Europe's far right is trying to block rearmament

Orban is wielding his Council veto, Wilders is blocking in the Dutch parliament, Le Pen is railing against Rearm Europe, and Meloni told EU leaders the Italian public may not accept it.

Donald Trump’s government has spent the past two months saying that the reason they are disengaging from Europe is because European countries are not spending enough on defence. It is curious, then, that as the EU and national governments have proposed a sudden surge in defence spending, it is Trump’s allies on this continent who are opposing it.

This week the Dutch Parliament voted to oppose Ursula von der Leyen’s €800 billion Rearm Europe plan, sending the cabinet of Prime Minister Dick Schoof into a crisis. The opposition has mainly come from the far-right PVV party of Geert Wilders, which since 2023 is the largest party in the parliament and the largest part of the Dutch governing coalition. The motion against the rearmament plan passed by a narrow majority of 73 to 71 votes, with the small centre-right NSC and right-wing populist BBB parties also voting for it. In theory this is about opposition to relaxing the EU’s deficit restrictions on Southern EU countries (the Dutchman’s boogeymen) in order to finance the defence efforts. In reality, this is part of a larger pattern of the far right across Europe throwing up roadblocks to rearmament.

In France, Marine Le Pen has come out swinging against the European rearmament plan and President Macron’s plans to widen the French nuclear umbrella to protect the EU. “The French nuclear deterrent must remain a French nuclear deterrent - it must not be shared,” she said last weekend. She said she will fight any attempt at creating an integrated European defence independent of Washington. “As usual, the European Union is using a crisis to get itself additional powers,” she said. “I can see that they would like this conflict to continue, so that they can take over responsibility for defence. I don't accept this.” The French parliament has this week been debating the rearmament and whether to continue support for Ukraine, with far-right and far-left MPs joining to attack continued military build-up. The opposition is interesting given that Le Pen’s far-right National Front/Rally has received Russian money in the past. Meanwhile, in Germany, rearmament plans have to be rushed through in the current parliament before the far-right AfD gets a chance to block it from their new perch as the main opposition party.

At the emergency European Council summit last week, far-right Hungarian leader Viktor Orban refused to sign up to conclusions endorsing further support and security guarantees for Ukraine. And Italy’s far-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni, who has over the past three years purported to be a strong supporter of Ukraine (while not actually giving them much of anything, more on that below), warned the leaders that the public will not accept the Rearm Europe plan under that name and that rearmament is unpopular. So, how do we explain this disconnect between what Donald Trump is saying and what his friends in Europe are doing? In fact, it’s not as contradictory as it might seem. Because while the Trump regime says they want more European defence spending, they do not actually want more European defence capability.