EU elections: Far-right parties have gained influence
Many of us didn’t notice that the world’s biggest and second-biggest democratic exercises took place back to back, as our Lok Sabha election was followed by the just-concluded European Union (EU) elections during 6-9 June, with an electorate of nearly 400 million people. Indeed, 2024 is an electorally significant year, marked by the scheduled participation of about half of the world’s eligible voters across 60 different countries. Voters in the EU’s 27 member states cast their ballots to choose 720 representatives to the European Parliament in Brussels.
The exercise served as a political litmus test for various parties in participating nations. The results were seen as a political earthquake, the epicentre of which appears to be in France; however, tremors were felt across the EU and beyond. A spectre of far-right neo-fascist ideology has haunted Europe for some time now.
Nonetheless, ‘the centre is holding’ in the EU overall, although centrist parties suffered a serious blow. Timothy Garton Ash stated in The Guardian that “a Europe that just celebrated on the beaches of Normandy the 80-year-old D-day beginning of its liberation from war, nationalism and fascism now again faces fascism, nationalism and war." The impact of the extreme right’s victories was felt more strongly in Paris and Berlin than in Brussels. The most dramatic outcome was in France, where Marine Le Pen’s National Rally handed Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party huge defeats, and pushed the French president to take a big gamble by holding snap elections to France’s legislative body.
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