Europe’s ‘New Right’ Look a Lot Like Its Old Center

Across the West, voters are rejecting the managerial consensus that formed around free markets in the 1980s and soft-centered internationalism in the 1990s. Voters don’t want the economy left to the mercy of markets, and they can’t afford a borderless world. They are unconvinced by the economies of scale that look so sensible from the heights of Davos. They want governments that give them what they need, not what the International Monetary Fund or the World Economic Forum want.

The only survivors of the old order are, not coincidentally, the political faces of the dollar and the euro: President Biden and German Chancellor

Olaf Scholz.

The other face of the euro, France’s ostensibly centrist President

Emmanuel Macron,

has turned right, only more quietly. A recent French poll found that 48% thought Mr. Macron’s government “right-wing” and only 11% thought it “left-wing.” Mr. Macron may be a technocrat to his fingertips, but he has responded pragmatically to the public mood.

The new parties are winning power by promising to save the nation-state: reducing immigration and crime; addressing the overcrowding of schools, hospitals and public services; stabilizing national cultures; and creating economic opportunity as well as security. They are often called the “new right.” In the U.S., and increasingly in Europe, they prefer “national conservatives.”

Much of the American media hear jackboots when a politician mentions border security or the family. But the constituencies for fascist nostalgia or racialized politics are tiny in today’s Europe. Some of Europe’s new parties began on the fringe but, with time and strategy, they have shed their radical and racist origins. Ms. Meloni’s policies aren’t even, to use Mr. Biden’s term, “semi-fascist.” Italian media call Fratelli d’Italia centrodestra, “center right.” The governing party in the Sweden Democrats’ coalition is the conservative Moderarterna. The liberal U.S. media’s habit of depicting Brexit as a “hard right,” “far right” or “white nationalist” movement is absurd. Mr. Sunak is the child of immigrants. A brown-skinned practicing Hindu, he was more in favor of Brexit than

Boris Johnson

was.

The philosopher

John Gray

has observed that “populism” is a liberal pejorative for the unintended consequences of liberalism. “Fascism” is a near-universal pejorative for any disliked policy or personality. Ms. Meloni isn’t seeking to revive the empire of Augustus Caesar or Mussolini. The past she wants to revive is more recent and less dangerous. It is Italy’s three-decade run of growth between the American-sponsored revival after 1945 and the Arab oil embargo of 1973. Nor are the Sweden Democrats right-wing racists. They want to revive the folkhem, Sweden’s postwar welfare state, and the cohesion and prosperity it brought.

Postwar Italy was run by the center-right

Christian Democrats.

Postwar Sweden was run by the center-left Social Democrats. Postwar Britain was run by a Labour-Conservative consensus. In the 1950s, the policies of a Conservative chancellor of the Exchequer,

Rab Butler,

and a Labour chancellor,

Hugh Gaitskell,

were so close that they were nicknamed “Butskellism.” Europe’s new right looks much like its old center. That center never went away during governments’ four-decade romance with the free market.

If national conservatives are popular now in Europe, it is because their policies are, historically speaking, classically conservative—in the European sense—and because the failures of the center parties of right and left have created an opening. The new parties’ ends are to preserve individual rights as well as national cultures, and they see no ideological obstacle in government intervention as a means to achieve this. Their right-liberal orientation contrasts sharply with American national conservatives.

The Trump presidency bequeaths the Republicans a sizable MAGA base and a small contingent of “natcon” intellectuals. Some of them are so radically disaffected that they fall into a Hungarian rhapsody over Mr. Orban’s illiberal democracy. Others sincerely wish to restore the American center with a bracing dose of the old European church-and-state nationalism. But American and European societies are now highly plural and increasingly unchurched. In both the U.S. and Europe, voters seem less attracted to moral crusades than to competent governments that focus on securing the foundations of society.

In Europe, national conservatives have mass appeal and are supplanting the older parties of the center-right by offering to revive a broken social compact. In the U.S., as the popularity of

Ron DeSantis

shows, similar ideas have the potential to reconnect the Republican Party to the center—if they get the chance.

Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Foreign Policy Research Institute.