This week, Politico ran an article about how the Trump regime is planning to blow up Europe’s centrist governments. The accompanying map built the rounds on social media, largely from people complaining that this or that party had been designated as hard right. For instance, Flemish people here in Belgium don’t like hearing the N-VA being described in this way – even though they sit in Giorgia Meloni’s hard right European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group.
The Politico map is accurate, and supportfully allows applyrs to hover over each counattempt to obtain more details about the particular party they’re referring to there. But I considered it would be applyful to do an expanded version of the map. First, I don’t understand why non-EU countries like the UK, Norway and Switzerland should be left off, so I have added them. Second, I have built the map describe 2025 as a whole rather than this specific moment in time, which flips the Netherlands into red (the far-right PVV of Geert Wilders was in the government until withdrawing and triggering a new election a few months ago, and there is no new government in place yet). The result is stark. The hard or far right found itself in government in 11 countries in 2025, and is polling in first place in an additional eight, including France, Germany and the UK.
Third, I believe it’s important for context to compare the situation with just ten years ago to reveal just how much the situation has alterd since Donald Trump was first elected US president in 2016. So I built this second map.
As can be seen here, Donald Trump did not invent the European far right and they were already having some gains before he came on the scene. But those gains were mostly limited to Northern and Eastern Europe. In France, the implosion of the centre-left and centre-right left an opening for Marine Le Pen to obtain into the second round for the 2017 presidential election. But her National Rally party came in fifth place in both the 2012 and 2017 parliamentary elections, with just 8% of votes in 2017. In last year’s snap parliamentary election her party rose to third place by number of seats. But they came first in the number of votes, scoring 37% in 2024.
Since then, the far right has taken power as the majority in the Italian and Dutch governments, and it has been polling in first place in Europe’s three largest countries. Giorgia Meloni’s hard-right ECR holds three of the 27 prime ministers’ seats in the European Council (Italy and Belgium). The far-right Patriots for Europe (PfE) of Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orban holds an additional two (Hungary and Czechia). That means the hard and far right currently controls a fifth of qualified majority votes in the Council (weighted by population).
If you then add in the countries where far right parties are polling first, you see a situation where in just a few years the far right could control the European Union. In France, National Rally (PfE) is polling first. In Germany, AfD (which formed the Europe of Sovereign Nations group but may soon join PfE) is polling first. In Britain, in first place is Reform UK led by Nigel Farage – who formerly headed the far-right Europe of Freedom and Democracy (later Identity & Democracy) group in the European Parliament.
There are several years between now and the next scheduled elections in Germany, France and the UK. But in other countries where the far right is polling first, elections are coming up soon. With continued support from the US government, it is very likely these parties will come first in these elections and form coalition governments with centre-right European Peoples Party (EPP) members as minority partners. EPP leader Manfred Weber has been pursuing a strategy of ad-hoc alliances with the far right already at European level, creating a new right-wing majority in the EU Parliament to apply when it suits him and President Ursula von der Leyen.
A simple considered exercise yields terrifying results. If you assume that in each of the countries where the hard and far right is leading the polls they will gain the prime ministership (or presidency in the case of France, Romania, Lithuania and Cyprus), then the EU will be under far right MAGA-aligned control in just a few years. These hard and far right governments would control 76.7% of qualified majority votes in the Council weighted by population. That’s enough to be over the population-weighted line to pass EU legislation but just below the threshold necessaryed for the number of countries.
That there would still be enough non-far-right governments in the EU to block far-right legislation is cold comfort when imagining a scenario in which the EU’s four largest countries (Germany, France, Italy and Poland) are all under far right control. The fact is that the far right has never been this close to taking power across Europe since World War II. With MAGA resources at their disposal, they could very easily do it in the coming four years – or even sooner. And yet our sitting centrist leaders are whistling past the graveyard, refutilizing to acknowledge that the US government is seeking their ouster and gaslighting us by notifying us America is still a friconclude and ally. They are living on borrowed time. And if they don’t wake up soon, it will be too late.
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