Meloni, Wilders and Europe's ascendant far right

It's been three weeks since the rabidly anti-Muslim Geert Wilders won elections in the Netherlands, and he still hasn't been able to corral potential allies into coalition negotiations. As the experience of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni shows, the pressure to compromise will probably act to temper his most extreme instincts. But that's small comfort in the European Union, where the right's momentum shows little sign of slowing.

It will probably only help that Meloni, 47, could have a potential foil among the EU's original six that can cast her as a relative moderate, having taken a pro-NATO foreign-policy position on Ukraine and withdrawn from China's Belt and Road initiative.

And yet, Meloni can still weaken the European project, particularly hammering at immigration. She risks undermining values and the rule of law considered central to its current form. She's already taking aim at the EU's human-rights laws and its commitment to the United Nations convention on refugees. 

Take the obscure contretemps involving non-EU Albania: The opposition, and now the Supreme Court, in Tirana has challenged an asylum agreement announced last month between Meloni and Albania's Prime Minister Edi Rama, citing a potential breach of the nation's sovereignty that would push it to host refugees rescued at sea by Italian vessels. The asylum seekers would remain in Albania until their requests are processed or until they are repatriated.

Meloni has touted the deal, which was widely criticised by human-rights groups and prompted resistance near processing centers, as a model for other European nations. 

The blueprint for the approach was Donald Trump's signature policy that kept asylum seekers in Mexico as their claims were processed. The link doesn't stop there. Europe's right would certainly draw new impetus if the indicted former president regains office in the November 2024 vote.

What's clear is that Meloni is aggressively nationalist at the expense of a joint approach. The Albania migrant deal is of a piece with her recent ban on the sale of cultivated meat in Italy that flies in the face of European rules. 

Economically, Italy under Meloni is also holding out against the European Stability Mechanism, considered a key backstop for the bloc against financial contagion, but which Meloni considers a potential back door for Brussels to influence Italy's debt reduction. The irony is lost on no one that the EU stumped up some € 200 billion ($216 billion) in loans and grants to Italy post-pandemic.

It's past time to write of a rising right in Europe: It has already risen. The question now is how great its influence will be. Viktor Orbán of Hungary is now the longest-serving EU leader. Robert Fico, a populist who dabbles in far-right themes, is back as prime minister of Slovakia. 

The Sweden Democrats are the second-largest party in parliament and support the governing coalition. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) now regularly polls above 20%, making it the second-most popular party in Germany, behind CDU/CSU and more than SPD and the Greens. France's Marine Le Pen has significantly moderated her position as she prepares another run at the presidency.

To be sure, history suggests Meloni's unlikely to be in power to see her vision of a populist EU come to fruition. Italian governments tend to collapse on average after just over a year. That said, if she manages to bring about change in EU elections next year, her influence will outlast her. 

True, Donald Tusk's government in Poland is a bright spot for believers in the liberal European project, and a bulwark against the rising right. Still, a centre-left Italian politician admitted to me there's resignation already in some quarters that the extreme right can't be stopped in Europe, even if her government doesn't last. 

For him, the concern now is centered on whether there's a risk that Meloni and her followers are "wearing a mask and when they all get to power in Europe they will then throw the mask off."

"That is too terrifying a prospect to consider," he adds.

To date that unthinkable fear that Meloni, whose Brothers of Italy has its roots in the post-fascist tradition, would presage a return to a Mussolini-style extreme right has proved unfounded. It also seems very unlikely. But that shouldn't be reassuring. 

Meloni's actions are foreshadowed by Silvio Berlusconi, who was long considered a buffoon but a moderate at heart, which meant Europe's establishment and investors ignored the threat he posed until he brought the EU almost to destruction in the euro-zone crisis. 

Meloni and her acolytes may be a more palatable version of the extreme right, but riding the same winds buoying the Trumpist right in the US, they risk bringing the European project again to the brink.

Sketch: TBS

Rachel Sanderson is a contributing columnist at Bloomberg opinion

Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Bloomberg and has been published by a special syndication arrangement.