Europe’s Far Right Has Stalled

Another year, another unrealized right-wing scare in Europe. Though far-right parties1 are now a fixture on the European political stage, they made no significant gains on the continent in 2019. Despite growing political fragmentation, the center is holding. Nationalist populists are still as unsuited to governing as ever.

I had an early inkling that the far right wouldn’t advance much in 2019 when I went to Brussels in February to interview Michel Modrikamen, the Belgian lawyer who was supposed to be U.S. nativist ideologue Steve Bannon’s point man in Europe. Bannon had talked about disrupting the European Union’s operation by fueling a radical right-wing wave in the European Parliament election in May. But Modrikamen, leader of the People’s Party, a small nationalist political force in the francophone part of Belgium, wasn’t working on anything as ambitious as that: Instead, he was interested in organizing a kind of discussion club for European nationalist and conservative politicians. Dreams of centralized war rooms for nationalist parties turned out to be unfeasible because of strict campaign financing laws. U.S. money and technological know-how failed to materialize. (The People’s Party was disbanded in June after a disappointing showing in the European and Belgian elections).