When we met him in The Hague the other day, Geert Wilders, chief of the Dutch far-right Party of Freedom, maintained that he was not, in fact, Vladimir V. Putin’s best ally in Europe.
My colleague and I had asserted that he and the Russian president had a shared interest: They both wanted to weaken the European Union — Mr. Putin from outside, Mr. Wilders from within. “Nonsense,” he said. “I don’t need Putin.”
But that was a dodge. Whether he needs Mr. Putin or not, Mr. Wilders and the rest of the European far right are coming together in their belief that, as the Ukraine crisis shows, Europe has long been punching above its weight, and that it is now paying the price.
In the past, Mr. Wilders raged against Islam, calling it fascist and demanding a ban on the Quran. Now the self-described freedom fighter is using the same approach to what he regards as the second-greatest danger to Europe’s liberty: the strangulation of sovereign nations by bureaucrats in Brussels.
He’s not alone. Practically every country has its own version of the Tea Party, each striving to do away with the euro or even with the European Union altogether. They see their big day coming on Sunday, when 380 million Europeans will finish electing the European Parliament. In Italy it is the Five Star League, in France it is the National Front, in Britain it is the U.K. Independence Party.
They all see the vote as a referendum on an overstretched 28-nation bloc and a common currency that condemns their peoples to agonizing austerity measures. Polls see the parties winning up to 25 percent of the seats.
All of this is happening at a time when Russia is trying to roll back the European Union’s influence in the east. To be fair, Mr. Wilders has been critical of Mr. Putin’s actions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Still, the Russian leader could hardly wish for better friends these days than the anti-Union agitators. The European elections are taking place on the same day as presidential elections in Ukraine. It’s not hard to imagine that, after Syria, Snowden, Sochi and Simferopol, Mr. Putin’s propaganda machine will try to add Strasbourg to the list of Russia’s victories.
And if Mr. Wilders demurs on his relationship with Russia, others don’t. “I think we can be a good partner for Russia in the European Parliament,” said Filip Dewinter of the Belgian right-wing party Vlaams Belang. Indeed, leading representatives from Mr. Putin’s United Russia party have already visited with Europe’s anti-Union activists, returning the good wishes.
The mutual attraction is more than the usual enemy-of-my-enemy scheme. It is the promise of a new model of modernity that unites Europe’s anti-establishment movement with Mr. Putin’s neo-imperialism. Both reject multilateralism and international frameworks. Both are nationalist and anti-immigrant.
Both draw a similar set of lessons from the post-Cold War era. It is not the strength of law that has triumphed since the fall of the Soviet Union, they argue, but the law of the strongest. America may have claimed to act in the interest of multilateralism in Serbia and Iraq, they say, but it could do what it wanted because of its strength. How dare anyone then criticize Russia’s grip on Crimea? Geopolitics never disappeared; the West has just disguised them with concepts that sound less evil.
There’s a second link between the European far right and Mr. Putin. It is the nostalgia over lost worlds, over simple social and moral orders that — with the whitewashing effect of oblivion — appear preferable to today’s complexity. In the West it is a form of conservative communalism; in Russia it is a pining for the black-and-white world of the Warsaw Pact.
A quarter century on, many Russians blame “democratization” for social disintegration, loss of certainties, corruption and chaos. In Europe, globalization is blamed for a loss of political accountability as well as a frightening increase of market powers.
The truth is, the European right isn’t completely wrong. Supranational politics, particularly of the overbureaucratized kind practiced by the European Union, has its flaws.
But we should be able to work them out without stepping back in history. Yes, the realities of today’s West are harsher than those before 1989: The market is more powerful, and it takes more work to maintain the same quality of life. But the chances to do so, to create one’s own future, have also risen immeasurably since 1989. Giving up on these complexities for a sepia-tinted quiet life, as the friends of Mr. Putin propose, means giving up on opportunity and freedom.
One reason these parties have achieved as large a following as they have is that the traditional, centrist European parties have yet to take a clear stand. It is not a matter of taking on Russia explicitly, which many have been loath to do. With the elections only days away, it may be too late to make a difference this time. The European Union’s leaders must take up the fight between tomorrow’s world and yesterday’s.
For example, for each sanction imposed against a member of Mr. Putin’s government and his associates, these parties could invite 1,000 young Russians to come see the real Europe, instead of the Kremlin propaganda version. Doing so would not only undermine Mr. Putin’s credibility at home, but it would show Western Europeans that the Union stands for something, and that there are real stakes involved in making sure it succeeds.
Jochen Bittner is a political editor for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit.