Speaking to the leader of the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) group in the European Parliament, it doesn’t sound like there’s much will to form a progressive front in next June’s EU elections. For Iratxe García Pérez, president of the main center-left bloc in the Brussels assembly, “the question over 2024 is whether the European People’s Party will still support a pro-European working program or prefer to side with those who want to weaken the European Union.” In short, the center-left leader is waiting for the leader of the European People’s Party (EPP) — an alliance made of right-wing parties like Germany’s Christian Democrats and France’s Republicans — to determine the strategy and the coalition.

The leader of the Left group in the European Parliament, Manon Aubry, takes an opposite view: “If the Socialists think that EPP is a real ally, they will betray their own voters,” Aubry says. “It would be naive to think that [the EPP leader] will come back and say: yes to the green deal, yes to reforming budgetary rules, yes to new ethical rules. What is clear is that the far right is gaining more space and the cordon sanitaire is also falling: the Right is more and more collaborating with the far right. Either we present a common front, or we let them win.”

After the last European elections in 2019, the right-wing EPP and the progressive S&D group had once again renewed their historic cooperation, forming a “Grand Coalition” at the EU level together with the liberals of Renew. Yet EPP president Manfred Weber soon began looking for a right-wing alternative. Indeed, nobody has done so much to normalize Europe’s far right as Weber. In 2021, this German politician began a tactical alliance with Giorgia Meloni, the president of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) party, which includes Spain’s far-right Vox and Poland’s ultraconservative Law and Justice (PiS). Before becoming Italy’s prime minister last October, Meloni had boycotted a plan to create a single far-right group composed of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, ECR, and Identity and Democracy. By blowing up Orbán and Matteo Salvini’s plan for a united far right, Fratelli d’Italia leader Meloni obtained a privileged channel to the EPP. This was also a license for her to govern Italy, despite her neofascist biography.