European Parliament tilts right; Macron calls snap elections in France

“The center is holding,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Sunday night. But the outcome, with gains for parties on the extremes, “comes with great responsibility for the parties in the center” to ensure “stability” and “a strong and effective Europe,” she said.

Macron said legislative elections would give French citizens a chance to determine their country’s future. He warned: “The rise of nationalists, of demagogues, is a danger for our nation, but also for our Europe, for France’s place in Europe and in the world.”

The French presidency won’t be contested, but the vote, with a first round set for June 30, will be a referendum on Macron’s government.

The once-every-five-years European Parliament elections are the world’s largest democratic exercise outside India. Citizens of the European Union’s 27 member states cast ballots to determine the 720 representatives that sit in Brussels and Strasbourg. Since the last elections in 2019, once-fringe hard-right parties have entered the political mainstream in Europe, and the results seemed to reflect those shifts.

In Germany, while the center right was leading comfortably on Sunday, there was boisterous flag-waving at Alternative for Germany headquarters after an exit poll determined the far-right party to be the “second strongest force.” Austria’s far-right Freedom Party also celebrated on Sunday after forecasts showed it placing first for the first time.

In Italy, exit polls from the national broadcaster RAI showed Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party coming in a first with between 26 and 30 percent of the vote — a major gain over the party’s 2019 performance, and as well or better than it did in the 2022 national vote.

If those results are borne out, they would solidify the Italian leader as a rising conservative star on the world stage, vesting her with additional regional clout at time when the leaders of Germany and France have been weakened.

“Thank you,” Meloni said in a post on X. “@FratellidItalia confirms itself as the leading Italian party, surpassing the result of the last political elections.”

Early projections on Sunday suggested that France’s National Rally, a far-right party guided by Marine Le Pen and her protégé, Jordan Bardella, won about 31.5 percent of the vote, more than doubling the showing from Macron’s allies. “The unprecedented gap reflects a scathing disavowal and rejection of the policy led by Emmanuel Macron,” Bardella said.

Dissolving the National Assembly is a way for Macron to show he has heard the criticism. He may be betting that protest votes featured prominently in the European Parliament elections and that people may vote differently when focused on France.

It’s an “extremely risky” strategy, said Michael Duclos, a former French diplomat now at the Institut Montaigne think tank. “There is a strong chance that the National Rally will win … in a landslide and therefore be able to form the next government,” with Bardella as the likely prime minister, Duclos said.

That is what’s known as “cohabitation” in France, when the president and the prime minister come from opposing parties — a situation critics say leads to political paralysis. Duclos said Macron may hope being in power would make Bardella unpopular. But even then, another far-right figure, most likely Le Pen, could win the presidency in 2027, he said, breaking a long-held taboo in France around far-right governments.

Le Pen, speaking before party members on Sunday, welcomed the snap elections and said her party was “ready to exercise power if the French people trust us during these future legislative elections.”

Demonstrators congregated at Place de la Republique in Paris on Sunday night, calling for unity on the left to prevent the far right from entering government.

Sunday’s strong showing for the far right was also a massive blow for German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Two broadcaster exit polls in Germany estimated that the AfD had won 16 percent of the vote, compared with 11 percent last time. That is despite recent scandals that could have dented support. Meanwhile, Scholz’s Social Democrats saw big losses, according to the polls, as did the Green Party that is part of his governing coalition.

A Dutch projection released Thursday also indicated that Geert Wilders’s hard-right Party for Freedom had made the biggest gains in the Netherlands, winning seven seats.

The elections came as some E.U. countries have been pushing for the kind of closer cooperation and integration that guided a coordinated response to the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while a vocal chorus of conservative, nationalist figures are pushing back, wary of what they cast as overreach.

Economic issues are at the forefront for voters across the bloc, according to the latest Eurobarometer survey. Compared with past years, however, the need to take action against climate change appeared less dominant, reflecting a backlash in some countries to the cost of green policies. Migration remained a Top 10 issue regionally.

In other words, European voters are now grappling with many of the same grievances as Americans, and the outcome of this week’s vote could anticipate aspects of the November elections in the United States — just as the 2016 Brexit referendum appeared to preview the victory of Donald Trump that year.

In the past, hard-right parties in Europe took votes away from center-right parties, but these days, they are also making inroads with people who once favored the left. “The far-right has siphoned off voters, certainly in France, Germany and Italy, and some Scandinavian countries, who would have historically voted for left parties,” said Catherine Fieschi, a political analyst and fellow at the Robert Schuman Center of the European University Institute in Florence. “Part of the story of the right is the failure of the left in some of these countries.”

The final European election results, once they are in, will not be the last word, but the beginning of weeks, or even months, of negotiation as the representatives form political groups and officials vie for the union’s top jobs.

One question is whether von der Leyen will get another five-year term leading the E.U.’s executive. After the last elections, in 2019, she secured parliament’s approval by nine votes — and many wonder if it could be closer this time.

Another big unknown is if and how far-right leaders such as Meloni and Le Pen will work together. Le Pen’s National Rally shares Meloni’s hard-line views on immigration and some social issues, but it is far more Euroskeptic and deeply wary of additional E.U. support for Ukraine.

Le Pen has tried to distance herself from those further to the right, including Germany’s AfD.

Ahead of the vote, the AfD’s lead candidate, Maximilian Krah, was banned from campaigning after suggesting that not all of Nazi Germany’s SS officers should be considered criminals.

At an AfD rally outside Berlin last week, there were calls for the expulsion of migrants and slogans like “Our homeland, our rules.” One person carried a sign with a censored version of the phrase “Everything for Germany” — a banned Nazi slogan that recently got an AfD politician fined roughly $14,000.

In the weeks ahead, analysts will be watching to see if the AfD can inch its way into a far-right coalition of some sort, or whether it will remain on the fringes.

“Central to the question ‘How powerful will the [far right] become?’ is the question ‘Are the conservative parties distancing themselves or not?’ said Bettina Kohlrausch, director of the Dusseldorf-based Institute of Economic and Social Research.

Timsit reported from Paris, Faiola from Rome and Brady from Berlin. Beatriz Rios in Brussels contributed to this report.