can force the Bundeskanzleramt and the Elysée to finally pay attention. In short, EU membership provides leverage. It is a tool that makes national leaders larger than they would otherwise be.
This is the cynical Europe that politicians like Orban, Le Pen, Salvini, and Wilders are working on. Next weekend, at a conference of Salvini’s far-right European parliamentary group in Florence, they will be tuning their violins again.
Far-right parties used to rant on the national podium against the EU and “unelected Eurocrats” in Brussels, pushing narrow national interests—and, as a result, often clashing among themselves. Those differences are now increasingly overshadowed by the new prominence of some of their favorite themes: security, defense, migration, and border control. The far right no longer just speaks on behalf of the nation against Europe, Hans Kundnani of Chatham House recently wrote; it is now starting to speak on behalf of Europe. This “ethnoregionalism,” as he calls it, is characterized by a rhetoric that focuses on the idea of an endangered “European civilization.”
Indeed, the “decline of Europe” is becoming a common theme for far-right parties. In Zürich, Orban mentioned Europe’s inability to exercise “autonomous and sovereign action” several times. Europe, he said, is losing its way in the world. Then, he posed as its savior—in the footsteps of political giants like Adenauer and Kohl.
The fact that Orban now positions himself in a center-right tradition, not on the far right, is not accidental. It implies that the dam between the center right and the far right, which has been in place for decades, has broken. In many countries, the center right is copying the far-right discourse, making it mainstream. In the Netherlands, it was the center-right VVD—Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s party—that made the PVV electable by opening the door to cooperation. The same is happening in Austria, where the far-right FPÖ has overtaken the center-right ÖVP as the more popular party, with elections scheduled for next fall. In Belgium, which holds elections in June, a similar dynamic could play out. In France, the center-right Republicans are now more radical than the far-right National Rally—and a lot smaller, too. Meanwhile, in the European Parliament, the conservative family that has been a powerful bulwark against political extremism since World War II is equally shifting to the right. It votes down some of the Green Deal climate laws it previously supported; it wants to close borders; and it is getting increasingly vocal in opposing social-justice issues.
With all this happening, far-right politicians like Wilders have fewer reasons than ever to leave the EU. As Orban said in Zürich, “Hungary is not the black sheep but the first swallow, and … we look forward to the others.”
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