European Conservatives Face A Critical Choice Following Election Wins

The far right did not do as well as expected, but it could still help decide who leads the EU.

HuffPost conducted reporting for this story in Amsterdam and Berlin as part of a trip funded by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, a think tank affiliated with the center-left Social Democratic Party of Germany.

Defenders of European liberal democracy breathed a qualified sigh of relief on Sunday after European Union voters gave mainstream center-right and center-left parties the largest number of votes, preventing the far right from the kind of surge that would reshape EU politics.

But Europe’s nationalist far-right parties still picked up a significant number of seats, shaking the political firmament in France and Germany — the EU’s two largest nations — in particular.

Leaders of Europe’s centrist conservative group, the European People’s Party, which will once again have the largest share of EU parliament seats, must now decide whether to solicit the support of the less extreme European far-right parties as partners in governance. How they choose to proceed could shape EU policy on immigration, climate change, rule of law, relations with the United States, and even support for Ukraine. It could also indicate what kind of international support former President Donald Trump, an ideological ally of the European far right, could solicit should he win a second term in November.

Katjana Gattermann, a politics expert at the University of Amsterdam who spoke to HuffPost and other reporters in Amsterdam last week, put it succinctly. The question facing European centrists and conservatives, she says, will be, “Do we normalize the far right more by collaborating with them? Or do we have a clear kind of cordon sanitaire against them?”