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?