Is Europe Turning Its Back on the Left?

A few months ago, anxious American liberals told themselves a cautionary tale about politics in Europe: A seemingly inevitable rightward surge in this summer’s elections there was a dark portent of the political future, for Europeans and for Americans.

As it turned out, that surge didn’t really happen. In June voting for theEuropean Parliament, the far right gained only modestly, and the centrist governing coalition held pretty firm. In early July, Britain’s Labour won the second-largest parliamentary majority since World War II, humiliating the center-right Tories and sidelining the farther-right Reform. And a few days later in France, a combination of strategic voting and strong left-wing turnout kept Marine Le Pen and her menacing National Rally party out of power.

But just two months later, the story in Europe has grown a bit bleaker — not only in Germany, where this month the Alternative for Germany became the first far-right party to win a state election since 1945, but also in those places whose elections produced, in July, such sighs of relief on the global left.

In France, the socialist skew of the parliamentary election apparently displeased the centrist president, Emmanuel Macron, who responded by dillydallying for nearly two months and simply refusing to form a government.

He had called the election by surprise, openly challenging his country to reject Le Pen and her increasingly popular brand of xenophobic nationalism. But when the French electorate did exactly that, it was not on the terms Macron had hoped for: The president’s centrist coalition hadn’t won, in terms of parliamentary seats, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s left-wing coalition, with whom Macron had made only a begrudging last-minute alliance, had secured the largest number. In response, Macron seemed almost not to accept the results, or at least not to feel they obliged him to move with any urgency to appoint a new prime minister, leading some observers to wonder how long the country could go without one — and whether the stalemate might quickly harden into a new status quo.

Last week, Macron finally made his choice: Michel Barnier, a conservative and former Brexit negotiator for the European Union whose party won less than 7 percent of the first-round vote, and who had campaigned, in a previous election, on mandatory military service, a yearslong end to migration to Europe, and turning over to the army the policing of various communities that had “lost control.”

In certain ways, Barnier is an establishment figure and a natural ally for Macron, if decidedly more conservative than him. But the center-right had been repudiated in the election, and to secure support for Barnier’s appointment, Macron brokered at least a temporary alliance with Le Pen, long seen as a kind of civilizational menace to much of French society, and now effectively the arbiter and guarantor of the new government. And a kind of governing partner for Macron.

This weekend, tens of thousands marched in Paris and across the country to protest the appointment, and on corners of the left, it has been called a “soft coup,” though that isn’t quite fair, since it’s common in parliamentary systems for alliances of smaller parties to outflank the largest vote-getter to form a government. In raw vote totals, too, the National Rally had actually done better than either the left-wing alliance or the center. Nevertheless the appointment, and the arrangement it depended on, came as a kind of shock, given that Macron called the elections to sideline Le Pen and then spent the campaign running, in alliance with the left, against the threat she and her party represented.

From the start, many on the French left doubted Macron’s sincerity, believing instead that his goal in calling the election had not been to defeat Le Pen but “domesticate” her, staging a vote her party might win and bringing the National Rally into government at the parliamentary level as a way of defanging its anti-establishment appeal ahead of his own presidential campaign next year.

And once the vote came in, Macron was faced with two options: a governing alliance with the left, which had actually won the election campaigning alongside him, and one with the far right, whose possible return had haunted the nightmares of the Western European establishment for decades. And the French president, himself almost a caricature of that continental elite, affirmatively turned his back on the old left and instead looked to shore up support by turning to new friends on the new right. As to why, the simplest answer was given by Macron’s predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy, who told Le Figaro, bluntly, “It’s wrong to say that Marine Le Pen is more dangerous than Jean-Luc Mélenchon.”

This isn’t exactly “going Nazi,” in the memorable formulation by Dorothy Thompson. But effectively overruling election results to extend an olive branch to France’s xenophobic right is also not exactly an inspiring moment for European liberalism, either. Instead, it looks like another mark of the rise of what has been called the “extreme” or “reactionary center” and which I called, a few months ago, “the fringe-ward drift of the continent’s bourgeois center-right” — that is, a growing comfort between Europe’s business and political elites and the harsher politics of its new nativist wing. And of course it is a gamble that Le Pen won’t benefit politically from the game of thrones.

In Britain, the turn away from the left looks a bit different — less like an explicit post-election betrayal and more like a slow centrist creep. In 2019, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s leader at the time, campaigned on promises of more than £80 billion in new spending, and won more than 10 million votes. In 2024, Corbyn’s successor, Keir Starmer, promised less than £5 billion in new spending per year and won less than 10 million votes — which produced what was nevertheless a generational landslide in Parliament, given low turnout, savvy campaigning by Labour and the historic collapse of the conservatives.

Having campaigned on a platform of technocratic centrism, Starmer’s Labour has basically stuck to the script since its victory — warning of an austerity budget to come, advertising itself as the new party of British business, and promising a crackdown on migration. Those watching from abroad might have hoped that, once in office, Labour would, as my colleague Paul Krugman put it, “govern like the dominant party they now are,” but over the summer the basic spirit has been less “elections have consequences” and more straightforward “return of competence.” Before the election, the Labour campaign was mocked as “change without change”; now, Starmer is telling voters that the party will simply “have to be unpopular.”

Already, the political consequences are apparent. According to one poll, Starmer’s own net approval rating has fallen by 30 points in 40 days; the unfavorable rating of Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who is managing the budget, is roughly twice as high as her favorables. Public disapproval of the party has grown by about 20 percentage points since the election, and in premature surveys of “voting intention” Labour now ranks barely ahead of the Tories, who looked two months ago to be mired in an unrecoverable collapse. Nigel Farage’s nationalist upstart Reform party has surged, too. The same party that won so convincingly this summer now barely has its head above water, and it isn’t even fall.

Labour was dealt a difficult hand, in fairness. It’s not for nothing that Britain has been called “Stagnation Nation,” and it is no politician’s dream to be greeted, shortly after coming into office, with nationwide race riots harrowing enough they’ve been called “pogroms.”

But one risk of running such a cautious campaign is that nobody is all that committed to your government, and one downside of doing so while repeatedly stiff-arming the left is that the only voters excited to see what you might do with that power are rooting for you to squander it. Starmer’s government is still young, and there are some genuine liberal bright spots, including on climate, where the country that invented the Industrial Revolution is closing its very last coal plant. But with the new Labour government just two months old, it doesn’t seem premature any longer to wonder whether a more affirmative progressive agenda might have produced perhaps a smaller popular victory, but also a more lasting and productive one.