Is the EU about to get a hard-right president?

If polls are right, the European Parliament's two far-right groups could be the largest bloc after June's election. That would make the appointment of a centrist Commission President difficult.

Yesterday, at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, far-right French firebrand Marion Maréchal Le Pen announced that her Reconquest party will join the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group in the next term, and she will lead the party in June’s EU election. For anyone who hasn’t been paying attention to the ECR since it was founded by the British Conservatives in 2009, it might come as a surprise. But Reconquest, founded in 2021 by ultranationalist presidential candidate Eric Zemmour as a further-right alternative to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, will feel perfectly at home in today’s ECR.

ECR, headed by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, now includes some of Europe’s biggest heavy-hitters on the far right: the Sweden Democrats who are propping up the center-right government in Stockholm, the True Finns who came second in last year’s election in Finland, Law and Justice (PiS) who were the ruling party in Poland dismantling rule of law until being voted out last year, Vox who nearly formed a governing coalition with the center right after Spain’s election last year, and the Flemish nationalist N-VA, the largest party in the Belgian parliament despite believing Belgium shouldn’t exist. It’s a who’s who of Trump-admiring, Steve-Bannon-coordinated nationalists and is the driving force behind the European far right today.

However, like most far-right parties, the ECR bristles at the description. Since being set up as a Eurosceptic break-away faction of the center-right European Peoples Party (EPP) in 2009 as a joint project of the Tories and PiS, they have insisted that they are simply a center-right group that opposes EU federalism. But with the far right abandoning the idea of taking their countries out of the EU after seeing the calamity of Brexit, the group is these days much more motivated by ethno-nationalist ideas and culture war preoccupations than it is about the proper functioning of the European Union. This Frankenstein’s monster stitched together by British Conservatives 15 years ago is now poised to become the third-largest political group in the European Parliament following June’s election, according to polls.