Will the rise of the far right spell trouble for Europe and its Jews?
The first-ever European Parliament Israel vote ranking in 2023, commissioned by the European Coalition for Israel and conducted by the Brussels based research institute EU-Matrix, counted actual votes by political parties related to the safety and security of Israel. The ranking revealed what many EU-observers had known for years but did not want to say out loud: The political parties on the so-called “Far Right” are, in fact, the most supportive of Israel of any political groups in the European Parliament.
The progressive Left, on the other hand, is highly critical and even struggling with outright antisemitism in its ranks.
The New Right
The term “Far Right” is used differently in Europe than it is in the US.
While there is currently no exact definition of the term, in the European context, any right wing party which is not part of the center-right European People’s Party (EPP), which includes the German Christian Democrats, is considered “Far Right.” It includes social conservatives, Eurosceptics, nationalists, and many anti-establishment parties. In the current European Parliament, it includes the European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR), the former home of the British Conservatives, as well as the new Patriots for Europe group, created after the recent EU elections by leading EU critics Marine Le Pen of France and Prime Minister Victor Orban of Hungary.
To the right of these is Europe of Sovereign Nations, which includes Alternative for Germany (AfD), which was expelled from Marine Le Pen’s group just before the European elections because of its growing radicalization, making it an extreme right-wing outlier. Whereas most other Far Right parties are trying to move toward the mainstream, AfD is choosing another path, flirting with ethno-nationalism. It is becoming increasingly pro-Putin and pro-Hamas, thus finding a common cause with the extreme Left.
Blacklisted Friends
The Israeli Foreign Ministry is embarrassed by the vote ranking. Most of the political parties with the highest scores, meaning that they were the most supportive of Israel, belong to the Far Right. They are thus blacklisted by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, meaning that their diplomats are prevented from making contacts with them.
Take the situation in Sweden. Having previously had the dubious distinction of being the first Western nation to honor the late PLO leader Yassir Arafat with a state visit and later championing the cause of Palestinian statehood, Sweden, like many other nations in the EU, has made a political turn to the right. An important factor in the election victory of the new center-right government in 2022 was the electoral success of the populist Far Right Sweden Democrats (SD) which became the second-largest party in Sweden, behind the Social Democrats.
A Troubling Past
The party has a troubling past.
As many as one-third of its 80 or so founders in the late 1980’s were connected to Nazi or fascist organizations, although many of them left the party soon after. But, like similar populist right-wing parties (SD prefers today to be called Social Conservative) the Sweden Democrats have evolved, matured and become more pragmatic over time. The new party leadership has been open about its dark past and is today applying a zero-tolerance policy for what they consider right wing radicals.
The party has a clear pro-Israel stance. In fact, in the latest EP Israel vote ranking in April 2024 (covering the whole electorate period from 2019 to 2024) the Swedish Democrats came in third place out of 196 national political parties represented in the European Parliament!
SD supports a Swedish Embassy move to Jerusalem and was willing to use this as a bargaining chip in the government negotiations in 2022 where only one of the coalition parties was resistant to the idea. Meanwhile the Israeli Ambassador refused to meet with party representatives and instead criticized them openly in Swedish media, to the delight of the enemies of Israel, who fear a change in Swedish policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The boycott by the Israeli government has placed the Sweden Democrats in a delicate dilemma and many ask how they can justify their strong support for Israel for their electorate, while the Israeli government continues to avoid any contact with them.
Fascist Past or “Intersectionality”?
This dilemma applies to many other friends of Israel in Europe. By applying the principle of “intersectionality,” some believe Israel has painted itself in a corner by simply accepting the progressive Left’s demand for respectability by refusing to engage with democratic parties on the Right that do not fully subscribe to the current EU-orthodoxy or are more socially conservative than the mainstream.
Officially, the Israeli Foreign Ministry justifies its refusal to interact with these parties by citing their past. While this may seem logical indeed if applied without distinction, the number of parties that would qualify for friendship would be small. In fact, some of the parties most supportive of Israel – and transatlantic relations, which seem to go hand in hand – have similarly questionable pasts. They include the onetime Franco-loyalist Partido Popular in Spain, which is today a close ally of both Israel and the US, and part of the mainstream EPP-group in the EU.
The same could be said about a range of other parties across Europe, despite their Fascist past, are today in the political mainstream. This would include the German Free Democrats as well as the Swedish Center Party, both with a well-documented Nazi past but which have since become traditional center-liberal parties.
The “Extreme Right Wing”
Not all populist right-wing parties have succeeded in their transformation. German MEP Jörg Meuthen, once co-leader of the AfD, had no choice but to leave the party in January 2022 after it refused to distance itself from members with openly antisemitic and racist views. In the 2023 Israel ranking, he had the highest scores of any Member of the European Parliament, while his former party is moving in a completely opposite direction. Eighty years after the Holocaust, some Germans seem to have distanced themselves from their historical commitments and have even given up on democracy. This may explain the recent attempt by an extremist far right group to topple the German government with the aim of re-establishing monarchy. Here, the term “extreme right-wing” is certainly applicable.
National Success but Banned in Brussels
Like Meuthen, most other European Far Right leaders, such as Giorgia Meloni, have distanced themselves from the fascist past of their respective parties By defining herself as “a woman, mother, Italian, and a Christian,” she struck a chord with the Italian people, who elected her prime minister in 2022. She is also pro-Israel with close links to the current US administration.
While her combination of pro-Israel policies and social conservativism has been successful at home, it is the antithesis of the current EU orthodoxy and has thus disqualified her from any real political influence on the EU level. When government leaders from Germany, France, and Spain met in Brussels to divide up the top posts in the new European Union after the elections in June, Italy was missing from the table.
By applying the principle of cordon sanitaire, the old established parties are currently trying to disqualify the new Right from gaining power and influence in Brussels in proportion to its new electoral strength – which now consists of one quarter of all the MEPs. Their enemies are backed up by strong political allies on the local level. Just a few weeks before the European elections a conference organized by the National Conservativism movement – which has the support of Meloni – was abruptly shut down in Brussels by the Belgian police on the command of District Mayor Emir Kir, who cited public safety concerns but added that “the Far Right is not welcome in Brussels.”
The ban was eventually overruled by Belgium’s top administrative court which stated that the shutdown violated the country’s constitutional right to peaceful assembly. But this happened only after international media had reported on the ban and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had called the action “extremely disturbing.”
Political Comeback of Geert Wilders
Nobody illustrates the rise of the Far Right and its appeal to the electorate better than Dutch enfant terrible Geert Wilders. In 2009, he was denied entry into the UK for “threatening community harmony and public safety” after having, among other things, compared the Quran to Mein Kampf. Wilders has not changed his views, but the electorate seems to have swung his way.
In the national elections earlier this year, Wilders made his Freedom Party the largest single party in the Dutch parliament, making it impossible to ignore. In a rare compromise, Wilders agreed to personally stay out of the new government as long as the Freedom Party was able to form a coalition in line with its own policy recommendations. It is today joined by other like-minded parties, most of which are united in their firm opposition to what they consider to be overreach by the European Commission.
For many years Wilders demanded that The Netherlands, one of the founding members of the European Community in 1958, leave the Union due to its federalist ambitions. The new, pragmatic Wilders 2.0 has given up on his more radical approach and is instead demanding a complete reform of the system. This nationalist approach is shared by a growing number of national governments in the EU, among them Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia, and, until recently, Poland. The Italian and Finnish governments include populist parties, which in the past have campaigned for leaving the EU. However, none of the current Far Right leaders, including Le Pen in France, demand a full Brexit anymore. If you can’t leave, then fix it, they seem to reason.
With the rise of the Far Right and the shift of the mainstream EPP group to the right, they may soon be in a position to do just that.
Is it Good for the Jews?
The Israel vote ranking may have proven that most of the far-right parties are clearly pro-Israel – and also pro-transatlantic relations. But what is good for Israel is not necessarily good for the Jews of Europe. When it comes to public safety, those in the democratic Far Right are, of course, friends of good order and will do whatever it takes to beef up security around synagogues and other communal institutions, especially as most attacks tend to come from radical Islamists and the extreme left.
Still, other policies of theirs risk causing collateral damage for the Jews. In an unholy alliance between the parties of the radical Right and the progressive Left, efforts are being made to ban religious animal slaughter both for Jews and Muslims. The ban, motivated by a concern for animal welfare among the Progressives and anti-Muslim sentiments among the Far Right, mobilizes a wide spectrum of political parties beyond the fringes. Hence, in Finland a proposed ban on religious slaughter under the former Socialist government was supported by a broad parliamentary majority, before it was stopped last-minute, due to geopolitical considerations. Finland was in the process of applying for NATO membership and did not want to jeopardize its good relations with either Washington or Berlin, where support for kosher slaughter is well-grounded. But the proposal could be reintroduced at any time now that Finland has become a member of the alliance.
The Future for Jews in Europe
For the time being, a ban on kosher slaughter has limited practical consequences for observant Jews in Europe as they can buy their kosher meat from neighboring countries. But what happens the day a majority of the EU countries ban kosher meat and religious circumcision? Will there be any future for the Jews in Europe?
The Chief Rabbi of Paris, Moshe Sebag, made a splash when he recently commented on the results from the snap election in France by stating, “There is no future for Jews in France.” The comment came after the extreme Left had scored a decisive victory and was expected to form a new government. Rabbi Sebag, like many other Jewish leaders in France, had made an appeal to not vote for either extreme. Explaining the rationale behind his appeal, he said that most Jews tend to stick to the political center because they do not know who hates them more, the extreme Left or the extreme Right. For others, like renowned Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld or left-leaning public intellectual Alain Finkielkraut, the choice was clear. Having to choose, they chose the Far Fight. Klarsfeld no longer considers the Far Right an enemy.
This dilemma applies to the whole of Europe. The former Chief Rabbi of Russia, today President of the Conference of European Rabbis, Pinchas Goldschmit, is more diplomatic. He thinks there are no good choices, either from the political Right or the progressive Left. In an article in Politico just days before the European elections, he wrote, “We fear for the future of Europe and our place in it as a minority, no matter how we vote and no matter who wins.”
If Jews no longer feel welcome in Europe, it will not be simply because of the rise of the Far Right, but due to a broader ideological shift within the political mainstream which in recent years has grows increasingly anti-Western, and as a consequence, hostile both to Israel and Europe’s Jews. In this civilizational battle, Israel and the Jews may need new allies, including the Far Right.
Tomas Sandell is the Founding Director of the European Coalition for Israel. Before helping to found the coalition in 2003, he was an accredited journalist to the European Union in Brussels.
