Europe's populists' dirty secret is that they are so pro-Putin
Populist hard-Right parties are already in power in Italy, Hungary and Slovakia; form part of ruling coalitions in the Netherlands, Croatia and Sweden; and are bidding fair to replace the ruling centrist elites in France, Germany and Austria.
But beneath this uniform success story – which threatens to upend the whole centrist liberal order that runs the EU – there is a looming split among the populists that could prove to be their Achilles Heel.
Though some, like Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy) party, are loyal to NATO and Western resistance to Vladimir Putin's brutal war on Ukraine; many, if not most, of the populists display a worrying affection for the Russian dictator, and a readiness to excuse the atrocities of his criminal regime. An affection that Putin's agents are working hard to exploit.
This tenderness towards the Kremlin's aggression is often – as in the case of Viktor Orban's ruling Fidesz Party in Hungary – born of sheer opportunism, as Russia supplies almost all of Hungary's energy needs; but in other places the populists admire Putin's hard fisted ways of dealing with his critics for its own sake, and doubtless wish they could imitate him with their own opponents.
In Austria, for example, the leader of the hard-Right Freedom Party (FPO) Herbert Kickl, who came top in last September's elections, and is currently negotiating with conservatives to form a coalition government in Vienna, signed a so called 'Friendship Treaty' with Putin's United Russia party in 2016, and the head of Austria's internal security service has warned that the FPO's close ties with Moscow threatens both Austria's security and its international neutrality.
Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Robert Fico, the authoritarian Prime Minister of Slovakia, who survived being shot in an assassination attempt last year, made a personal Christmas Pilgrimage to see Putin, ostensibly to discuss the continued supply of Russian gas to his country. As Fico was unaccompanied by Slovak diplomats on his festive trip though, there are suspicions that he was also discussing cementing closer ties with Moscow. Fico has frequently spoken out against Ukraine and threatened to expel Ukrainian refugees from Slovakia.
In making friends with the tyrant in the Kremlin, Orban and Fico are forgetting their own country's tragic histories of being invaded by Russia. In 1956 Russian tanks bloodily crushed an anti-Communist revolution in Budapest, and in 1968 Soviet tanks did the same to snuff out a softer Communist regime in Czechoslovakia.
Most disturbing of all Putin's European pals, however, given Germany's status as the EU's strongest economy and most populous state, is the fawning attitude of the nationalist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, now running second in the polls on more than 20 per cent, in the current campaign for Germany's election on February 23rd.
As in neighbouring Austria, Germany's internal spy agency has warned that Russia is trying to destabilise the country by infiltrating the AfD and influencing it in an anti-Ukraine direction.
Putin's agents don't need to work too hard: the AfD's official election platform already calls for an end to Germany's military support for Ukraine, and the resumption of Russian energy supplies, and the party is riddled with anti-American figures who prefer to cosy up to Moscow. A smaller populist party, the BSW, with roots in the former ruling Communist party of East Germany, is even more slavish in its obedience to Moscow's orders and interests.
Some of Putin's former friends have fallen by the wayside and quit his hallelujah chorus. In France, Marine Le Pen's nationalist National Rally has strongly criticised the invasion of Ukraine. It was a different story in 2017 when Le Pen trod the well worn path to Moscow and was photographed shaking hands with Putin. Her party also took a six million euro loan from a Russian bank to part finance her Presidential campaign – a loan which was hastily repaid in 2023 after criticism that Le Pen was in Putin's pocket.
Although the populist parties are currently enjoying huge surges of support for their opposition to mass immigration through Europe's open borders, too many of them are behaving like Putin's useful puppets in his long game of destabilising the West.
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