Right West and Right East: Will Europe’s rightward shift benefit Putin?
The success of the far-right Rassemblement Nationale in the French parliamentary elections has solidified a trend established by the success of far-right parties in the European Parliament elections in June. The rightward shift in European politics is traditionally seen as favourable for Moscow and a threat to Europe's support for Ukraine.
The situation, however, is more complex. Most of the right-wing parties in Western Europe that have emerged in the past decade have distanced themselves from Moscow since the start of Russia's aggression in Ukraine – unlike most right-wing parties in Central and Eastern Europe.
Differences in views on Russia's war in Ukraine and Putin's policies, in general, have been one of the reasons why far-right parties have failed to form a unified faction in the European Parliament. However, the prospect of increased representation in European politics and Europe's fatigue with the war in Ukraine are pushing right-wing parties to overcome their previous disagreements.
To achieve these goals, pro-Moscow right-wing parties will likely need to adjust their positions. As suggested by Viktor Orban's visit to Kyiv, they will have to change from opponents of aid to Ukraine to 'peacemakers' working on an acceptable settlement formula.
The Right and the War Factor
The right-wing success in the French elections has confirmed that the 'rightward shift' in Europe is a much more serious trend than some had recently anticipated, and it has likely not yet reached its peak. However, the answer to the question of how it will affect Europe's attitude towards Russia is far from obvious.
The overwhelming majority of right-wing populists in the European Parliament, including France's National Front (the predecessor of the current RN, Rassemblement Nationale), Austria's FPÖ (Austrian Freedom Party), Germany's AfD (Alternative for Germany) and Hungary's Fidesz, have long supported many Kremlin narratives. However, their traditionally strong relations with the Kremlin began to sour just after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, according to Adam Holesz and Piotr Zagórski of the Centre for European Politics at the London School of Economics (EUROPP).
The researchers assessed these changes by analysing the results of more than 13,000 votes in the European Parliament from July 2019 to June 2022 with representatives of populist parties. The French RN deputies were the most supportive of Putin's line, voting for only 3% of the resolutions directed against Moscow before the invasion of Ukraine. Their reliable allies also included the Austrian FPÖ and the German AfD, which did not support even a tenth of the anti-Kremlin initiatives. Even after the war in Ukraine began, deputies from these three parties remained the most loyal to Moscow among all the far-right parties.
Meanwhile, the most critical parties towards Moscow in the European Parliament were the Spanish Vox, the Polish PiS ('Law and Justice'), and the Italian Fratelli d’Italia ('Brothers of Italy'), which before the war supported, on average, more than 80% of resolutions criticising Moscow. After the outbreak of the war, this figure dropped slightly (probably due to the populists' ambiguous position on sanctions against Russia). Between these two poles, according to Holesch and Zagórski, were several far-right parties, including Viktor Orban's Fidesz and the Belgian Vlaams Belang ('Flemish Interest'), which both before and after the invasion demonstrated an average level of support for anti-Putin initiatives in the European Parliament.
Most of the right-wing parties that emerged loudly in the past decade and expressed sympathy for Moscow's policies have decisively distanced themselves from it after the war began. For example, the ruling Social Democrats (SD) in Sweden (13.2% in the European Parliament elections, three seats), who were previously repeatedly accused of close ties with Moscow, advocated for the introduction of strict sanctions against the Kremlin, approved Sweden's application to join NATO, and refused to cooperate in the European Parliament with pro-Kremlin parties. The Spanish right-wing populist Vox party (9.6%, six seats) has toughened its rhetoric towards Moscow since the invasion began, backing the admission of refugees from Ukraine and sending weapons to Kyiv. Andrej Babiš, the leader of the Czech opposition movement ANO (26.1%, seven seats), who was constantly criticised for his pro-Russian stance when he was prime minister, in March of this year, spoke in support of restoring Ukraine's territorial integrity, including Crimea, and stated that discussions about the Czech Republic leaving the European Union and NATO were unacceptable to him.
For a long time, the French RN (31.4%, 30 seats) was considered one of Moscow's most loyal allies in Europe, with Bloomberg calling its sharp rise in popularity a ‘great gift for Putin’. The RN and its predecessor, the National Front, always had close ties with Moscow, based not only on a shared understanding of political, economic, and cultural sovereignty but also on multimillion-dollar financial support from Russia, notes Marlene Laruelle, director of the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES). However, the new leader of RN, Jordan Bardella, under whose leadership the party won the first round of the extraordinary elections to the National Assembly on 30 June, supported the supply of weapons to Kyiv (but opposed sending French troops to Ukraine). Bardella called Moscow 'a multi-dimensional threat to both France and Europe' and pledged 'not to question' France's international commitments, including within NATO. This contrasts with Marine Le Pen's 2022 statement that if elected president, Paris would leave NATO's integrated command system.
Anti-Putin rhetoric has become a tool of political struggle for the far-right Italian party Fratelli d’Italia (28.8%, 24 seats) and its leader Giorgia Meloni. While in 2018 she publicly congratulated Putin on his re-election as President of Russia, after the invasion of Ukraine, she supported sanctions against Moscow, distanced herself from alliances with pro-Russian MEPs, and called the ceasefire conditions proposed by Putin in June ‘propaganda’. The experts from EUROPP note that the anti-Kremlin rhetoric allowed Meloni to distance herself from another Italian far-right party, Lega (9%, eight seats), whose leader Matteo Salvini has repeatedly expressed admiration for Putin and has even worn T-shirts with his portrait. In April 2024, Salvini's party announced the denunciation of a cooperation agreement signed in 2017 with ‘United Russia’. The Belgian Vlaams Belang (14.5%, three seats), several representatives of which were present as observers at the Crimean ‘referendum’ in 2014, has publicly distanced itself from Putin after February 2022, calling the invasion of Ukraine a gross violation of international law, although it continues to criticise ‘poorly conceived’ sanctions against Russia.
West is West, East is East
However, this evolution is not characteristic of all European right-wing parties. The German AfD remains one of Moscow's most consistent supporters: its deputies refused to attend Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's address to the German Bundestag on 11 June, and the new foreign policy doctrine adopted by the party at the end of June calls for the lifting of sanctions against Russia, the cessation of arms supplies to Ukraine (because they 'do not have a decisive impact on the course of the war, but rather increase the number of deaths and the extent of destruction'), and the strengthening ties with Beijing.
In April, the European Parliament adopted a resolution calling on the AfD to disclose its financial ties with Russia. This did not prevent the AfD, which advocates for negotiations even at the cost of Ukraine losing territory, from receiving 15.9% of the vote in the European Parliament elections in June, taking second place in Germany. Other far-right parties that continue to sympathise with Putin's policies, as noted by Professor Natasha Lindstädt of the University of Essex in a review for The Conversation, include the Polish Confederation, which took third place in the recent European Parliament elections (11.8%, six seats), the Slovak Smer (24.8%, five seats) and Republika (12.5%, two seats), the Czech SPD+Trikolora and Přísaha a Motoristé, which took first and second places respectively in the European Parliament elections, the Romanian AUR (15% of the vote, six seats), the Bulgarian Vŭzrazhdane (15.4%, three seats), and the winners of the elections in Hungary, Fidesz (44.8%, 10 seats), in the Netherlands, the Party for Freedom (PVV) led by Geert Wilders (17%, six seats), and in Austria, the FPÖ (25.4%, six seats).
It is easy to see that the war in Ukraine has most significantly worsened the Kremlin's relations with former right-wing 'partners' in Western Europe, the old EU members, while in the new EU members in Central and Eastern Europe, there has been no such shift in attitudes toward Putin and Moscow's policies. This is likely due to the fact that the 'old' Europeans experienced a much stronger and more consolidated shock from Putin's full-scale war on the outskirts of Europe, which right-wing populists had to take into account.
The overwhelming majority of far-right MEPs with a hardline stance towards Moscow have at various times belonged to the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, while Putin's supporters either participated in the Identity and Democracy (ID) group or did not join any group. This may be due to the fact that the ECR, founded in June 2009 by the British Conservative Party together with the Polish PiS, has roots in moderate Euroscepticism and historically advocated for strong transatlantic ties. In contrast, the ID group was created after the 2019 European Parliament elections by hardline Eurosceptics such as the Italian Lega, the German AfD, the French RN, and the Hungarian Fidesz, writes the European Student Think Tank.
Diverging views on Russia's war in Ukraine and Putin's policies, in general, have been one of the reasons why far-right parties have been unable to form a unified faction in the European Parliament, EUROPP underscores. The right-wing parties came close to uniting in the European Parliament after a number of European right-populist parties signed a joint declaration on the need for deep reforms in the EU at the initiative of PiS and Fidesz in the summer of 2021. However, negotiations on political cooperation were halted after the start of the war in Ukraine. In the spring of 2022, Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of the Polish PiS, for whom an anti-Putin stance is a crucial element of ideology, criticised Fidesz leader Viktor Orbán for his attitude towards the war.
The new reality: from Putin-Versteher to peacemakers
The European Parliament elections held on 6-9 June resulted in a significant increase in the representation of far-right and populist parties in Europe’s main legislative body (→ Re:Russia: European Balance). Two far-right groups, ECR and ID, along with non-aligned MEPs, including 15 AfD representatives, collectively secured 228 out of 720 seats in the parliament (31%) – 48 more than in the previous parliament.
The prospect of expanding their representation in European politics and Europe’s fatigue from the war in Ukraine are pushing the right-wing parties to overcome previous disagreements.
On 30 June, far-right MEPs announced the creation of a new parliamentary group, ‘Patriots of Europe’, which will include both Putin critics like Portugal’s Chega! (9.8%, two seats) and the Czech ANO, as well as pro-Kremlin parties like Austria’s FPÖ and Hungary’s Fidesz. In the near future, the group may also include deputies from Slovakia’s pro-Putin Smer and the anti-Kremlin PiS, according to BRNODaily. AfD has also expressed interest in joining the group.
The parties included in the coalition signed the manifesto 'Sovereignty above all else', in which they criticised plans to create a 'European central state', promised to 'put sovereignty above federalism, freedom above dictatorship, and peace first', and called the fight against illegal immigration their key priority.
Valeria Gianotta, an expert at the Italian Centre for International Policy Studies (CeSPI), stresses that it is these problems that are currently of greatest concern to the far-right electorate. The sharp rise in the popularity of the right in Europe is linked to growing public disillusionment with the EU’s ability to manage migration, the rising cost of living, and foreign policy issues. The far-right parties in the EU are prioritising the growing gap between the interests of the European bureaucracy and the needs of ordinary people, whose disillusionment is being converted into support for populists. This allows the far-right to focus on their main goals and ignore less critical disagreements, including their stance on Putin.
However, to achieve these goals, pro-Moscow right-wing parties will likely need to adjust their positions. As indicated by Viktor Orbán’s visit to Kyiv, they will have to shift from opposing aid to Ukraine to becoming ‘peacemakers’ working on an acceptable settlement formula. Orbán’s visit also suggests that Eastern European right-wing parties aim to lead this new alliance. However, there is no guarantee that Western European ‘transatlantic’ right-wing parties will agree to this.