IT IS tempting these days to divide the continent of Europe into two opposed camps. On the one side, the flat-white-sipping liberals of Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg or Warsaw’s Praga, led by the impeccably globalised Emmanuel Macron of France. Arrayed against them, the nativists of Treviso in northern Italy or Fréjus in southern France, whose leaders are Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, and Italy’s deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini. The deep divide between “open” and “closed” visions of society can be illustrated with dramatic images. Those from far-right riots and anti-fascist counter-protests this week and last in Chemnitz, in Germany’s former east, are one. Sweden’s election on September 9th, at which the hard-right Sweden Democrats will make gains, may prompt a similarly simplistic take.
Look more closely, however, and it all seems more tangled. Mr Orban may be undermining the rule of law in Hungary, but he sits in the European People’s Party (EPP), a group that includes Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor. Mr Macron may be a globalist, but he nationalised a French shipyard to prevent its takeover by an Italian firm last year, and this June declined to take in Aquarius, a refugee ship rejected by Italy. Ordinary Europeans are similarly complicated. Most residents of Chemnitz, for example, attended neither pro- nor anti-migration protests.
Despite an exchange last month in which Mr Macron asserted: “If they want to see me as their main opponent, they are right,” it is better to see open v closed not as a binary proposition but as a spectrum, with Mr Macron closer to one end and Mr Orban and Mr Salvini towards the other. In between and on either side of these leaders are all shades of open and closed, often with a strong local flavour. Mr Macron may seem less liberal in the Netherlands or Sweden; Mr Salvini’s continued if grudging commitment to EU membership and to sticking with the euro (at least for now) would make him a firm Europhile in Brexit Britain.
Those looking for a crisp divide in the campaign for the European Parliament’s elections next May might consider a different taxonomy: institutional conservatives versus institutional innovators. To understand this, it helps to consider the build-up to the election as two parallel processes that may or may not converge.
The first is the formal, institutionally conservative one. At the last election, in 2014, each of the main political families proposed a Spitzenkandidat (lead candidate) to run the European Commission. The EPP came first, as it had in every election for two decades, so Jean-Claude Juncker became commission president with the support of the Socialist group as well. The established European parties want to repeat the exercise next year. On September 5th Manfred Weber, the EPP’s leader in the European Parliament, launched his bid to be the group’s Spitzenkandidat. A moderate in Bavaria’s conservative Christian Social Union who has nonetheless championed Mr Orban, he typifies this stodgy, machine-political Europe. To varying degrees the other EPP front-runners all represent that old sort of European politics, a consensus between traditionally hegemonic—but now declining—Christian-democrat and socialist blocs.
The second process is the disruptive one, for both good and ill. Beyond the two established political families of centre-left and centre-right are disparate challengers united by their insurgency and ascendancy. These include some on the hard right, like Mr Salvini’s Northern League and the Sweden Democrats, but also Mr Orban’s Fidesz; some liberal startups like Mr Macron’s En Marche! and Spain’s Ciudadanos; some alt-left parties like the German Greens (soaring in the polls) and GroenLinks (now the largest Dutch left-wing party); as well as peppy new radical-left outfits like Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France party.
These parties represent wildly different positions on the open-closed spectrum. But they have things in common. Most are institutionally innovative, having in recent years either reinvented themselves or emerged from nowhere. Some (rightly) pooh-pooh the idea that voters know or care about the Spitzenkandidat system. Mr Salvini and others on the insurgent right show little interest, and at a gathering in Brussels on September 4th Christophe Castaner, the chief executive of En Marche!, declared it a “democratic anomaly”. The French president wants to create a new liberal group in the European Parliament. “Macron’s rejection of the Spitzenkandidaten process may be the catalyst for a new pro-EU platform, rallying new and older movements ready to hack the system from the outside,” says Alberto Alemanno of HEC Paris, a business school. Likewise, Mr Salvini wants to found a “League of Leagues” uniting the populist right in the European Parliament, perhaps eventually including Fidesz.
Don’t count them out
The odds are with the old guard, which can count on well-honed structures and traditions. Both Mr Macron and Mr Salvini may struggle to marshal their new, personality-driven groups to any great effect. The French president has so far failed to peel other centrist parties away from the established centre-right, liberal and centre-left groups. Italy’s populist doyen faces competition from other would-be leaders (France’s Marine Le Pen, say), whose squabbles and ego-conflicts have to date kept Europe’s hard right split. But the institutional innovators also have their advantages. They tend to be more dynamic, better at using social media and generally more willing to shake up the EU. More European voters say the EU is on the wrong path than the right one.
Open v closed matters. But it should be seen as a symptom of wider struggles: over the capacity of the likes of Mr Macron and Mr Salvini to redraw the party landscape, over the ability of their style of politics to usurp the old guard and over whether the next commission president will be a status-quo traditionalist, some hybrid of the established and insurgent styles, or a full-blown innovator. Institutions could matter as much as ideology.