The far right did not storm the gates of European respectability on its own. It was escorted in, one rhetorical concession at a time, by centrist leaders who convinced themselves that borrowing nativist language was the surest way to neutralise nativist movements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The story is now so familiar that it has lost its capacity to shock, which is precisely the danger. In France, the trajectory from the cordon sanitaire around Jean-Marie Le Pen to the mainstream courtship of Marine Le Pen’s policy positions spans barely two decades. In that time, successive presidents \u2014 from Sarkozy’s deliberate pursuit of Front National voters to Macron’s adoption of hardline immigration rhetoric ahead of the 2022 and 2024 cycles \u2014 performed the same manoeuvre. Each insisted they were inoculating the electorate against extremism. Each, in practice, validated its premises.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
France is only the most conspicuous case. In Denmark, the Social Democrats won power by absorbing the Danish People’s Party’s immigration platform almost wholesale. In Austria, the mainstream right spent decades alternating between coalition with the FPO and theatrical ruptures from it, each cycle leaving the party more embedded in the political furniture. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s path to the Palazzo Chigi was paved not by any sudden radicalisation of the electorate but by the slow, bipartisan consensus that her positions on migration, identity, and sovereignty were within the bounds of legitimate debate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The mechanism is always the same. A centre-right leader, facing electoral pressure, adopts one or two planks from the nativist platform \u2014 usually immigration controls or national identity rhetoric. The media frames this as pragmatism. The nativist party, far from being outflanked, is vindicated: its diagnosis was correct all along, the mainstream now agrees. The Overton window shifts. Next cycle, the nativist party raises the stakes, and the centre follows again. The ratchet only turns one way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What Europe’s centrist establishment refuses to confront is that this strategy has never once worked on its own terms. Nowhere on the continent has mainstream adoption of far-right rhetoric produced a durable collapse in far-right support. Instead, it has produced a continent where policies once confined to the margins \u2014 pushbacks at sea, mass detention, the casual linkage of immigration and civilisational threat \u2014 are now the operating assumptions of governments that still describe themselves as liberal democratic. The normalisation is complete. The question now is whether anyone in the European centre has the honesty to admit what they built.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The far right did not storm the gates of European respectability on its own. It was escorted in, one rhetorical concession at a time, by centrist leaders who convinced themselves that borrowing nativist language was the surest way to neutralise nativist movements. The story is now so familiar that it has lost its capacity to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"author_name":"Marc-Antoine Delacroix","author_role":"Contributing Editor, Paris","published_date":"2025-04-28","region":"France \/ Western Europe"},"class_list":["post-44","neweu_opinion","type-neweu_opinion","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/onyxsilk.vagabond.andreidraganescu.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/opinion-pieces\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/onyxsilk.vagabond.andreidraganescu.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/opinion-pieces"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/onyxsilk.vagabond.andreidraganescu.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/neweu_opinion"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/onyxsilk.vagabond.andreidraganescu.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}