The right are not taking over Europe, they’re falling apart

This is the case for optimism in the European left. Across the continent these are the parties that are actually winning. Just last week the right fell short in quick succession in France, Denmark and Italy. This matters not just because the right has hit a ceiling, but shown the left has found its formula to win in the age of Trump.

You can see this at play in France. Here the good news is Marine Le Pen’s party taking the Élysée is now looking quite questionable. In the country’s recent bellwether municipal elections, a ceiling of respectability, a reputation for municipal incompetence and a now familiar pattern of tactical voting held them back. The far right needed to win France’s major cities if they wanted to look inevitable, heading into the long build up to the 2027 presidential vote. And they didn’t. Marseille, the nation’s second city, said no to the Rassemblement National and Toulon narrowly rejected them, as Nîmes booted out its right-wing mayor. True, Carcassonne went their way, as did Nice. But the forces of Le Pen needed to do much better than this to show they were truly on the way to the Élysée.

Paris saw the right hit more than a ceiling. The failure of Rachida Dati to dislodge Anne Hidalgo’s socialist successor Emmanuel Grégoire exposes that the Parisian left is onto a winning formula. Hidalgo’s legacy of mass pedestrianisation, cycle lane laying and green planting has transformed Paris into a greater Amsterdam and a city where bikes now make twice as many journeys as cars. Paris has also been unusually explicit about picking its winners and losers for the European centre-left, putting young people over the car-owning grande bourgeoisie. Despite an all-out assault from the French right and its media allies, Parisians backed the project to continue. This was a shock to the French right that hoped to bring it down. Doing nice things, voters can feel, had created another hard ceiling.

The left’s win in Paris has something of the same spirit as Rob Jetten’s win in the Netherlands. His optimism, with full on millennial yimby-ish enthusiasm for new towns, made him prime minister after Geert Wilders’ party made a total hash of being in a coalition government. What the French and the Dutch experience is telling us is that when the left can claim optimism, and the right gets tarnished by incompetence, the left comes out on top.

Meanwhile in Italy, Georgia Meloni’s defeat in a referendum on constitutional reform of the judiciary has broken her all powerful image. Italian voters, against expectations, turned sceptics on granting the government more powers over the courts in a national debate that allowed the left to warn of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and of course Donald Trump’s America as where things might lead. Meloni’s loss, against the backdrop of Trump’s wildly unpopular and shockingly unplanned war on Iran, whose economic tsunami is racing towards Europe as we speak, marks a turning point in Italy. Trump has gone from being an asset to a liability for the prime minister.

The same thing can be said for Denmark, even more spectacularly. A year ago the Danish right comfortably expected to return to power. The geopolitical rollercoaster the nation has been on since then with Trump’s threats to annex Greenland put paid to that. It went as far as Danish forces reinforcing the continent-sized frozen island under Copenhagen’s sovereignty with plans to blow up its runways to interdict an easy invasion path. True, Mette Frederiksen and her bloc didn’t win a majority and intense, inevitably tense, coalition talks will follow but the right in Denmark, as in Italy, has paid a heavy price for Trumpism.

The truth is, there’s too much pessimism in the Anglosphere about the prospects of the global left. Largely, in my opinion, driven by the algorithm on X that promotes right-wing content and sets the narrative tone for journalists. Since Trump’s return to power, Canada, Australia and Norway all show how liberals and the left can bounce back and win big when it comes to elections. All three won by combining a push on cost of living, a bit of distance from the United States, whilst being tough on borders and security.

So what’s the European left adding to this formula, now we are in Trump’s war era? Tying all this together it’s not rocket science. A bit of Jette’s Dutch optimism, a bit of Hidalgo's Parisian sprucing up the public realm, and a bit of Frederiksen’s Danish security message works, as the right finds Donald was a bad, bad bet for their brands. The Labour Party should take note as our own May elections approach.