Europe’s Right on the Precipice

During a debate with his political nemesis Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln noted that “public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.” The centrality of persuasion, which Lincoln correctly identified as the fundamental mechanism of statecraft in a democratic society, is the reason the Right is ascendant in America today. The Left has been telling its story for a long time, but the chasm between their claims and reality finally grew too large for most voters not to notice.

This opened the door for Donald Trump, a figure whose defining quality is a penchant for pointing out the failures of America’s political class—and it turned out that a majority of Americans agreed with his assessment.

The president’s achievement, properly understood, is reorienting conservatism toward using power well—what used to be called statesmanship—across four key categories: ideology, elections, policy, and competency. Each of these should be understood as a particular relationship with power. Ideology is alignment with the nation, the proper source of power. Elections are about persuading citizens to confer power. Policy is the design of a program for the use of power. Competency is the apt use and execution of power.

The second Trump Administration has more or less mastered all four of these domains. But the European Right, with discrete exceptions, has not. That they are still mostly unable to succeed in the same fashion deserves exploration. Europe, which is largely at an earlier stage in the rightist resurgence, still awaits the emergence of comparable figures who can match Trump’s achievements.

Recent years have witnessed a promising upsurge in populist-right and nationalist-right parties across the European continent—from Reform UK and Vox in Spain to National Rally in France and Alternative for Germany—and a concurrent collapse in public faith and credibility in the Left and what might be called the “establishment” Right. Yet aside from the examples of Italy and Poland, no major European country has seen any of these movements come to power. (The Right in smaller nations in East-Central Europe—Hungary being the most prominent example—has achieved power and demonstrated a capacity to govern, but they are sui generis.) But there is evidence that they could: Reform UK might credibly take 400 seats in the next general election, and for most of the year, polls have shown National Rally leading in the coming French presidential contest.

Yet even were that to happen, the specter of policy and competency arises: we have witnessed in multiple countries that there is comparatively little preparation for administering the state. Absent a deep understanding of the design of policy, the assembly of personnel, and a pragmatic awareness of the formal and informal mechanisms of the state, any election won risks being all for naught.

Cautionary examples have been seen in the U.K., in which the Tories had two consecutive prime ministers—Boris Johnson and Liz Truss—who were simply unfit to govern despite each having ideological and election bona fides. Policy and competency matter. The lesson, which was especially apparent during Trump’s first term, is that developing these skills cannot be left to the day after the election.

One reason why political realignment has occurred more quickly in America is due to the U.S.’s two-party system. Rather than starting a wholly new party, the New Right overtook the Republican Party, and the “establishment” Right along with it. What started out as an uneasy cohabitation is now, a decade later, a robust synthesis. Under the singular figure of the president, the New Right provides victory, policy, and ideology. Meanwhile, the “establishment” offers knowledge of the mechanics of the state and institutional memory.

Europe yields a very different outcome because of its multi-party systems, which have led to a bifurcated Right in the U.K., France, Spain, Germany, and elsewhere. The nature of this bifurcation is amenable to several different dichotomies: populist versus establishment, traditionalist versus libertarian, revolutionary versus evolutionary, and new versus old.

What is relatively consistent, however, is mutual antagonism. Much of this lies in the proximate origins of the “New” Right parties (allowing for the fact that some of them have a history going back decades). Their formation was not so much in reaction against the Left as against the perceived failures of the parties of the “establishment” Right.

In reaction, those establishment parties have tended to engage in a cordon sanitaire against their rightward rivals, and are more willing to enter governing coalitions with the Left than with other conservatives. Most distressingly, there is a destructive tendency for the larger party to cannibalize the smaller, as happened in Spain’s 2023 elections when the center-right Partido Popular chose to attack the rightward Vox—and thereby ended up denying both the opportunity to form a coalition government. This is also illuminated vividly in Germany, which is essentially trying to make Alternative for Germany illegal, and to an extent in France. These cases are partially fueled by a frequently overwrought tendency to see fascism or worse in any explicit invocation of nationalism.

Meanwhile, one rarely sees the parties of the Left unwilling to partner with each other when it comes time to form a government.

If the European Right cannot overcome its own splintering and master the art of governance, it will be the salvation of a European Left whose project is otherwise tottering and at its natural end.

European conservatives must look to the American experience and adapt it—not merely import it—for their own contexts and histories. A Europe with a governing Right in its major nations, oriented to the times and effective in its spheres, will not automatically be in concord with a United States animated by its own America-First principles—interests rationally diverge after all. But it will be better than a Europe ruled by regimes that are positively inimical to those principles, as is the case today.

There is a compelling need for the nations of Europe to catch up to the times at hand. In a common civilizational framework, we are participants, not observers—and the hour is late. 

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