TRUMP ALLIES PLOT TO TAKE OVER THE EUROPEAN UNION  
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John Feffer
January 23, 2024
Tom Dispatch
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_ The Far Right, the War in Ukraine, and the Future of the Green Deal
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, iStock.com/Travel_Motion

 

It would be funny if it weren’t so potentially tragic — and
consequential. No, I’m not thinking about Donald Trump’s 2024
presidential campaign but a related development: the latest decisions
from the European Union (EU) about Ukraine.

As 2023 ended, European nations failed to agree on a $54-billion
package of assistance for Ukraine at a time when that country was
desperately trying to stay afloat and continue its fight against
Russian occupation forces. Bizarrely, the failure of that proposal
coincided with a surprising EU decision to open membership talks with
that beleaguered country.

In other words, no military aid for Ukraine in the short term but a
possible offer of a golden ticket to join the EU at some unspecified
future moment. Ukrainians might well ask themselves whether, at that
point, they’ll still have a country.

One person, right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, is
largely responsible for that contradictory combo. He singlehandedly
blocked
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the aid package, suggesting that any decision be put off until after
European Parliamentary elections in early June of this year. Ever the
wily tactician, he expects those elections to signal a political sea
change, with conservative and far-right forces — think of them as
Donald Trump’s allies in Europe — replacing the parliament’s
current centrist consensus. Now an outlier, Orbán is counting on a
new crop of sympathetic leaders to advance his arch-conservative
social agenda and efforts to cut Ukraine loose.

He’s also deeply skeptical of expanding the EU to include Ukraine or
other former Soviet republics, not just because of Russian
sensitivities but for fear that EU funds could be diverted from
Hungary to new members in the east. By leaving the room when that
December vote on future membership took place, Orbán allowed
consensus to prevail, but only because he knew he still had plenty of
time to pull the plug
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on Ukraine’s bid.

Ukrainians remain upbeat despite the aid delay. As their leader
Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted
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about future EU membership, “This is a victory for Ukraine. A
victory for all of Europe. A victory that motivates, inspires, and
strengthens.”

But even if Orbán’s resistance were to be overcome, a larger
challenge looms: the European Union that will make the final
determination on Ukraine’s membership may not prove to be the same
regional body as at present. While Russia and Ukraine battle it out
over where to define Europe’s easternmost frontier, a fierce
political conflict is taking place to the west over the very
definition of Europe.

In retrospect, the departure of the United Kingdom from the EU in 2020
may prove to have been just a minor speedbump compared to what Europe
faces with the war in Ukraine, the recent success of far-right parties
in Italy and the Netherlands, and the prospect that, after the next
election, a significantly more conservative European Parliament could
at the very least slow the roll-out of the European Green Deal.

And worse yet, a full-court press from the far right might even spell
the end of the Europe that has long shimmered on the horizon as a
greenish-pink ideal. The extinguishing of the one consistent success
story of our era — particularly if Donald Trump were also to win the
2024 U.S. presidential election — could challenge the very notion of
progress that’s at the heart of any progressive agenda.

ORBÁN’S ALLIES

For decades, Dutch firebrand Geert Wilders, leader of the far-right
Party for Freedom, has regularly garnered headlines
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for his outrageous statements and proposals to ban Islam, the Quran,
and/or immigrants altogether. In the run-up to the November 2023
parliamentary elections in the Netherlands, it looked as if he would
continue to be an eternal also-ran with a projected vote total in the
mid to upper teens. In addition to the usual obstacles he faced, like
the lunacy of his platform, he was up against a reputed political
powerhouse in Frans Timmermans, the architect of Europe’s Green Deal
and the newly deputized leader of the Dutch center-left coalition.

To everyone’s surprise, however, Wilders’s party exceeded
expectations, leading the field with 23% of the vote and more than
doubling the number of Party for Freedom seats in the new parliament.

Although mainstream European parties had historically been reluctant
to form governments with the far right, some have now
opportunistically chosen to do so. Far-right parties now serve in
governments in Sweden and Finland, while leading coalitions in Italy
and Slovakia.

Wilders, too, wants to lead. He’s even withdrawn a 2018 bill to ban
mosques and the Quran in an effort to woo potential partners. Such
gestures toward the center have also characterized the strategy of
Giorgia Meloni [[link removed]], the head of
the far-right Brothers of Italy party, who downplayed its fascist
roots and pledged to support both NATO and the EU to win enough
centrist backing to become Italy’s current prime minister.

But what happens if there’s no longer a political center that must
be wooed?

That’s been the case in Hungary since Viktor Orbán took over as
prime minister in 2010. He has systematically dismantled
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judicial, legislative, and constitutional checks on his power, while
simultaneously marginalizing his political opposition. Nor does he
have to compromise with the center, since it’s effectively dropped
out
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of Hungarian politics — and he and his allies are eager to export
their Hungarian model to the rest of Europe. Worse yet, they’ve got
a strong tailwind. In 2024, the far-right is on track
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elections in both Austria and Belgium, while Marine Le Pen’s
far-right party leads the polls
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the equally intemperate, anti-immigrant Alternative fur Deutschland is
running a strong second to the center-right in Germany
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No less ominously, the Identity and Democracy bloc, which includes the
major French and German far-right parties, is projected to gain more
than two dozen seats [[link removed]] in
the European parliamentary elections this June. The European
Conservatives and Reformists bloc, which contains the Finnish, Polish,
Spanish, and Swedish far-right parties, will also probably pick up a
few seats. Throw in unaffiliated representatives from Orbán’s
Fidesz party and that bloc could become the largest
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in the European parliament, even bigger than the center-right
coalition currently at the top of the polls
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Such developments only further fuel Orbán’s transnational
ambitions. Instead of being the odd man out on votes over Ukrainian
aid, he wants to transform the European Union with himself at the
center of a new status quo. “Brussels is not Moscow,” he tweeted
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in October. “The Soviet Union was a tragedy. The EU is only a weak
contemporary comedy. The Soviet Union was hopeless, but we can change
Brussels and the EU.”

With such a strategy, wittingly or not, Orbán is following the
Kremlin playbook. Russian President Vladimir Putin has long wanted to
undercut European unity as part of an effort to divide
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that in mind, he forged alliances with far-right political parties
like Italy’s Lega and Austria’s Freedom Party to sow havoc in
European politics. His careful cultivation of Orbán has made Hungary
functionally his country’s European proxy.

Not all of Europe has jumped on the far-right bandwagon. Voters in
Poland last year even kicked out
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right-wing Law and Justice party, while the far right lost big
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in the latest Spanish elections. Also, far-right parties are
notoriously hard to herd and forging a consensus among them will
undoubtedly prove difficult on issues like NATO, LGBTQ rights, and
economic policy.

Still, on one key issue they’re now converging. They used to
disagree on whether to support leaving the EU, Brexit-style, or
staying to fight. Now, they largely favor a take-over-from-within
strategy. And to make that happen, they’ve coalesced around two key
issues: the strengthening of “Fortress Europe” to keep out those
fleeing the Global South and frontally assaulting that cornerstone of
recent EU policy, the Green energy transition.

THE FATE OF THE GREEN NEW DEAL

In Germany, the far right has gone after, of all things, the heat
pump. The Alternative fur Deutschland’s campaign
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against a bill last year to replace fossil-fuel heating systems with
electrical heat pumps propelled the party into second place in the
polls (thanks to an exaggeration of the cost of such pumps). The
French far right is also on the political rise, fueled in part by its
opposition to what its leader Marine Le Pen, in a manifesto issued in
2022
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called “an ecology that has been hijacked by climate terrorism,
which endangers the planet, national independence and, more
importantly, the living standards of the French people.” In the
Netherlands, Wilders and the far right have similarly benefited from a
farmer backlash
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against proposals to reduce nitrogen pollution.

A report from the Center for American Progress concludes that European
far-right groups “frame environmental policies as elitist while
stoking economic anxiety and nationalism, which erodes trust in
democratic institutions and further distracts from genuine
environmental concerns.” Researchers
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from the University of Bergen in Norway are even more pointed:
“Populist far-right parties portray fossil fuel phase-out as a
threat to traditional family values, regional identity, and national
sovereignty.”

The European far right, in other words, is mobilizing behind a second
Great Replacement theory. According to the initial version of that
conspiracy theory
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which helped a first wave of right-wing populists take power a few
years ago, immigrants were plotting to replace indigenous, mostly
white populations in Europe. Now, extremists argue that clean green
energy is fast replacing the fossil fuels that anchor traditional
(read: white Christian) European communities. This “fossil
fascism,” as Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective have labeled it
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marries extractivism to ethnonationalism, with right-wing whites
clinging to oil and coal as tightly as Barack Obama once accused their
American counterparts
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of clinging to guns and religion.

Believers in this second Great Replacement theory have demonized the
European Green Deal, which is dedicated to reducing carbon emissions
55% by 2030. The overall deal is a sophisticated industrial policy
designed to create jobs in the clean energy sector that will replace
those lost by miners, oil riggers, and pipeline workers. However
urgently needed, the Deal doesn’t come cheap and so is vulnerable to
charges of “elitism.”

Worse yet, the backlash against Europe’s Green turn has expanded to
efforts in the European Parliament to block
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pesticide reduction and weaken legislation on the reduction of
packaging. As a result of this backlash, _Politico_ notes
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“The Green Deal now limps on, with several key policies on the
scrapheap.” A rightward shift in the European Parliament would knock
the Green Deal to the ground (and even kick it while down), ensuring a
further disastrous heating of this planet.

THE WAR OF IDEAS

The war in Ukraine seems to be about the territory Russia has
occupied, the fight over the European Green Deal about politics and
the far right’s search for an issue as effective as
immigrant-bashing to rally voters. At the center of both struggles,
however, is something far more significant. From Vladimir Putin in the
Kremlin to Marine Le Pen at the reactionary barricades in Paris, the
far right is fighting over the very future of European ideals.

Narrowly, that debate is just the latest iteration of a longstanding
question about whether Europe should emphasize expanding its
membership or the deeper integration of the present EU. Until now, the
compromise has been to set a distinctly high bar for EU membership but
provide generous subsidies to the lucky few countries that make it
into the club. By turning a cold shoulder to a neighbor in need, after
having benefitted enormously from EU largesse since the 1990s, Hungary
is challenging that core principle of solidarity.

But Orbán and his allies have a far more radical mission in mind: to
transform European identity. Right now, Europe stands for extensive
social programs that even right-wing parties are reluctant to consider
dismantling. The European Union has also advanced the world’s most
consequential collective program on a green energy transition. And
despite some backlash, it remains a welcoming space for the LGBTQ
community.

In other words, the EU is still a beacon for progressives around the
world (notwithstanding the neoliberal reforms that are regressively
remaking its economic space). It remains an aspirational space for the
countries on Europe’s borders that yearn to escape autocracy and
relative poverty. It’s similarly so for people in distant lands who
imagine Europe as an ark of salvation in an increasingly illiberal
world, and even for U.S. progressives who are envious of European
health care and industrial policies, as well as its environmental
regulations. That the EU’s policies are also the product of vigorous
transnational politicking has also been inspirational for
internationalists who want stronger cross-border cooperation to help
solve global problems.

In the late 1980s, as the Warsaw Pact disintegrated and the Soviet
Union began to fall apart, political scientist Francis Fukuyama
imagined [[link removed]] an “end of
history.” The hybrid of market democracy, he argued, would be the
answer to all ideological debates and the European Union would serve
as the boring, bureaucratic endpoint of global political evolution.
Since the invasion of Ukraine, however, history is not only back, but
seems to be going backward.

The far right is at the forefront of that retreat. Even as the EU
contemplates expansion eastward, a revolt from within threatens to
bring about the end of Europe itself — the end, that is, of the
liberal and tolerant social welfare state, of a collective commitment
to economic solidarity, and of its leading role in addressing climate
change. The battle between a democratic Ukraine and the autocratic
Russian petrostate is, in other words, intimately connected to the
conflicts being waged in Brussels.

Without a vibrant, democratic Ukraine, the eastern frontier of Europe
abutting Russia is likely to become a zone of fragile, divided,
incoherent “nation states,” hard-pressed to qualify for EU
membership. Without a powerful left defending Europe’s gold-standard
social safety nets, libertarians are likely to advance their attempts
to eat away at or eliminate the regulatory state. Without Europe’s
lead, global efforts to address climate change will grow dangerously
more diffuse.

Sound familiar? That’s also the agenda of the far-right in the
United States, led by Donald Trump. His MAGA boosters, like media
personalities Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon, have been pulling
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Geert Wilders, and Vladimir Putin to send Europe spiraling backward
into fascism.

Short on resources and political power, progressives have always
possessed one commodity in bulk: hope. The arc of the moral universe
is long, Martin Luther King, Jr., prophesied
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ago, but it bends toward justice. Or maybe it doesn’t. Take away the
European ideal and no matter what happens in the American presidential
election this year, 2024 will be the year that hope dies last.

Copyright 2024 John Feffer

JOHN FEFFER, a _TomDispatch_ regular
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author of the dystopian novel _Splinterlands
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director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy
Studies._ _Frostlands_
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a Dispatch Books original, is volume two of his _Splinterlands_
series, and the final novel in the trilogy is _Songlands_
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He has also written _Right Across the World: The Global Networking of
the Far-Right and the Left Response
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* The European Union; Democracy; European Right; Russia;
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