The Great Firewall Keeping Out the Hard-Right Collapses Across Europe

The next chancellor of Austria could be Europe’s most Right-wing leader after establishment parties failed to strike a pact to keep a populist pro-Putin faction out of power.

The victory for Herbert Kickl’s Eurosceptic and anti-migrant Freedom Party of Austria (FPO) marks a paradigm shift on the continent as traditional coalition building between moderate parties falters.

The centre-Right People’s Party (OVP) and other establishment groups in Austria initially refused to hold coalition talks with the FPO after federal elections in September 2024.

But their attempt to form a “firewall” – or “cordon sanitaire” – against the far-Right failed after negotiations among themselves to form the next government collapsed.

Now, talks between the far-Right FPO and conservative OVP are on, sparking protests across the country that saw tens of thousands of people take to the streets in anger last week.

The cordon sanitaire, which is formed by pacts between traditional parties to keep extremists from government, has a long history in Europe.

But as more and more hard-Right parties rise to prominence, such firewalls have come under increasing pressure.

Jeremy Cliffe, the editorial director and senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations think tank, said: “Austria was once an outlier, now it looks more like a forerunner of wider trends across the continent.

“The so-called firewall is breaking down across Europe, albeit at different speeds. The growth of the radical Right vote combined with the fragmentation of the rest of the political spectrum is making it ever-harder to form majorities against it.

“The European radical Right is here to stay for the foreseeable future,” he added.

The average vote share of far-Right parties in 35 European democracies hit a record high of 14.1 per cent in 2024, according to Telegraph analysis of Parlgov data.

The rise coincides with a decline in support for the Left, slumping to a record low of 40.6 per cent.

Prof Frank Furedi, the executive director of MCC Brussels, a conservative think tank, predicted that 2025 would be the year that the “monopoly of power” would be challenged and that the days of the cordon sanitaire were numbered.

“I think that the cordon sanitaire is fast unravelling…You cannot put increasingly popular Right-wing parties under a political quarantine,” he told the Telegraph.

“The old mainstream parties no longer possess the authority to ignore the support enjoyed by populist parties and certainly the millions of citizens who have opted to support these movements are not going to allow their voices to be ignored,” he said.

In France, a broad constellation of Left-wing parties joined forces to form the Popular Front after being convinced that riots in 1934 were an attempt at a fascist takeover.

This tradition has continued. Voters of all political persuasions joined forces in 2002 to support the centre-Right Jacques Chirac against the far-Right Jean-Marie Le Pen in the second round run-off for the presidential elections. Mr Chirac won 82.21 per cent of the vote share over Mr Le Pen, whose death this week at the age of 90 was greeted with street parties in Paris.

Last summer, Leftist factions formed the New Popular Front to prevent Marine Le Pen, who has brought her father’s Holocaust-denying party back into mainstream French politics, from seizing power in snap parliamentary elections called by Emmanuel Macron.

After the July vote, Mr Macron named Michel Barnier as the prime minister of a Right-leaning minority government. It promised to crack down on illegal migration to placate Ms Le Pen’s National Rally but collapsed after three months, when she withdrew her tacit support.

In nearby Belgium, the far-Right Vlaams Belang, which has long been blocked by a cordon sanitaire, came second in elections held in July. Lengthy coalition negotiations have still not resulted in a new government.

“Macron’s inability to form a stable government in France, Spain’s fragile minority coalition, now the collapse of Austria’s ‘grand coalition’ talks – it all points to the growing difficulty of forming viable governments while excluding the radical Right,” Mr Cliffe said.

Elsewhere, establishment parties in The Netherlands and Sweden have found ways to involve far-Right pirates in government, while maintaining an appearance of exclusion.

The Sweden Democrats are propping up a conservative coalition of less controversial Right-wing parties but they are not officially part of the government. However, their influence is clear in the once liberal Scandinavian country’s crackdown on illegal migration.

Mark Rutte was the longest serving prime minister in Dutch history before his government collapsed in 2023. During his nearly 14 years in office, Mr Rutte had always made plain that his pro-business VVD alliance would never enter a coalition with Geert Wilders, the veteran anti-Islam firebrand.

Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, Mr Rutte’s successor, vowed to drive down migrant numbers but did not rule out a pact with Mr Wilders and his PVV party, which won a landslide victory.

After extensive negotiations, a coalition deal was struck whereby Mr Wilders would not officially be part of the Dutch cabinet but one of his party members would take on the job of minister for migration. It was not long before Mr Wilders claimed credit for The Netherlands’ “strictest ever” asylum policy.

The Austrian OVP has suggested it could enter into a coalition with the FPO in a deal that would exclude Mr Kickl.

Firewall is ‘losing effectiveness’

The centre of pro-EU parties held in the European Parliament after bloc-wide elections in July also saw a surge in support for Right-wing alliances.

A cordon sanitaire intends to shut out hard Eurosceptic nationalist unions from influential posts but before the elections, the centre-Right adopted many of the policies they championed, such as a backlash against Brussels’ Net Zero regulations.

According to Prof Furedi, the cordon sanitaire is losing “effectiveness” because of the emergence of soft and hard Eurosceptic parliamentary groups.

“As mainstream parties seek to win back voters they are often adopting elements of its political offer, narrowing the gap and making cooperation less of a leap,” agreed Mr Cliffe.

“In some countries we will see growing arguments for letting radical Right parties burst their own bubble by assuming power and all the challenges it brings. It’s a risky strategy.”

For Andrew Duff, a senior policy fellow at the European Policy Centre think tank in Brussels, the risk of contagion from extremist parties is very real.

“Cordon sanitaires were meant to stop the spread of infectious diseases. When they stopped working, other interventions were needed. Nowadays, in Europe the far-Right must be tackled head on by constant argument and persuasion,” he said.

The former Liberal Democrat MEP told the Telegraph that establishment parties should not be tempted to try and defang the far-Right by giving it entry to government.

“Why condemn states to even worse governments than they have already? Centrists should be less intimidated than they seem to have become.” Mr Duff added.

German firewall remains most robust

The situation in Austria has raised concerns in Germany after the recent state-level electoral successes of Alternative For Germany (AFD), which is classified by Berlin intelligence as “a suspected Right-wing extremist group”.

The AFD is polling in second place behind the centre-Right CDU and ahead of Olaf Scholz’s socialist faction before Germany’s general election in February.

Mainstream parties refused absolutely to cooperate with the AfD at a national level in a “Brandmauer” – or firewall – over a legacy of the country’s experience of the Nazi regime.

The cordon sanitaire remains most robust in Germany for obvious historical reasons. “Coalitions including the AfD at federal or state level are still unthinkable,” Mr Cliffe confirmed.

“But there have been instances of case-by-case cooperation at the local government level in the eastern states where the party is strongest. I would not be surprised if those became more frequent in the coming years.”

Once a cordon sanitaire is broken, it is very difficult to rebuild, as events in Vienna have shown. The ring fence in Austria keeping the FPO from national government was first broken in 2000 but this will be the first time that the party is the senior partner in a coalition.

Mr Kickl now expects to become the FPO’s first chancellor since the party was founded in the 1950s under a leader who had been a senior SS officer and Nazi lawmaker.

The group has a “friendship pact” with Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party and when Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, addressed the Austrian parliament in March 2024, FPO MPs walked out in protest.

“Honest government must be preceded by honest negotiations,” Mr Kickl said when Austria’s president tasked him with beginning coalition talks after the centrist firewall failed.

“No little games, no tricks, no sabotage.”

The talks continue.