The Spectator Gavin Mortimer Europe is shifting rapidly to the right 27 June 2023, 8:29am

The Spectator 

Gavin Mortimer

Europe is shifting rapidly to the right

27 June 2023, 8:29am

‘The left is sweeping to power across Europe,’ suggested the headline in the Independent in September 2021. The newspaper called on the analysis of Denis MacShane, the former Labour MP, to explains to its readers why this was so. MacShane posited that the election of Joe Biden as US president had reinvigorated the left-wing electorate while the population at large were voting for parties who were dealing with climate change most vigorously.  

Eighteen months later and red has become an endangered colour in European politics. The latest blow to the left was in Sunday’s Greek general election; not only was the centre-right Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis re-elected with over 40 per cent of the vote, but the newly-formed Spartans took 12 seats in parliament. They have links to the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, which was banned a few years ago and several of its founders jailed for crimes ranging from assault to murder. 

The Greek parliament has not had as much right-wing representation since democracy was restored to the country in 1974.   

It is only eight years since the far left Syriza party was elected to power in Greece with its leader, Alexis Tsipras, declaring that ‘hope begins today’. Syriza boasted 149 MPs in 2015; they now have 48.   

Syriza’s plight is symptomatic of how the left’s influence in Europe has declined in recent years. Of the 27 governments in the EU only six lean to the left: Spain, Portugal, Slovenia, Malta, Denmark and Germany. In Denmark the Social Democrats are in power partly because they run an immigration policy that its critics describe as ‘far right’.

Those six could be reduced to five next month when the Spanish go to the polls after the beleaguered Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called a snap election after his party were trounced last month in regional elections. 

Meanwhile, in Germany the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) has never been so popular and on Sunday they achieved a first: victory in a local election in Sonneberg, giving them their first governing post. Writing in yesterday’s  Coffee House, Katja Hoyer attributed the AfD’s resurgence to a ‘lack of trust in the established political spectrum, in its ability and even its willingness to solve the big issues of the day’. 

No issue is bigger – and has been consistently for the last decade – than mass, uncontrolled immigration. It was a feature of the Greek election with Mitsotakis mocking the left for their ‘open-border logic’ and vowing to do all he can to end the ‘organised invasion of illegal migrants into Greek, that means European, territory’. 

The vast majority of Europeans don’t want an end to all immigration – they recognise the benefits of it – but they do want it controlled.  

Over the weekend, 1,500 migrants landed on the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, taking the total number who have arrived on Italian soil in the first six months of the year to over 61,000. The number was 25,795 in the same period in 2022. 

Europeans, be they Italians, Germans or Greeks, want to know that the people entering their country are who they say they are and have no evil intent. These concerns have been persistently ignored by Brussels and by most European heads of state. 

In January I wrote an article headlined ‘Europe’s leaders are failing in their duty to keep people safe’. It was prompted by a spate of brutal assaults in France, Spain and Germany; men and women stabbed randomly by, respectively, an Algerian, Moroccan and a Palestinian.

The Palestinian asylum seeker who is awaiting trial for the murder of two Germans on a train has a long history of extreme violence. He should have been deported after a conviction but judicial incompetence allowed him to remain at liberty.  

One of his alleged victims was a 17-year-old girl, Anne-Marie who, like Grace Kumar and Barnaby Webber, the two students murdered in Nottingham earlier this month, was on the cusp of a bright and exciting future. 

Anne-Marie’s father raised his daughter to be open and tolerant, and among her best friends was a Syrian refugee. But, as he told Der Spiegel magazine after her death: ‘Something is fundamentally wrong in our country.’

How could such a dangerous man be allowed to remain in Germany, and at liberty, he asked? He blamed the interior minister and demanded an inquiry: ‘There must be a reappraisal. My daughter is not just a regrettable isolated case’. 

After four babies were stabbed in their pushchairs at a playground in Annecy this month, the right-wing French politician, Eric Zemmour, described the attack as ‘Francocide’. That drew an angry response from Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, who condemned the word as ‘hate speech and I hope that no one will use it’.  As for the atrocity itself, allegedly perpetrated by a Syrian refugee, Grandi called it ‘an isolated act’.  

These attacks are not ‘isolated’. In Germany, for example, knife attacks on trains and in stations doubled in 2022 and over 50 per cent of the assaults were carried out by people categorised by police as ‘non-Germans’.  

If the EU, the UN and the left persist in their state of denial, more outraged by the rhetoric of the likes of Zemmour than they are the stabbing of toddlers in their pushchairs, it won’t be long before the right rules Europe in its entirety. 

Gavin Mortimer

WRITTEN BY

Gavin Mortimer

Gavin Mortimer is a British author who has lived in Paris for 12 years. He writes about French politics, terrorism and sport.