At a rally last week near the Palace of Versailles, France’s largest far-right party, the National Front, deployed all the familiar theatrics and populist themes of nationalist movements across Europe.
A standing-room-only crowd waved the national flag, joined in a boisterous singing of the national anthem and applauded as speakers denounced freeloading foreigners and, with particular venom, the EU.
However, the event, part of an energetic push for votes by France’s surging far right before elections this week for the European Parliament, also promoted an agenda distant from the customary concerns of conservative voters: Why Europe needs to break its “submission” to the US and look to Russia as a force for peace and a bulwark against moral decay.
Illustration: Tania Chou
While the EU has joined Washington in denouncing Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the chaos stirred by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, Europe’s right-wing populists have been gripped by a contrarian fever of enthusiasm for Russia and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Russian influence in the affairs of the far right is a phenomenon seen all over Europe,” said a study by the Political Capital Institute, a Hungarian research group.
It predicted that far-right parties, “spearheaded by the French National Front,” could form a pro-Russian bloc in the European Parliament or, at the very least, amplify previously marginal pro-Russian voices.
Pro-Russian sentiment remains largely confined to the fringes of European politics, though Putin also has more mainstream admirers and allies on both the right and the left, including former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and former German chancellor Gerhard Schroder.
Putin’s authoritarian leanings and pugnacious nationalism have generated widespread and diverse opposition to him across Europe; at a gay pride event in Brussels on Saturday, marchers wore masks featuring the Russian president’s face, colored pink and daubed with blue eye shadow and red lipstick.
Even among far-right groups, the sympathy for Russia and suspicion of Washington are in part tactical: Focused on clawing back power from the EU’s bureaucracy, they seize any cause that puts them at odds with policymakers in Brussels and the conventional wisdom of European elites.
However, they also reflect a general crumbling of public trust in the beliefs and institutions that have dominated Europe since the end of World War II, including the continent’s relationship with the US.
“Europe is a big sick body,” said Alain de Benoist, a French philosopher and a leading figure in a French school of political thought known as the “new right.”
De Benoist said Russia “is now obviously the principal alternative to American hegemony.”
Putin, he added, is perhaps “not the savior of humanity,” but “there are many good reasons to be pro-Russian.”
Some of Russia’s European fans, particularly those with a religious bent, are attracted by Putin’s image as a muscular foe of homosexuality and decadent Western ways.
Others, such as Aymeric Chauprade, a foreign policy adviser to National Front leader Marine Le Pen, are motivated more by geopolitical calculations that stress Russia’s role as a counterweight to US power.
Russia has added to its allure through the financing, mostly with corporate money, of media, research groups and other European organizations that promote Moscow’s take on the world. The US also supports foreign groups that agree with it, but Russia’s boosters in Europe, unlike its leftist fans during the Cold War, now mostly veer to the far right and sometimes even fascism, the cause Moscow claims to be fighting in Ukraine.
Hungary’s Jobbik, one of Europe’s most extreme nationalist parties and a noisy cheerleader for Moscow, is now under investigation by the Hungarian authorities amid allegations that it has received funding from Russia and, in a case involving one of its leading candidates for the European Parliament, that it has worked for Russian intelligence.
No longer dismissed, as they were for decades, as fringe cranks steeped in anti-Semitism and other noxious beliefs from Europe’s fascist past, the National Front and like-minded counterparts elsewhere on the Continent are expected to post strong gains in this week’s elections.
However, they are unlikely to form a cohesive bloc: Nationalists from different countries tend to squabble, not cooperate.
Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party, a group zealously opposed to the EU, and a critic of US foreign policy, is already engaged in a bitter feud with Le Pen.
However, Farage and Le Pen have at least found some common ground on Russia.
The British politician recently named Putin as the world leader he most admired, “as an operator, but not as a human being,” he told a British magazine.
Le Pen has also expressed admiration for Putin and called for a strategic alliance with the Kremlin, proposing a “Pan-European union” that would include Russia.
In general, said Doru Frantescu, policy director of Votewatch Europe, a Brussels research group, the affections of far-right Europeans for Putin are simply opportunistic rather than ideological, “a convergence of interests toward weakening the EU.”
This convergence has pushed the far right into a curious alignment with the far left. In European Parliament votes earlier this year on the lifting of tariffs and other steps to help Ukraine’s fragile new government, which Russia denounces as fascist, but the EU supports, legislators at both ends of the political spectrum banded together to oppose assisting Ukraine.
“Russia has become the hope of the world against new totalitarianism,” Chauprade, the National Front’s top European Parliament candidate for the Paris region, said in a speech to Russia’s parliament in Moscow last year.
When Crimea held a referendum in March on whether the peninsula should secede from Ukraine and join Russia, Chauprade joined a team of election monitors organized by a pro-Russian outfit in Belgium, the Eurasian Observatory for Elections and Democracy. The team, which pronounced the referendum free and fair, also included members of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party; a Flemish nationalist group in Belgium; and the Jobbik politician in Hungary accused of spying for Russia.
Luc Michel, the Belgian head of the Eurasian Observatory, which receives some financial support from Russian companies, but promotes itself as independent and apolitical, champions the establishment of a new “Eurasian” alliance, stretching from Vladivostok in Russia to Lisbon in Portugal and purged of US influence.
The National Front, preoccupied with recovering sovereign powers surrendered to Brussels, has shown little enthusiasm for a new Eurasian bloc. However, it, too, bristles at Europe’s failure to project itself as a global player independent from the US, and looks to Russia for help.
The EU, said Marion Marechal-Le Pen, a member of the French Parliament and the niece of Marine Le Pen, “is the poodle of the United States.”
Russia offers the prospect of a new European order free of what Chauprade, in his own speech, described as its servitude to a “technocratic elite serving the American and European financial oligarchy” and its “enslavement by consumerist urges and sexual impulses.”
The view that Europe has been cut adrift from its traditional moral moorings gained new traction this month when Conchita Wurst, a bearded Austrian drag queen, won the annual Eurovision Song Contest.
Russian officials and the Russian Orthodox Church bemoaned the victory — over, among others, singing Russian twins — as evidence of Europe’s moral disarray.
At the National Front’s pre-election rally, Chauprade mocked the “bearded lady” and won loud applause with a passionate plaint that Europeans had become a rootless mass of “consumers disconnected from their natural attachments — the family, the nation and the divine.”
For three years and three months, Taiwan’s bid to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) has remained stalled. On Nov. 29, members meeting in Vancouver agreed to establish a working group for Costa Rica’s entry — the fifth applicant in line — but not for Taiwan. As Taiwan’s prospects for CPTPP membership fade due to “politically sensitive issues,” what strategy should it adopt to overcome this politically motivated economic exclusion? The situation is not entirely dim; these challenges offer an opportunity to reimagine the export-driven country’s international trade strategy. Following the US’ withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership
Two major Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-People’s Liberation Army (PLA) power demonstrations in November 2024 highlight the urgency for Taiwan to pursue a military buildup and deterrence agenda that can take back control of its destiny. First, the CCP-PLA’s planned future for Taiwan of war, bloody suppression, and use as a base for regional aggression was foreshadowed by the 9th and largest PLA-Russia Joint Bomber Exercise of Nov. 29 and 30. It was double that of previous bomber exercises, with both days featuring combined combat strike groups of PLA Air Force and Russian bombers escorted by PLAAF and Russian fighters, airborne early warning
Since the end of former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration, the Ma Ying-jeou Foundation has taken Taiwanese students to visit China and invited Chinese students to Taiwan. Ma calls those activities “cross-strait exchanges,” yet the trips completely avoid topics prohibited by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), such as democracy, freedom and human rights — all of which are universal values. During the foundation’s most recent Chinese student tour group, a Fudan University student used terms such as “China, Taipei” and “the motherland” when discussing Taiwan’s recent baseball victory. The group’s visit to Zhongshan Girls’ High School also received prominent coverage in
India and China have taken a significant step toward disengagement of their military troops after reaching an agreement on the long-standing disputes in the Galwan Valley. For government officials and policy experts, this move is welcome, signaling the potential resolution of the enduring border issues between the two countries. However, it is crucial to consider the potential impact of this disengagement on India’s relationship with Taiwan. Over the past few years, there have been important developments in India-Taiwan relations, including exchanges between heads of state soon after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s third electoral victory. This raises the pressing question:
RSS