Europe Had a Terrible Year, and It’s Probably Going to Get Worse

Early this year, France’s center-right Republicans decided to move to a new home. After a decade of demoralizing defeats, the party vacated its headquarters for one closer to France’s National Assembly, hoping the move would bring a change in fortune.

It was not to be. June brought disastrous results in European Parliament elections and the prospect of more in a snap election called by President Emmanuel Macron. In response, the president of the Republicans, Éric Ciotti, threw in his lot with the ascendant National Rally, the far-right party of Marine Le Pen. But he did so without consulting the party’s other leaders, to whom the alliance remained anathema. When they tried to remove him from his post, Mr. Ciotti simply dismissed the staff and locked the doors.

Mr. Ciotti’s lockout is emblematic of the season of political chaos Europeans have lived through this past year. Such collapses and reversals have now become the norm. Within three months of taking office, the French government was painstakingly put together after the election fell apart; the German government soon followed suit. As 2024 draws to a close, the European Union’s founding duo find themselves politically adrift.

Europe’s growing far right, meanwhile, has only entrenched its position. This summer’s European elections were marked by breakout performances for the hard right across the union, and there were major advances on the national level, too. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom forged a government coalition; Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s post-fascist prime minister, saw her popularity deepen; and the far-right Alternative for Germany surged to become the country’s second-most-popular party.

Europe’s extreme right has moved past the point of normalization — now a regular force of government, it is becoming almost banal. For Europe, its consolidation caps a year of tumult. Judging from the continent’s parlous economic situation and general social disarray, matters are only going to get worse.

A decade ago, Europe presented a very different face to the world. In Greece, the radical left party Syriza was about to rise to power on the back of resistance to austerity imposed by the so-called Troika of the European Commission, European Central Bank and the Eurogroup. In France, a center-left president, François Hollande, was being hounded by rebels on the left of his party. And in Britain, a socialist backbencher named Jeremy Corbyn was soon to claim the leadership of the Labour Party.