Jan-Werner Mueller

PARIS – An all-too-familiar specter is haunting Europe, one that reliably appears every five years. As citizens head to the polls to elect a new European Parliament, observers are once again asking whether far-right anti-European parties will gain ground and unite to destroy the European Union from within.

To be sure, skeptics of this doomsday scenario have always argued that the far right will remain divided, because nationalist internationalism is a contradiction in terms. But it is more likely that specific policy disagreements – mainly over the Ukraine war – and drastically diverging political strategies will prevent Europe’s various far-right parties from forming a “supergroup.”

Before the last parliamentary elections in 2019, Europe was transfixed by the idea that Steve Bannon, an American political operative promoting himself and the dark arts of populism, was going to work his magic to unite the bloc’s far-right parties. But most observers failed to realize that the alliance envisaged by Bannon and his acolytes was, in fact, illegal. And while the far right performed well at the polls that year, it remained split between two major groups in Parliament: Identity and Democracy (ID) and the slightly less Europhobic European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR). Predictions that the far right would paralyze Parliament – similar to the Republicans who regularly threaten to shut down the U.S. Congress – proved unfounded.

At the same time, the conventional wisdom that stridently nationalist parties cannot unite across borders........

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