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Since 2016, concern over the resurgence of illiberal populist political parties and movements has been palpable in Europe and the United States. The election of Donald Trump, the United Kingdom’s referendum to leave the European Union, and the electoral advances of far-right parties in many European states, including France and Germany, created the sense that populist parties were a new, unstoppable political force in democratic politics.¹ Yet in 2019, the notion that populist parties are the future of European politics seems far less certain.

The term “populism” itself may have outlived its usefulness. Originally, it referred to parties and leaders who described themselves as true voices of the people against self-serving, out-of-touch elites—and it was prone to run roughshod over established political norms and institutions. Over the past three years, differences in approaches, tactics, and outlooks between different populist parties have emerged, making it clear that there is no clear populist governing strategy. Accordingly, beyond disrupting the current order, anti-establishment political forces in Europe share no actual transnational policy agenda. Yet populist and anti-establishment forces have upended European politics and contributed to fragmentation and uncertainty. As the example of the record turnout in the 2019 European parliamentary election illustrates,² the EU itself has become an important dividing line for voters.

The high turnout and raucous nature of the 2019 election portends animated debates over European policies. Gone are the days when the EU could move initiatives forward without much public attention or concern. In short, Jean Monnet’s “salami-slicing” method of incremental, technocratically driven European integration³ is dead. A more engaged and aware European public is in itself a positive development. Yet simultaneously, for better or worse, the sudden salience of European policies can present an obstacle to policy initiatives that otherwise would be seen as uncontroversial. Just as partisan divisions in the United States have plagued Washington with significant policy paralysis, the emergence of a similarly contentious and partisan politics in Europe may make it hard for Brussels to act.

Europe has proven resilient over the past decade, but that resilience should not be taken for granted. The EU largely has failed to address its structural weaknesses that were exposed following the 2008 financial and fiscal crisis, meaning that the EU would confront a future economic crisis with the same limited toolbox it had in 2008.⁴ To make matters worse, influential populist actors could also obstruct swift action while benefiting politically at home from the EU’s failings. Unlike only a few years ago, fears of the EU’s sudden unraveling seem farfetched. Yet a protracted death by a thousand cuts, caused by populist leaders undermining EU rules and norms, remains a distinct possibility.

The new instability of European politics poses a real challenge to the trans-Atlantic alliance. Unity among free and democratic states of the West is hard to sustain in the current political environment on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet at a time when the alliance faces a rising challenge from autocratic powers such as China and Russia, the case for unity and cooperation is stronger now than at any point since the end of the Cold War. This report seeks to chart a course for the EU and for the trans-Atlantic alliance, while acknowledging that the anti-establishment sentiments that reverberate through European politics are here to stay. While there is a strong case to be made for a Europe that works together to defend democratic values at home and abroad as well as a trans-Atlantic alliance that is willing to work in proactive partnership to tackle big global challenges—from climate change to terrorism to nuclear proliferation—that goal is still a long way off.

Much has been made of the seemingly inevitable rise of authoritarian politics in Europe, but the true picture in Europe today is far more complex than what such generalizations allow. In analyzing this complexity, what becomes apparent is that this disruption to so-called traditional politics includes not only authoritarian political movements but also new forms of moderate politics, as well as adaptation by traditional center-left and center-right parties. In this report, the authors look at four specific trends: the fragmentation of traditional political alliances; the emergence of a new liberalism countering authoritarianism; the divergent revivals of social democratic parties; and the radicalization of traditional conservatism.

Fragmentation of the European Parliament

The run-up to the 2019 European parliamentary election was dominated by the expectation of an inevitable rise of populism across the continent.⁵ The results of the election, however, did not live up to the hype, with media coverage of the far-right nearly evaporating since the election.⁶

While a populist takeover of the European Parliament did not happen, populists on the far-right did grow in strength. Far-right populists now hold almost 25 percent of all seats in the European Parliament.⁷ This result reflects the strength of Matteo Salvini’s Northern League in Italy and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France as well as the radicalization of some traditionally center-right parties such as Fidesz in Hungary. In the United Kingdom, the floundering UK Independence Party (UKIP) was replaced by Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party, which took a significant share of the vote from both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party.

Left-wing populists fared significantly worse in the 2019 election than they did in that of 2014. In 2014, there was significant energy behind insurgent left-wing parties such as Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece.⁸ The two parties’ underwhelming performance this year reflects a decline in their domestic political positions. Over the past five years, both parties also became far more tempered in their positions on European policies. Similarly, other left-populist parties, including the Unbowed movement in France and the old Socialist Party in the Netherlands, failed to make a sizable national impact. Neither did traditional social democratic parties that had veered to the populist left, such as Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in the United Kingdom or the German Social Democrats under Andrea Nahles, perform well. In the case of UK Labour, the party’s ambiguity over Brexit played a key role in its performance, as the election served as a second referendum of sorts regarding the United Kingdom’s membership in the EU.⁹

The election has heralded a complex political environment for the EU, characterized by increased fragmentation across the political spectrum and no clear majority in favor of any one direction. In this regard, the outcome is a continuation of a trend identified initially by political scientist Cas Mudde in 2014:¹⁰ The emergence of new insurgent parties on the right, combined with the growth of support for liberal and green parties, has further weakened the position of the traditional center-right and conservative blocs that once controlled the European Parliament.

The 2019 European election can be seen as a “split-screen” vote.¹¹ As Susi Dennison, Mark Leonard, and Paweł Zerka of the European Council on Foreign Relations note, voters “rarely used their vote to endorse the status quo,” yet wanted radically different forms of change. The resurgence of green parties across the continent during this election, for instance, reflects a desire among some segments of the electorate to address climate change more aggressively. Other voters, in contrast, are more concerned with the rise of right-wing nationalism and xenophobia, which explains the growth of some liberal parties. While the growth of liberal and green parties is in some ways a reaction to the gains of the far-right, it also suggests that the European Parliament—and European institutions more broadly—will face difficulties settling on a coherent policy agenda for the next five years due to their disparate priorities.

Europe’s large political families, the European People’s Party and the Party of European Socialists—which both saw a decline in their share of the vote—cannot avoid working with some of the new liberal and green parties. At least in the European Parliament, the next five years will not be characterized by dominance of the far-right, but rather by a fragmented political landscape in which new alliances will be necessary to keep the EU’s traditional agenda moving forward. This will not be an easy task. Both inaction and the inability to compromise on some of the most important reform agendas are possible outcomes, at least in the short term.

The fragmentation of the political order at the European level is also mirrored by similar trends across the EU’s member states. This is not surprising, as political realignments at the national level are both consequences of and contributors to pan-European trends. National politics is thus becoming, slowly but surely, Europeanized, and Europe itself is becoming a central political issue in national debates.

A new liberalism: Centrism and grand coalitions

At the end of 2018, commentators were setting the stage for a battle of ideas between illiberal nationalism and reform-minded pro-Europeanism that was expected to dominate the campaign ahead of the European election. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and French President Emmanuel Macron made for natural leaders of these two political camps.

Orbán’s speeches on making Europe great again in Brussels in January 2017¹² as well his speech in memory of former Chancellor of Germany Helmut Kohl in Budapest in January 2018 positioned him as the leader of nationalist forces in Europe and across the globe.¹³ President Macron’s sound electoral victory over Le Pen in May 2017, in contrast, widely was seen as a model for how illiberalism and nationalism could be defeated. As early as October 2017, Macron’s political party La République En Marche! began establishing relationships with what they hoped would be the founding partners of a new political family in Europe, starting with the pro-business centrist party Ciudadanos in Spain.¹⁴

Thus far, attempts to create new pan-European political families have proven more difficult than expected—and not just for Macron. Salvini’s goal of creating a far-right “League of Leagues”¹⁵ and U.S. far-right political operator Steve Bannon’s attempts to create a populist club called The Movement¹⁶ both floundered.¹⁷ Ultimately, Macron’s pan-European campaign ahead of the 2019 election amounted to little more than a call for a European “Renaissance” articulated in a syndicated opinion column published across the continent.¹⁸ Macron’s failure to build a new centrist movement had domestic roots: The sustained protests by the yellow vest movement ensured that Macron’s political capital and attention had to be focused elsewhere, as Ismaël Emelien—Macron’s long-term strategic adviser at En Marche! and at the Élysée—notes below in his contribution to this report. Over a period of several months, Macron’s government witnessed a significant decline in the polls.¹⁹ In response, his team launched a “grand débat,” where the president toured the country and engaged in town hall conversations with citizens. Gradually, Macron’s handling of the crisis saw his approval ratings rise, and his reengagement with the public seems to have reassured his supporters. Whatever Macron’s electoral prospects may be—and it seems unlikely that the yellow vest movement will lead to either a resurgence of the left or a strengthening of the conservative movement—Europe has seen pro-European centrist movements and coalitions organize themselves to push back against nationalism and illiberalism, oftentimes inspired by Macron’s early success.

In Poland, for example, a new pro-European and pro-democracy alliance has emerged in the form of the Civic Coalition, founded by the center-right Civic Platform and the liberal Modern parties ahead of the 2018 local election. Three-and-a-half years of a one-party government, the Law and Justice Party (PiS) led by Jarosław Kaczyński, saw numerous assaults on the country’s constitutional order and created a new sense of urgency for the opposition.

The European election provided a testing ground for collaboration for pro-democracy forces ahead of the Polish parliamentary elections in November 2019 and the presidential election in May 2020. In February 2019, nearly every moderate party that opposed PiS—from the conservatives to the Greens—combined forces into a common electoral list extending beyond the Civic Coalition.²⁰ The new European Coalition’s platform was simple: to protect democracy and the rule of law and lend support to Poland’s place in the EU. The coalition’s campaign kicked off with the support of the liberal Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) Party in the European Parliament in April with much fanfare.²¹ In a context where the government had created a climate of us vs. them, dividing the country into two Polands—one based on solidarity and the other supposedly on unchecked social and economic liberalism—the opposition sought to recast the battle as one about the defense of democracy and pluralism.²²

Yet the run-up to the election was characterized by a number of sex-abuse scandals in Poland’s powerful Catholic Church. Instead of eroding support for the culturally conservative PiS, the debate reinforced a siege mentality among PiS’ rural and traditionalist electorate not dissimilar to the “Flight 93 election” mentality—“charge the cockpit or you die”—observed in some conservative circles in the United States.²³ The European election confirmed the deep geographic divides existing within the Polish electorate and the firm grip that PiS still exercises over its traditional strongholds. It remains to be seen if the opposition parties can improve on their results in the parliamentary election in fall 2019. The dynamic might be particularly interesting if the Civic Coalition is no longer the only game in town. In particular, Wiosna (“Spring” in Polish), a new, explicitly progressive party, has provided an alternative for liberal urban voters. Established by Robert Biedroń, the mayor of Słupsk and a famous LGBT rights campaigner, Wiosna—the only independent party not aligned with any of the major political families—managed to win 6 percent of the vote in the European parliamentary elections, earning 3 out of Poland’s 51 seats.²⁴

The developments in Slovakia offer interesting parallels, as well as some differences, to those in Poland. Following almost a decade of governments led by Robert Fico’s Smer, a left-populist party, the energy seems firmly on the side of centrist, pro-EU forces. The current developments have been catalyzed by the public’s reaction to the murder of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancé Martina Kušnírová in February 2018, as Kuciak was working on a story exposing the ties between Slovakian politicians and the Italian mafia.²⁵ The killings led to Fico’s resignation from the presidency though not from the leadership of his party. The slow and half-hearted beginnings of the investigation into the murder led to a new generation of political activism among people who had come of age after communist rule. A generation that had grown up in a democracy that their parents had fought for, one young protestor told The New York Times, owed it to their parents “to win the fight against corruption.”²⁶

Two new centrist, pro-European parties have been the main beneficiaries of these developments: the center-left Progressive Slovakia (PS) and the center-right SPOLU-Civic Democracy. The coalition of PS and SPOLU ranked first in the European election, defeating both Smer and a long list of established opposition parties. Even more significantly, the focus of the new political movement on defense of the rule of law and environmentalism led to the election of the country’s first female president, Zuzana Čaputová. Čaputová, who was sworn into office on June 15, 2019, has long been a vocal government critic and anti-corruption activist who first garnered attention for successfully campaigning against a planned toxic landfill in her hometown of Pezinok. She has been nicknamed Slovakia’s Erin Brockovich²⁷ for her leadership of this campaign, which she was inspired to take up after learning of cancer diagnoses of people close to her. She eventually won the case before the European Court of Justice in 2013.²⁸

Čaputová is proudly European in values and supportive of the Europe integration project. Like Poland’s Biedroń, she supports minority and LGBT rights, including the adoption of children by same-sex couples. Strikingly, she is perhaps the first major politician in Slovakia, if not in central Europe, to articulate her distinctly liberal positions in a manner that many conservatives and Christians in the country find nonthreatening, basing her arguments on conservative and Christian values of empathy and respect for other people.²⁹

Aside from new pro-European liberal movements in central Europe, unprecedented centrist coalitions of traditional parties have started to emerge in other parts of the continent. In Sweden, for example, for the first time ever, the traditional blocs of left and right—led respectively by the Social Democratic Party and the Moderate Party—have given way to a new political order. The results of the Swedish general election in September 2018 were inconclusive. The incumbent minority government, consisting of the Social Democrats and the Greens and supported by the Left Party, won 144 seats—just one seat more than the four-party Alliance coalition, which brings together the Moderate Party, Centre Party, Christian Democratic Party, and the Liberal Party. The remaining seats went to the far-right Sweden Democrats.³⁰

In the resulting hung parliament, it took four months of intense negotiations to build a government. Because the Alliance coalition had ruled out governing with the Sweden Democrats before the election began, they proved as incapable of forming a minority coalition government as the Social Democrats and Greens. Finally, on January 1, 2019, the Social Democrats, Greens, Centre Party, and Liberals struck a deal whereby the Social Democrats and Greens would form the government with the parliamentary support of the Centre Party and the Liberal Party, which do not hold ministerial positions in the government.

This new political settlement has been the topic of much debate, not least among conservatives. As Karin Svanborg-Sjövall and Andreas Johansson Heinö from the Swedish think tank Timbro note in their contribution to this report, it is unclear whether the country’s conservatives can return to power without the support of the Sweden Democrats.

It is an open question whether this is the beginning of a new era of Swedish politics or a temporary blip before a return to a competition between right- and left-wing political blocs, albeit characterized in a new form. While the governing agenda has been supported by trade unions and members of the left, Social Democrats have voiced concerns about whether the arrangement is sustainable. Such calls were amplified following the proposed tax reforms, which were seen as benefiting high-income earners in the coalition’s first budget. It remains to be seen whether this new traffic-light coalition will provide the foundations for a new progressive alliance in the manner advocated by Matt Browne, Ruy Teixeira, and John Halpin in a 2011 CAP report, which called for a coalition of Social Democrats, Liberals, and Greens to ensure a continued progressive hegemony in the new fragmented European landscape.³¹

Social democratic revivals

Following the global financial crisis in 2008, and then again in the aftermath of the European refugee crisis in 2015, social democratic parties suffered a string of electoral defeats. Only a decade earlier, some 14 out of 15 member states of the EU were governed by social democratic parties or coalitions led by them. By 2010, that ratio had dropped to 5 out of 27 member states. Social democratic parties have since found themselves caught in a pincer movement between urban-value voters, who commonly favor lower taxes and an embrace of openness and multiculturalism, and their traditional working-class base, which tends to favor restrictions on immigration. Responding to these pressures without jeopardizing the goals of progressive politics has become increasingly difficult.³²