Europe’s Hardening Cordon Sanitaire Against the Left
Across Europe, centrist parties increasingly paint even mild social democracy as a “radical left” threat. The wild rhetoric about left-wing danger has a clear goal: to justify alliances with once-frowned-upon far-right parties.
German far-right leader Alice Weidel recently told Elon Musk that Adolf Hitler was a “communist.” (Hendrik Schmidt / Picture Alliance via Getty Images)
Last month, the world’s richest man offered the leader of Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)— a former member of the Hayek Society, a financial consultant, and still a staunch neoliberal — a global stage to say obscenities such as “Hitler was a communist, a socialist.”
The remarks made by AfD leader Alice Weidel on X with Elon Musk may seem extreme. Yet they represent the latest point reached by what is by now a long-standing trend in Europe.
For years already, we had seen mainstream politicians breaking down the remaining barriers against the far right. In the German Bundestag this past Wednesday, the Christian Democrats (CDU) and Weidel’s AfD voted together to pass a motion calling for a clampdown on migration. But now we are even beyond the point where we could talk of those defenses being removed. For today, the so-called cordon sanitaire is being actively constructed against the Left.
By “Left” I do not only mean parties with some sort of social calling — as we have seen recently with the demonization of the New Popular Front in France and the exclusion of the Social Democrats from government negotiations in Austria. For this silencing also extends to social movements, climate activists, NGOs, trade unions, and, more generally, a vital civil society able to react against the unscrupulous alliance of neoliberals and right-wing populists.
Exclusion From Power
The effects of this trend are especially mature in Austria, where there has never been an effective cordon sanitaire against the far right. Here the first government led by the conservative People’s Party (ÖVP) including the post-Nazi Freedom Party (FPÖ) dates back to 2000. But these forces’ relative positions have changed. Today the FPÖ leader, Herbert Kickl, is in negotiations to lead a government in which the far-right party would be the lead and the traditional center-right ÖVP the junior partner.
The ÖVP had previously rejected this scenario, starting talks with the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) before abruptly breaking them off at the beginning of this year. Former ÖVP leader and chancellor Karl Nehammer explained the breaking point as follows: “At some point the Social Democratic leader Andreas Babler switched to the rhetoric of class struggle and an old-fashioned social democracy.” Hence even the mainstream center-left is demonized more than the post-Nazis. The so-called center right now seeks a deal with the far right in the name of pursuing a pro-business agenda without disruptive elements, and this is how SPÖ’s proposals for fiscal and social justice are presented.
When negotiations with the Social Democrats were still ongoing, Harald Mahrer — president of the Austrian federal economic chamber and a member of the ÖVP negotiating team — admitted that “some people are flirting with the FPÖ’s economic program because it has been partly copied from ours and from the Federation of Austrian Industries,” a reference to the country’s main employers’ group. The exit of the New Austria and Liberal Forum (NEOS) from those early negotiations — the trigger if not the absolute cause of their failure — and the definitive break announced by ÖVP immediately afterward were both motivated by the interests and pressures of the business world.
“What matters to us is that budget is reformed only on the public expenditure side,” said Georg Knill, the president of the Federation of Austrian Industries. Together with the far right, the ÖVP is rapidly coming to terms with this perspective. “With social democrats, it would have been impossible,” Knill concluded. In the name of defending the richest, the ÖVP is assimilating what it knows to be a Nazi-rooted, pro-Moscow, pro-AfD, pro–Viktor Orbán party — itself using this party as a bogeyman, so long as this suits its own interests — and is now opening up to the idea of its leader, Kickl, as chancellor.
A similar trend has also been evident for some time in France. There neoliberal forces such as Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party are willing to come to terms with the far right — they even dine together, it turned out last summer, when French daily Libération reported on the secret meetings between figures from the president’s camp and Rassemblement National leaders Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella — while trying to demonize and exclude the Left from power. Here the political dynamic is combined with a disturbing change in public discourse, which makes the trend even more alarming.
How Demonization Started
“Ultimately, nobody won.”
In a letter last July, the French president informed voters who had just made the left-wing New Popular Front the biggest bloc in the National Assembly that the parliamentary elections had in fact produced no such outcome.
Since then, during months of political crisis that he himself triggered, Emmanuel Macron has not hesitated to entrust the government to ultra-minoritarian forces such as Michel Barnier of Les Républicains and even conceived governments dependent on Marine Le Pen’s external support. In short, Macron has done everything to exclude the Left from any chance of reaching power. He even denied that the New Popular Front had come first in the elections. How could he do that?
“Major mutations are linked not to solemn historical events, but to what one might call a discursive rupture,’’ French semiologist Roland Barthes once wrote. Already in the previous parliamentary elections, in 2022, Macron had fully implemented his demonization strategy against France Insoumise and its founder Jean-Luc Mélenchon. This was the same kind of demonization that he had successfully used against Le Pen in 2017. The term “extreme left” has been established in public discourse, where it has the same (or even worse) negative connotations as the far right, which is in the meantime being normalized. In summer 2022, Le Pen’s Rassemblement National managed to elect two members as vice presidents of the National Assembly, relying on support from Macron’s MPs.
After the 2024 elections, Macron’s demonization strategy was first and foremost aimed at boycotting the union on the Left by attempting to exclude France Insoumise from what the French president interprets as the “republican front.” The political dynamic of exclusion from power is closely related to this semantic assault. “The word république is losing his original meaning,” philosopher Michaël Foessel told me. “Originally, the republic meant a sum of principles guaranteeing constitutional freedom and equality. Now anyone who challenges the dominant logic is defined as anti-republican; hence also protest movements.” The Left has had its language stolen: “We moved from the republic of principles, with its social vocation, to the republic of values, which becomes exclusionary and disciplinary.”
A European Trend
As well as the collapse of the protective barrier against the far right, the projection of the cordon sanitaire against the Left corresponds to a European trend. This can also be seen at the level of the EU’s own institutions. “Liberals are going to apply the cordon sanitaire against the extreme left too,” former Belgian prime minister and current vice president of the European Parliament Sophie Wilmès recently stated in an interview. The trend itself is far from recent, and the first to bring it forward was the leading Christian Democratic group, the European People’s Party (EPP).
In 2021, the EPP chair, Manfred Weber, introduced a tactical alliance with the post-fascist leader Giorgia Meloni; at the same time, he started a political and semantic battle against the Left. Although the first strong reaction of the Socialists and Democrats (center-left) group in the EU Parliament came only a few months ago, when Weber unleashed the EPP’s forces against the Socialist vice president of the European Commission, Teresa Ribera, the assault had begun long before. The first election of Roberta Metsola as president of the EU Parliament, in 2022, took place with the support of the far right, while left-wing and green groups were marginalized in the negotiations. Even years ago, conservative Metsola made no secret of having more in common with her friends in Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia party than with the Left, which she even reprimanded recently for singing anti-fascist anthem “Bella ciao” in the parliamentary chamber.
If the center-left Socialists hoped to be spared from the EPP’s assaults, they can now see from Weber’s aggressive strategy that letting right-wingers split progressive forces ends up making everyone more vulnerable, in Brussels as well as in Paris.
The alliance between neoliberal forces and the far right also entails an increasingly harsh tendency to repress dissent. In this sense, the cordon sanitaire is being projected not only against the left-wing parties but also against trade unions, NGOs, environmental movements, and civil society in general when these forces try to express and organize dissent.
Few have noticed that the EPP has tried to use Qatargate (a corruption scandal that erupted in the European Parliament in 2022) to introduce the criminalization of NGOs. EPP chief Weber showed more zeal in wanting to impose restrictions on NGOs than in pushing for sharp reforms against corporate interests. This provides yet another element of harmony with the far right.
It is worth recalling that former French interior minister Gérald Darmanin tried to criminalize even the human rights NGO Ligue des droits de l’homme, as well as environmental associations. And it is impossible not to mention the harsh repression of social, environmental, and anti-pension reform protests in France. The criminalization of environmental movements is a trend that also concerns the whole of Europe. In the past few years, several governments — Italy, Hungary, UK, France — have repeatedly tried to limit workers’ right to strike.
Governments that tolerate illiberal drifts, as we are seeing in Italy with Giorgia Meloni and as we have seen in Hungary with Orbán, also tend to suppress dissent. Combined, the removal of barriers against the far right and the imposition of an exclusionary logic against the Left are amplifying each other with devastating results. Europe is breathing a suffocating atmosphere.