Europe’s Far Right Kisses the Ring

For years, Europe’s rising far-right parties have wrapped themselves in the language of sovereignty. Draped in their respective national flags, each has promised to put national interests and national identity above all else. France’s Rassemblement National deploys the slogan “Les Français d’abord,” meaning “the French first,” while Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland follows suit with “Deutschland zuerst.” In her first postelection speech, Giorgia Meloni, leader of Italy’s governing party, Fratelli d’Italia, promised to “start from national interests,” asserting it as a bedrock principle from which all other considerations must flow. The movement’s entire political vocabulary revolves around the claim that only the European far right can defend domestic priorities against pressures from abroad.

The genocide in Gaza and the ongoing US-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon have laid bare the hollowness of that rhetoric. In the United States, the new war has once again disproven the notion that Donald Trump’s MAGA movement is less imperial, less militarist, or more committed to peace than the liberal establishment. In Europe, it has revealed that when Washington or Tel Aviv calls, self-proclaimed sovereigntists suddenly lose all interest in national independence.

The war on Iran is setting the entire Middle East ablaze, with devastating consequences, and Europe is not immune from the reverberations. A continent already suffering repercussions from the war in Ukraine now faces the fallout from a second major conflict close to home. As energy prices skyrocket, all polling suggests broad public opposition in Europe to the US-Israeli war. If Europe’s far right really believed its own rhetoric about national interest and independence, now would be the moment to prove it. Instead it has fallen obediently into line.

In Italy, that subordination has taken a tragicomic form. When the war broke out, Guido Crosetto, the defense minister from Meloni’s pro-Trump party, was in Dubai, reportedly for family reasons. He was unaware that the war was about to begin because, he admitted, the United States had not informed him of the imminent attack. As the airspace closed and Iran began to retaliate, Crosetto was consequently stranded in Dubai.

The image was almost too neat: a senior minister of a government obsessed with national strength and prestige caught in the middle of a regional war whose timing and escalation had clearly been decided without any consideration for his input. But even this humiliation did not stop Meloni’s far-right government from authorizing the use of US bases on Italian soil for the war on Iran, even while making vague and largely semantic distinctions about the limits of technical or logistical support. At the same time, the Italian parliament approved a controversial new law equating many criticisms of Israel with antisemitism. Rather than assert national independence, the far right dutifully brought Italy to heel.

This acquiescence is especially striking given Italy’s own history. During the second half of the twentieth century, despite the limits imposed by the Cold War, Italy developed a foreign policy based on dialogue and cooperation with the Middle East, including with Palestine and Iran. That approach gave it a degree of sovereignty in foreign policy and a certain standing in the region, both of which have now been forfeited in favor of subservience to the United States and Israel.

The same pattern can be seen elsewhere. At the outbreak of the war, in the Netherlands, far-right leader Geert Wilders praised Israeli génocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu for making the world safer by bombing Tehran — even stating, absurdly, that he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize — and attacked the Dutch government for not supporting the United States and Israel with sufficient diligence and immediacy. In Britain, anti-immigration politician Nigel Farage accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer of endangering the “special relationship” with Washington by showing some initial hesitancy in his support, warning that without the United States, Britain would be defenseless. In Spain, the ultranationalist Vox party’s Santiago Abascal lamented that the Spanish government had “hindered” the bombings and angered Trump. Again and again, the parties that claim to put nation first have proven the most eager to betray their own people’s interests in order to appease Trump and Netanyahu.

In all this, the far right has become more closely aligned with the liberal-conservative establishment that governs the European institutions. The distance between them had been narrowing steadily for years, and this war has made that convergence even more visible. Both parties are all too glad to play their part as subordinates in the global hierarchy.

Since the war’s outbreak, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has repeatedly condemned every Iranian attack in the region as “reckless,” “unjustifiable,” and “indiscriminate.” She airily speaks as though these were not retaliatory acts in response to US-Israeli strikes, which are hardly ever mentioned and never condemned. The moral double standard of the European Union’s institutions is impossible to miss here. In response to Russia��s invasion of Ukraine, they constantly invoked the language of the attacker and the attacked, along with the sanctity of international law. That posture has now been abandoned entirely, as the establishment rushes to grant Washington and Tel Aviv their every wish and excuse their every action.

Yet in this bleak landscape there has been a flicker of a defense of sovereignty. It has come not from the nationalist right but from the Left. Spain’s social democratic government, headed by Pedro Sánchez in coalition with junior partner Sumar, has been outspoken in opposing the war since the first strikes on Tehran. It has denounced the attack on Iran as illegal and unjust, emphasized the severe economic and political costs for Europe, and refused to allow the United States to use Spanish bases on its territory for military operations. It is no surprise that this stance has enraged Trump and, with him, Spain’s own far right.

To be fair, there has also been criticism from the left of Sánchez for not drawing all the necessary conclusions from such a pacifist position, above all regarding Spain’s membership in NATO. But we must also understand Spain’s isolated position within Europe on this issue. At a time when almost every major government has lined up behind the war, Spain’s position is a courageous step in the right direction, reminding us what an actual sovereign posture looks like: not theatrical nationalism but the willingness to say no to imperial escalation even under immense pressure.

For the Left, sovereignty has never meant militarism, hatred of migrants, or fantasies of ethnic and cultural homogeneity. It means popular sovereignty — and thus upholding European citizens’ preference for peace — as well as state sovereignty, both with regard to one’s own country and others, as a pillar of peace, cooperation, and international law. That is the only sovereignty worthy of the name.