In May, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called for general elections as Britons faced challenges at home and abroad like increasing inflation, high living costs, deteriorating public services, economic recession, and war in Ukraine. The elections last month did not go as expected for Rishi Sunak and his Conservative Party, as Britons handed the Tories their worst defeat in over 200 years and ushered in the first Labour Party government in 14 years. Also of note in the British elections was the relative success of the new right-wing Reform Party, a populist party led by Brexit champion Nigel Farage that won five seats in the House of Commons and received 14 percent of the votes cast in these elections. A former lawyer, the new prime minister Keir Starmer entered British politics relatively late in his life and has avoided taking strong political positions during his career so far. In a phone call with President Biden, Starmer expressed enthusiasm about strengthening the U.S.-U.K. Special Relationship amid competition with China, war in Europe, and the presently transpiring NATO Summit. Depending on the outcome of the U.S. elections in November, however, Starmer’s previous critical comments about Donald Trump may complicate relations with the United States if the latter becomes president.
Meanwhile in France, President Emmanuel Macron held snap elections in a gamble to achieve “clarity” on support for his government after members of the right-wing populist National Rally party won a significant number of seats in the European Union’s June parliamentary election, coming to dominate the right-wing Patriots for Europe group in the European Parliament. While the National Rally party handily won the first round of voting in the French elections, it performed worse in the second round and achieved the third-highest number of parliamentary seats behind Macron’s Ensemble coalition and the New Popular Front, a coalition of left-wing and leftist parties. While National Rally did not win a majority of seats in France’s National Assembly, it did achieve the highest number of seats of any single party. Since none of the three groups won an outright majority in parliament, the country must wait to appoint a new Prime Minister, and a ruling coalition must be created to form a government.
Although there are many takeaways to be had from these electoral results, one thing is clear above all else: British and French voters, like many other European voters, are increasingly dissatisfied with the generally neoliberal status quo that has arisen in their countries since at least the end of the First Cold War. Though this dissatisfaction is tougher to detect in the U.K. given the dominance of the two establishment parties, the rapid rise of the Reform Party suggests the presence of this phenomenon. In Britain and across Europe, high rates of immigration to European countries from the Middle East and Africa, broken assimilation initiatives for new migrants, highly publicized violent crime, and a growing rejection of multiculturalism and globalism have strengthened the dissatisfaction with the status quo. While it is mainly right-wing voters who are spurred to vote based on these issues, left-wing voters are likewise unhappy with globalization and associated economic consequences such as deindustrialization and job loss.
In other European countries, these trends are perhaps even more visible. In Hungary, Czechia, Croatia, Slovakia, Italy, and Finland, right-wing nationalist parties either dominate or participate in the ruling government; in the Netherlands, the right-wing populist Party for Freedom is the largest single party in the parliament and will soon be at the head of a right-wing governing coalition; in Sweden, the nationalist Sweden Democrats hold the second highest number of seats and are key to the functioning of the executive; and in Germany, the right-wing nationalist Alternative for Germany party is currently polling at number two, up from a distant fourth two years ago. Looking at this data, including the recent success of the National Rally party in France and the Reform Party in the United Kingdom, a trend becomes clear: right-wing nationalists and populists are achieving greater and greater representation across Europe. Also of note is that while the success of the left-wing New Popular Front coalition in France was enabled by a fear of the National Rally party coming to power, the popularity of leftist and socialist elements within this coalition and the fact that New Popular Front outperformed Macron’s centrist coalition suggest a dissatisfaction with the establishment from the left-wing as well.
What all of this means for the United States and the future of transatlantic security is unclear. Although the new Labour government in the U.K. is unlikely to disrupt the Special Relationship between the United States and the U.K., it could prove more receptive to pressure from left-wing voters to break with the United States over certain measures of support for Israel. France, on the other hand, has been more willing to quarrel with the United States on the world stage since the end of the Second World War; though the two nations are close allies, French leaders frequently call for more “strategic autonomy” from the United States yet ultimately do little to distance their country from the United States. Two figures on the opposite sides of French politics could change France’s relationship with the United States, however. Jean-Luc Mélenchon – who heads the socialist France Unbowed Party, the largest party in the New Popular Front coalition – has said that Americans “represent everything [he] detest[s].” Meanwhile, Marine Le Pen, who remains the most popular figure in the National Rally party, has considerable ties to Russia. In other countries like Hungary and Slovakia, government leadership, particularly Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, cultivates close ties with Russia; and in Germany, the Alternative for Germany party maintains an opposition to Western sanctions on Russia.
Ultimately, however, transatlantic ties presently remain strong in the face of an aggressive Russia and a rise in the number of threats against the liberal international order built by the United States and Western Europe after the Second World War. The NATO alliance and robust bilateral ties between the United States and countries like the United Kingdom serve as safeguards for liberal values and American interests in Europe, but with rising skepticism of traditional institutions and calls for more naked nationalism and populism growing in volume across Europe, American policymakers should not take European alliances for granted.