When Andrej Babiš swept back into power last Sunday, it may at first have seemed like another mere blip in a continent that has long grown accustomed to populists coming and going. Yet, there might be more to Babiš’s comeback than meets the eye. To borrow Churchill’s phrasing, it may not be the beginning of the end, but ‘the end of the beginning’ for Europe’s anti-establishment right.
For over a decade, nationalist movements have gnawed at the edges of Europe’s political mainstream, railing against rootless and out-of-touch elites, Brussels, and globalism – while remaining excluded from real power.
Little now seems to remain of the ‘cordon sanitaire’ that had thus far kept populist parties at bay. With the shrinking of the centre and the emergence of a new generation of voters – for whom an anti-fascist narrative sounds like a vague abstraction – Europe’s populists may have come to maturity.
Moving from the periphery to the centre
Nowhere might this be more consequential than where it matters most: in Europe’s political core. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has moved from peripheral protest to the country’s main structural political force, shaping the national agenda on migration, energy and the debt brake – and leading in the polls.
In France, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) has shed its talk of ‘Frexit’ and rebranded itself as the party of sovereignty without rupture – a nationalist alternative to both Macronism and Brussels.
And in Britain, Reform UK has morphed into the gravitational centre of the disoriented right, absorbing fragments of a once-dominant conservative tradition.
The question, then, is no longer whether populism will reach Berlin, London and Paris (the so-called E3). It is: what would happen to the European Union (EU) and to Europe as a geopolitical bloc if all three parties – AfD, National Rally, and Reform UK – were to hold power at more or less the same time?
Grégoire Roos discusses the possible policies of an RN government.
The electoral calendar would technically make this possible. How would such a configuration affect the coherence of European economic integration and the stability of the euro? And, perhaps more importantly: what would the implications be for an already well-shaken NATO, and Europe’s commitment to Ukraine?
This would not necessarily herald a coherent alliance of sovereigntists. Politically, it would likely produce a continent of parallel nationalisms moving unevenly in the same direction. It would be a Europe defined less by unity or rupture than by a slow drift of purpose, in which the disoriented right finds itself somehow back in command.
A new centre of gravity for the disoriented right
Much of the increasing electoral appeal of the populist right can be attributed to the loss of the traditional centre right’s coordinates. What was once a broad coalition of Christian Democrats, Gaullists, Conservatives and free marketeers has fragmented under the depressurization of globalization, accelerating cultural insecurity and growing internal political contradictions over Europe itself.
Across Britain, France and Germany, this transformation has followed a similar pattern. The populists did not overthrow the old right; they inherited its electorate while discarding its inhibitions (‘the uninhibited right’ said an old slogan of the French Les Républicains aiming at winning back voters lost to Le Pen).
They have learned to present themselves not as radicals but as realists – or what Monsieur Bardella, Le Pen’s heir apparent, calls ‘le bon sens’, the common sense. Be it in Berlin, London, or Paris, theirs is a politics of candour as authenticity – a narrative in which anger becomes proof of sincerity. Has a certain Donald J. Trump not proved how successful the method can be?
In Germany, the AfD draws much of its support from voters who once formed the CDU’s socially conservative base. In France, Marine Le Pen’s movement has captured the working- and lower-middle-class electorate that once sustained the Gaullist movement.
And in Britain, Reform UK has become a gravitational field for former Conservatives who see a purer expression of their own frustrations in Nigel Farage’s rhetoric – a trend reflected by the rising number of defections of Tory elected officials to Reform UK.
This shift has redrawn the boundaries of what counts as the political centre. And there lies perhaps the most significant institutional impact of the populist advance across the E3, one that will have far-reaching repercussions for years to come.
Fault lines in a seeming unity
The prospect of the AfD, National Rally, and Reform UK all holding power within a similar political window invites speculation that a populist axis may form, running through Europe’s three major economies. Yet such an alignment is politically unlikely – and chemically impossible.
The first obstacle is structural: the United Kingdom is no longer part of the EU, which sharply limits any institutional convergence. Reform UK’s emerging base overlaps increasingly with disillusioned Conservatives and elements of the pro-business right – circles more concerned with regulatory flexibility than with continental confrontation. And as the Institute for Government recently noted, the party’s economic instincts are Thatcherite rather than revolutionary.