Coming to Terms with a Right-Populist Reality

What we can learn from recent elections in Europe and India

A map of European election results in France, with the populist-nationalist right represented (fittingly) by the color brown. (Posted on Twitter/X by Princeton historian David A. Bell.)

The last week or so has brought a boatload of news connected to the themes of the “Eyes on the Right” newsletter.

First, the Hindu nationalist party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India (the BJP) fell short of a majority in national elections. The BJP will remain in power but will be forced, for the first time, to form a coalition government with other parties.

And then came European parliamentary elections this past weekend. Polls predicted parties of the populist-nationalist right would do well and pick up seats in the EU’s legislative body, and they did, though without seizing outright control from parties of the center (which have flourished in part by co-opting policy positions loudly advocated by harder-line parties of the right).

But the result in individual countries was decidedly mixed. In France, the leading anti-immigrant party (RN) won by a large margin, with about 31.4 percent of the vote, and the party of French President Emmanuel Macron (Renaissance) finishing a distant second with about 14.6 percent. The result was such a repudiation that Macron responded by calling for new legislative elections within the next month—a high-risk move that could well backfire, severely weakening him through the remainder of his presidential term (which runs to 2027) and elevating (and potentially giving control of the legislature to) RN, its longtime leader Marine Le Pen, and her popular protégé Jordan Bardella.  

In Germany, the far-right AfD party likewise surged past the center-left SPD of prime minister Olaf Scholz to come in second behind the center-right CDU. Far-right parties also looked likely to make gains in the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, and Austria.

In more encouraging news for parties of the center, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz Party in Hungary fell short of winning a majority for the first time since 2004, while a mainstream rival to Orbán, Peter Magyar, won 30 percent, setting him up as a potentially formidable challenger to Fidesz down the road.

Our New Right-Populist Normal

So recent news is a mix of the ominous and the encouraging. In what remains of this post, I’d like to continue developing a line of argument I first suggested in posts written after recent elections in Israel and Poland, and which, I think, makes even more sense in light of the developments over the past week or so in Europe and South Asia.

In a word, right-wing populism and nationalism are our new normal, not some temporary pathology that can be walled off from power or defeated through repeated declarations of electoral emergencies.