Fear eats the Right

Reflections on the new EU Parliament.

European citizens gave conservatives a clear mandate in the European elections. But instead of finally getting their act together and following up the endless declarations about future cooperation with action, they are indulging in distance-itis. Why?

The ‘shift to the right’ of the new EU Parliament – what a mess. Instead of a strong conservative group that could finally stand up to the left-liberal firewall and represent a real political heavyweight, we now have three political groups that look at each other with suspicion but essentially pursue very similar goals. They are all against mass immigration, they all defend the traditional family, they all fight against the Islamisation of Europe, they all want to bring more subsidiarity back into the EU, they all reject the extremes of LGBTQ and gender ideology, they all want to strengthen the continent against its numerous competitors in the world of multipolarity, they all regard Christianity as the indispensable root of Western identity, they all view modern billionaire socialism with great suspicion, they all oppose climate apocalypticism, they all call for more pride in national and Western history - and the list goes on.

Of course, it should not be denied that there are certainly differences in the precise definition of the points just listed, as well as in the perception of their respective urgency. In addition, given the asymmetry between the European nations and between the core constituencies of the respective conservative parties, there are significant differences in the area of Europe's economic and debt policy and the associated powers. However, the other major groups in the EU Parliament are also characterised by often considerable internal divergences, without being as divided as the conservatives.

On the one hand, this is certainly due to the very pragmatic desire not to lose access to the feeding troughs of the many attractive and influential posts that are still the preserve of the major system parties. On the other hand, it is also due to the fact that the ideology and practice of the left - the Greens, the Social Democrats, the Liberals and the Christian Democrats - can certainly tolerate internal diversity.  They are not too shy to tolerate the one or other outlier as an ‘isolated case’. The European right is completely different, as it is obsessed with one central feeling: fear. In the following, I would like to take a closer look at this fear from three basic perspectives.

Some of this fear is undoubtedly positive: fear of the disintegration of traditional values, fear of losing one's homeland, fear of social decline, fear of the extinction of faith, fear of the disappearance of national identities, fear of foreign infiltration, etc.  Without a genuine fear of these very real prospects for the future, there can be no credible impetus to reflect on alternatives to the current disintegration. But this is where the first problem arises because many conservatives are blinded by their fear and by the realisation of the probably irreversible nature of many of the changes that the West is currently undergoing.  As a result, they exhaust themselves in ever new attempts to criticise the times without offering anything concrete apart from the implicit statement, ‘Everything was better before,’ and a maudlin idealisation of earlier times - the value liberalism of the 1980s, the fat years of the economic miracle, the proud power politics of the 19th century, the legitimacy of the ‘ancien régime’ before the French Revolution, or even the piety of the Middle Ages.

Of course, naming problems usually offers more opportunities for consensus-building than outlining concrete solutions.  But the lack of imagination most conservative election programmes is nevertheless frightening. Fear is a bad counsellor if it is not closely linked to a positive desire for something new.

Then there is the second central fear of conservatives - that of their own powerlessness, which is expressed very centrally in the Ukraine war, which I have deliberately omitted from the above list of similarities and divergences between the right, as the reader will have noticed. What does the Ukraine war have to do with ‘fear’? If you look at the two responses to the current war usually given on the right, you realise that support for the Russian cause, on the one hand, and for the transatlantic cause, on the other, is hardly ever accompanied by a desire to permanently belong to one or the other.  Only very few conservatives would like to live in a Russian-dominated or even an American-dominated Europe in the long term.

The search for an ally stems more from a sense of their own powerlessness: Russophiles feel that only Putin and a military defeat of the Atlanticists can free Europe from dependence on the US, while the Atlanticists, on the contrary, think that only the US military umbrella can save the continent from a Russian invasion or even increased Chinese influence. Accordingly, some then emphasise the ‘traditional’ facet of Russia, while others deny the woke infiltration of the USA, and are happy to ignore the obvious weaknesses of their favourite ally and the fact that neither one nor the other can have a genuine interest in a strong Europe and will do nothing to promote its strengthening beyond the point where the continent could stand on its own two feet in terms of foreign and military policy.

The real political and cultural preference of the author of these lines is not the decisive point here, but rather the observation that fear and negativity clearly poison all arguments in this matter. Considerably more effort is put into demonising one of the two neighbours, or idealising the other, than to outlining a genuine foreign and military policy line beyond these preferences, which would certainly include a clever and strategic see-saw policy, but which would above all be based on the desire for a Europe which is as united as it is strong. Anyone who, out of sheer fear of strong neighbours, believes that the only option left to them is the semi-voluntary choice of hegemon should not be surprised to be treated like a lackey. The right needs a credible immediate programme to strengthen an independent Europe, not geopolitical whispering.

And finally, a third point: fear of the media. After all, a major reason for the constant ‘demarcation’ between conservatives, which ultimately led to their tragic split into the three groups of the EU Parliament, is the fear of being attacked by the media and the possible loss of voter favour. This fear is not unfounded, as it is still the case that even conservative citizens are almost exclusively reliant on their own country's leading media when trying to better understand right-wing parties in other EU countries.  Conservative media are still few and far between and usually more interested in their own domestic politics than in foreign fringe parties.

AfD voters only know about the ‘Rassemblement National’ what the leading German media copy from the leading French media, and of course the same applies the other way round. You can guess how credible the result is. In other words, there is already so much to do with self-justification and the struggle for a reasonably fair treatment in the respective national party structures that it is not possible to de-demonise the conservative parties abroad.  This therefore leaves the general narrative in place for the time being.

In my opinion, this is an understandable but serious mistake, because since the pressure on the right is largely exerted by ‘international’ instruments (EU, IMF, UN, rating agencies, international courts, etc.), the counter-pressure must logically also be able to act on the same level.  The fight against universalist Brussels Europeanism must accordingly have an occidental patriotic-hesperialist component. Rather than standing aloof, it is therefore better to join forces - which of course does not rule out friendly admonitions, internal disputes about the best strategy or the marginalisation of obvious cranks.

All in all, fear is always a bad counsellor.  If the European conservatives finally want to fulfil the role which an ever-increasing number of voters seem to think they should play, it is high time for a little courage - and to take the Habsburg motto ‘Viribus unitis’ to heart!

The original German version of this article was published in Tichys Einblick.