Far right gained strength in European elections and caused a political earthquake in France

The elections to European Parliament confirmed this Sunday the rise of the extreme right, in a political gale that, although it did not change the balance of power in Brussels, motivated the calling of early legislative elections in France and made enormous advances in Germany and Austria.

Projections indicate that the far-right National Rally party swept the elections in France and obtained twice as many votes as the liberal alliance launched by the president Emmanuel Macron.

Given the catastrophic result, Macron gave a speech to the country and announced the call for early legislative elections, “whose first round will take place on June 30 and the runoff on July 7.”

Never before have European elections had such a devastating impact on the domestic politics of a country in the bloc.

The election of the 720 members of the European Parliament opens a new cycle in the EUand the new legislators will appoint the new president of the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm.

In Germany, the EU’s largest economy, Prime Minister Olaf Scholz’s social democratic party had the worst result in its history and was relegated to third place, behind the right and the far right.

According to projections by the European Parliament, the conservative CDU-CSU alliance would receive around 30% of the votes. The far-right AfD party comes in second with around 16%, and Scholz’s SPD party comes in third with 14%.

SGermany is the country with the highest number of Eurolegislators, with 96, followed by France (81), Italy (76) and Spain (61).

In Austria, exit polls put the far-right FPO party in front, with approximately 27% of the vote.

Meanwhile, in Italy, exit polls — which have a wide margin of error — indicate that the post-fascist Brothers of Italy party, led by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, was in the lead with between 25% and 31%. % of the votes.

After the first projections of results, the president of the European Commission and candidate for a second term, the German Ursula von der Leyen, promised in Brussels to build a containment barrier against “the extremes.”

“We are going to build a bulwark against the extremes of the left and the right. Let’s contain them. That’s for sure,” Von der Leyen said.

“We have won the elections!” he stated on behalf of his bloc, the European People’s Party. “The EPP is the strongest political group in the European Parliament (…) A majority cannot be formed without the EPP,” he stressed.

– The great bloc of the European Parliament –

Despite the advance of the extreme right, the European Parliament’s projections suggest that the sum of the more moderate right, the social democrats and the centrist liberals will continue to be the majority, in a large bloc of 389 seats in which the fundamental commitments on matters are forged. legislative.

However, although in these elections the number of MEPs went from 705 to 720, the Social Democrats, the Liberals and the Greens suffered heavy losses in the number of seats.

The far-right political family is divided into two blocks. On one side, there is the Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) bloc and on the other, the Identity and Democracy (ID), separated by their position on the EU itself.

During the electoral campaign, Von der Leyen had opened the door to specific alliances with the far-right group that responds to Meloni’s leadership.

In Spain, the conservatives of the Popular Party (PP) won the elections and obtained 22 seats, against 20 for the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) of the president of the government Pedro Sánchez, according to 99% of the votes counted.