In a letter responding to Alberto Alemanno's analysis of the far right's influence on the EU, Giuseppe Martinico, professor of comparative public law at the Dirpolis Institute, Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy, argues that framing the issue primarily as the far right tightening its grip risks missing a more troubling development. He contends that what is occurring is not simply the success of the far right but a broader cultural shift within the European political mainstream.
Migration as a Key Example
Martinico points to migration as the clearest example of this shift. He notes that the convergence between governments as politically different as those of Denmark and Italy suggests that positions once associated with the radical right have travelled well beyond it. Parts of the centre-left and centre-right have progressively abandoned a rights-based understanding of migration. More fundamentally, he argues, migrants increasingly disappear from the European political conversation as persons—as bearers of rights whose dignity should constitute a limit to what political majorities may legitimately do.
Weakness of the European Commission
This cultural transformation has been facilitated by an increasingly weak European Commission, according to Martinico. He observes that the second Ursula von der Leyen commission was born under the auspices of a strong presidency, but that political authority seems to have progressively evaporated. The response to the Ceuta crisis is revealing: neither the commission's president, Von der Leyen, nor its European commissioner for internal affairs and migration, Magnus Brunner, has provided the kind of strong political signal that might counterbalance the competitive hardening of national positions.
The Firewall Has Become Irrelevant
Martinico suggests that the problem may be deeper than the collapse of the traditional firewall around the far right. The firewall becomes almost irrelevant once much of the mainstream has internalised the assumptions that it was originally supposed to contain. The real question, he concludes, is no longer simply whether mainstream parties cooperate with the far right, but how much of the far right's understanding of migration, rights and belonging has already become mainstream European common sense.
