If one keeps up with foreign affairs, one may notice that the solid bedrock of postwar European parties has begun to crumble. Labour and the Conservatives in Britain, CDU and the SPD in Germany, and Christian Democrat and Social Democrat Parties in France, Italy, and the Netherlands have grim polling data compared to where they previously stood, as seemingly unchangeable pillars of politics.
Who are the victors of these unrealized gains? Universally, the new hard right parties and personalities. Specifically, ReformUK, Marine Le Pen in France, and the AFD in Germany. These parties hold a broadly similar ideological platform, decrying both the leftism and moderate conservatism which has allowed unchecked immigration into Europe, as well as broadly conservative social policies. On economics, they remain a mixed bag, with populist and statist economics on one hand, and free-market conservatism on the other. These parties, universally, and primarily live and die by their migration policies.
This article will go into some of these parties, and their likely future pathways to victory – unless something radically changes.
ReformUK
Reform is certainly the least “problematic” of the three major parties to discuss; their origins do not lie in the post war far right at all, and instead in Eurosceptic discontent amongst British Conservatives. Behind it all stands the rather boisterous figure of Nigel Farage.
Farage had a storied political history within the extra-parliamentary parties even before Reform and aims to carry his momentum into the next few rounds of British elections.
Reform and Farage have certainly aped some mannerisms from Trump, complete with their own brightly colored piece of political wear, the Reform football kit. Clad in bright blue, it may not have the same appeal as the MAGA hat, but it certainly strikes the same working-class, populist touch. Indeed, Reform appeals to the “left-behind Britain,” whose complaints overlap extensively with Trump’s beloved Middle America.
Critics of Reform certainly have not slowed its rapid rise. While they only got their first MP from Lee Anderson’s defection in May of 2024, they have already come to control five more seats without a general election. Reform, while only controlling five parliamentary seats is polling at twenty-nine percent, nine percent larger than the next party, according to YouGov. They have consistently either contended for, or in many cases, won local elections, the most prominent of which has been the Cardiff council election, acquiring a seat in one of Britain’s major cities, and the capital of Wales.
The Next Theoretical Steps for Reform
The issue Reform currently faces is, as it draws from both the traditionally Labour-voting working class and the traditionally Tory-voting traditionalist right, neither party has an interest in calling a snap election no matter how much they disagree with the current occupant of Downing Street. The next scheduled UK general election is, in modern terms, an eternity away in 2029, and Reform needs to maintain their momentum.
They need to keep winning until then, which means putting money into the ground game. Continuing to win local council elections means more people can see the effect of Reform governance. Reform needs to work to encourage conservative MPs to defect There are three massively important country level elections coming up within the next two years in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.
The pathways to win in each of these countries is slightly different. Wales could be a massive base of Reform support, with a mostly working-class or rural makeup. According to current polling for the next Senedd election — the Welsh country level parliament — Reform is within one percent of the Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru. Even by cracking a second-place finish in Wales, Reform can easily move to form a governing coalition with the Tories in Wales, discounting a separate Labour and Plaid coalition.
A Scottish parliamentary victory would be a difficult nut to crack even with a surging Reform. Currently, the elections, which can happen no later than May 2026, look to be a fairly comfortable SNP victory. However, again like Wales, a second-place finish gives Reform a base to work with in the future in Scotland and legitimizes the party as a serious contender to win the national elections.
Northern Ireland’s assembly, Stormont, has an equally fraught relationship as the island. Effectively shuttered from 1972 to 1998, it made a return to life as the Northern Irish Assembly, complete with separate parties from Britain. The major political split is not a one-to-one left and right, as left wing parties tend to be Irish nationalist, while conservative ones tend to be loyalist. Both camps are internally divided, and this is where Reform can strike.
They need to endorse a party they had previously collationed with, the TUV (Traditionalist Unionist Voice). Reform has flip-flopped on the coalition, endorsing candidates from the more established DUP, candidates who performed poorly despite the overall pro-reform feeling. If both of the parties can let that be water under the bridge, the TUV could be the perfect move for Reform to gain allies going into the next general election. The TUV is sitting at third – second amongst unionist parties – and a cash injection from Reform could mean the difference in several seats. Preventing a Sein Fein victory would allow Reform and the TUV to gain MPs in the working-class unionist areas of Belfast to help further push their populist agenda.
France’s National Rally
Marine Le Pen’s National Rally certainly has a more checkered past than ReformUK, mostly due to its time as the National Front when it was led by the inflammatory Jean-Marine Le Penn. Le Pen the elder, while embodying a populist style of conservatism, also waded into fascist associations and a downplaying of the Nazi regime.
His daughter, to her credit, seems to have carried over the former politics and not the latter, generally steering the party away from its extremist tendencies, even censuring her own father in the pursuit of this goal. She is currently in trouble for unrelated legal issues, and the legitimacy of these aside, cannot run for President of France. She has been replaced by member of the European Parliament Jordan Bardella.
The French government itself has essentially been in free fall for the last two years, with six prime ministers having held office. The debt rating of France downgraded earlier this year, and an IMF bailout crept its way into the discussion of a resolution of French politics.
France utilizes a strange system for elections which most likely requires its own article to fully explain. Suffice to say, National Rally is already the largest single party within the legislature, but the matter of the presidential race is a whole different animal. Bardella, a charismatic, clean cut, thirty-year-old leaves behind the controversial Le Pen name to further push the RN into the mainstream of French politics.
While the French Presidential elections are still two years in the future, Bardella holds a plurality in all polling at around thirty percent. The real threat lies in the second round of French Presidential elections. If the centrist parties and voters break to the right, even just by an additional twenty percent, it is almost certain that Bardella will become President. In the French system, the President holds an absurd amount of power, and Bardella will certainly be able to shape France into his will.
The Future of Europe
Unless something radically changes, Europe looks fairly destined to go towards the right-populist wing. Their policies have a template in Italy; crackdowns on illegal immigration, populist style economics, Euroscepticism, but a healthy pro-American stance in foreign policy, especially if the GOP is at the helm.
This surge is a direct consequence of centrist mismanagement of European affairs. There has not been a particularly radically left government in any western European country for the last fifteen or so years. In 2008, the response to the global financial crisis and the instability of the middle east was technocratic style state capitalist forces, and the importation of millions of immigrants. These policies from both ostensibly right and left parties have cratered Europe- Britain, Italy, France, have all entered into variously extreme political crises within the last five years, which have collapsed most of the major parties.
The danger most of these politicians has faced only fuels their appeals. Seven AFD candidates died in mysterious circumstances before local elections in Germany, and Dutch populist Geert Wilders was forced to suspend his campaign after coming into the crosshairs of a jihadist terror group.
Now, these parties face near impending doom, based on their own total mismanagement of economy and culture. What remains to be seen is if the populist right will steer the ship right, so to say.
