Vote share of the largest eurosceptic parties in national and EU elections 2000-2023
Euroscepticism - the political position which opposes the European Union - has been on the rise across Europe since the turn of the millennium. Nowhere has this been more true than on the populist right of the political spectrum, where a number of parties and movements have capitalized on dissatisfaction with the EU to win votes and, in some cases, to enter into government. Fidesz, the party of current Hungarian prime minister Vikor Orbán, has been the most successful right-wing eurosceptic party over the past twenty years, with the party regularly winning over half of the vote and governing the country for the past 14 years. Law and Justice (known as PiS in Polish) of Poland has seen similar success over this period, with the governments led by the party from 2015 to 2023 working in close alliance with Orbán's Hungary to block EU legislation, particularly regarding migration policy. PiS were defeated in the 2023 Polish parliamentary election, with a government being formed instead by former European Council President Donald Tusk.
The rise of the right in Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, and France
Lega and Brothers of Italy have seen their support rise sharply in Italy in the latter half of the 2010s, with Lega being intermittently in the governing coalition between 2018 and 2022, with the party governing in a coalition with Brothers of Italy since the 2022 Italian general election. At that election, Brothers of Italy came out as the largest party, with their leader Giorgia Meloni subsequently becoming Prime Minister of Italy. Of the other successful right-wing eurosceptic parties, the Sweden Democrats, while not an official part of the current government in Sweden, have a confidence and supply agreement with the governing parties, meaning that they hold significant influence on the government in that country. The PVV (Party for Freedom) in the Netherlands came out as the largest party in the 2023 Dutch General Election, with 23.49 percent of the vote, although as of January 2024, a government has yet to be formed in the country. The National Rally party in France has captured increasing shares of the vote in European and French parliamentary elections since 2000, while their candidates for the French presidency have even bettered this, with Marine Le Pen winning 41.5 percent of the vote in the second round in 2022, a dramatic increase from her father's, Jean-Marie Le Pen, result twenty years prior, when he received just 18 percent of the vote in the second round of the presidential election.
Germany and Spain have smaller far-right eurosceptic parties, but they are growing
Vox, the largest eurosceptic party in Spain, has also seen its fortunes rise in the latter half of the 2010s, as the party achieved its best ever result in the Spanish parliamentary election of November 2019 when it achieved 15 percent of the vote. Since then, Vox slightly lost ground and only achieved 12.4 percent of the vote in the 2023 Spanish election. The Alternative for Germany, a party which was founded in 2013 to oppose the Euro currency and the bailouts by EU institutions following the Eurozone debt crisis, has grown into a considerable force in German politics. The party underwent a shift away from its focus on European economic policy and towards a hardline anti-immigration stance following the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis. While the party achieved only 10 percent of the vote in the 2021 German parliament election, down from its high of almost 13 percent in 2017, the party rose dramatically in opinion polls during 2022 and 2023, with the AfD now forecast to be the second-largest party in the German parliament after the next election in 2025.
