Nothing Left in Europe

The EU’s rightward turn on immigration could leave American liberals on an island.

Excepting the socialists leading Spain, Ireland, and the Democratic Party in the United States, many progressives are now willing to concede that illegal immigration will be their undoing unless they craft a policy to reform it. If they fail, conditions could be right for a national populist wave to strike Europe just as it has the United States.

As living memory of World War II fades, the institutions crafted in the aftermath of that continental carnage find themselves in a perilous situation. The European Union’s stability is still based on the premise that centrist parties of both the Left and Right will advance the favored policies of the last few hundred subscribers to The Economist.

Under that premise, nations states like Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Spain were tasked with weeding out any would-be populist elements from each respected country and from smaller nations within the coalition.

But since Brexit, the premise has gotten shakier and shakier. Every time the centrists of Europe believe they have beaten back the populist uprising, it comes back, only stronger. The question now is whether national populists can finally break through the block.

We’re seeing progress in each of these countries, though it is far from linear. Following Brexit, Boris Johnson and his British Tories flooded the UK with an unprecedented wave of migrants from the Third World, which led to Labour winning a landslide victory in 2024. Yet despite that kick in teeth, populists have rallied around Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, a party that has won a series of by-elections and more than 2,000 local government seats across the country.

Across the Channel in France, Marine Le Pen lost her 2022 bid for the Palais de l’Élysée and was subsequently convicted of embezzling European Union funds. Yet her heir, Jordan Bardella, has made their party, the National Rally, the largest single voice in the French legislature, and Le Pen is polling first in the upcoming 2027 French presidential election.

Germany’s AfD was kicked out of a coalition of EU nationalist parties for being too extreme, while centrist politicians in Germany have openly considered banning the party. Yet after years of weathering what seemed like an impossible storm, membership in the AfD nearly doubled from 2024 to 2025, and now the party owns a commanding lead ahead of regional and national elections.

Then there’s Italy, where Giorgia Meloni became the first nationalist to be elected to Prime Minister of a Western European country—only for the EU to kick into overdrive making sure she fell in line. Yet Meloni has proven an especially tactful politician, providing not only stability within Italy for the first time in a generation but also driving continental policy on illegal immigration. In fact, Meloni’s biggest domestic political threat is not socialists but an even more nationalist party, National Future, which is led by retired Italian army general Roberto Vannacci.

Not even President Trump’s re-emergence as the ugly American promising to bully Europe for its excessive freeloading has been enough to scare the populace into supporting the centrist slop offered up by EU politicians of the last few decades.

Denmark Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called elections just weeks after Trump demanded to annex Greenland (a Danish territory), only for her Social Democrats to lose their majority and the national populist Danish People’s Party to reemerge as a political force after a half-decade in the political wilderness.

Even when European centrists have won, such as the defeat of Hungary’s Viktor Obran and his Fidesz Party, it was only to cede power to a man who attacked Orban for being too liberal on immigration.

But the greatest defeat for Europe’s neoliberal centrists greatest didn’t come at the ballot box. Rather, it came from the traditional Right’s unwillingness to resist nationalism coming from within its own coalition.

The End of the EU Establishment?

The European Union Parliament consists of eight coalitions, with the center-right European People’s Party, centrist Renew Europe, and center-left Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats holding a majority of the seats. These three parties have controlled the EU Parliament for the last two decades while blocking any effort made by the far Left or nationalist Right to make changes that better reflect their constituencies.

While it maintains control of the legislative body, the centrist bloc’s numbers have dwindled as the three nationalist Right coalitions grew from controlling 15% of the seats in 2014 to 27% today. Polls suggest that the nationalist parties could surge past 31% ahead of the next election in 2029—growth which is not going unnoticed by the establishment European People’s Party.

Last year, for the first time in the history of the EU Parliament, the European People’s Party delivered an olive branch to the previously excluded nationalist coalitions, asking for their help pushing against green new deal policies that were hurting Europe’s economy. Though fairly benign in terms of policy, the move reflected a major turning point where the supposedly center-right European People’s Party was no longer willing to refuse working with the nationalist Right. For over a decade, the EPP saw its coalition shrink as voters turned to more nationalist parties over those who betrayed their base in order to hold together an ever-strained center.

Earlier this year, the EPP once again turned to the nationalists to pass legislation against the will of the center-left’s Socialist and Democrats. This event was even more norm-shattering because it wasn’t over an issue like economics that some moderates can come to terms with. Rather, this was about the most important victory for nationalist parties—immigration.

Nations across Europe have been seeking faster deportation for criminals and rejected asylum seekers, but were often thwarted by the European Commission on Human Rights and other EU regulations. EU law states that you cannot send a migrant back to an unsafe nation, so conservative leaders like Meloni and former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak sought to instead send migrants to “safe third countries outside the EU borders,” similar to Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy.

But the Socialists would never go for it, nor would minor coalitions from the far Left, and there weren’t enough centrist EPP and Reform Europe members to pass the legislation. The only way through was toughening the policy by winning over nationalists in the other coalitions.

With the backing of the nationalist Right, the revised policy stipulates that rejected asylum seekers who cannot be returned to their countries of origin can be transferred to “return hubs” outside of the laws and regulations of the EU. Passage of this policy was a major win for Meloni and her allies.

In essence, the center can no longer keep the nationalist Right out of the governing conversation. The ultimate test will come in upcoming national elections in Germany and Austria, where nationalist parties are expected to garner the most votes but still likely need coalition partners to form a government.

The EU’s center-Right parties are realizing that the only way they can pass conservative policies is to join forces with the dreaded nationalists, turning their backs on the generations-old compact to stop the hard Right at every turn.

The Domestic Front

Unfortunately, political parties within individual European countries haven’t yet learned that lesson.

Western Europe has become a region void of political stability. France has cycled through seven prime ministers in the last six years, the United Kingdom is about to start its fifth, and the only way for Angela Merkel’s former party, the centrist Christian Democratic Union, to keep the nationalists at bay in Germany after the next election will be to enter a coalition with various Left and far-Left parties. All of these countries sit in a state of political chaos precisely because they refuse to work with the nationalists. Italy is the sole exception—its nationalist prime minister is closing in on four consecutive years in office.

The center-Left is even conceding a bit of ground when it comes to immigration. Labour’s Keir Starmer greatly slashed legal immigration from the Boris wave while he was leading the UK; Denmark continues to pursue punitive measures against illegal immigrants, and even Hungary’s new anti-Orban prime minister is looking to slash legal immigration from South Asian countries.

Throughout Western Europe, all of the institutionalists who believe in the promise of post-war Europe are dying on the hill of mass immigration, losing ground with each passing year. We could be on the verge of a nationalist wave on the other side of the Atlantic.

Nationalists and populists from Europe won’t always agree with their U.S. counterparts. When it comes to artificial intelligence, for example, the Trump administration champions the technology while European leaders like Meloni compare the promises of tech leaders to those of 1990s politicians who said there would be no downsides to free trade with China.

Still, due to the shared issue of immigration, along with the threat of China and its advancing influence in the Southern Hemisphere, a nationalist/populist coalition that crosses the Western world could be a powerful force. Having nationalists govern both the U.S. and top European countries could create a shared permission structure for each nation to control its borders, deport illegal aliens, pursue smart energy policies, and protect its unique national identity.

In the decade since Trump first took office, American progressives have championed Europe as a shining beacon of democracy that would never succumb to his border and immigration restrictions. But if every country in the West begins working from the same playbook, institutional Leftists will have nowhere to turn to aside from Canada—and that’s pretty sad.

Could we, in 2028, live in a world where Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni lead two of the largest nations in Western Europe, Reform UK and AfD are ascending ahead of their respective upcoming elections, and JD Vance is the Republican Party’s presidential nominee?

It’s no longer out of the question.