“There is no room for firewalls”.

When US Vice-President J.D. Vance uttered these words at the Munich Security Conference in February, he spoke with the imperative tone of the new sheriff in town. Even before Donald Trump took office for his second term as president, he had put pressure on the European Union to drop all barriers against the Eurosceptic far right. Elon Musk – the world’s richest man and a close ally of Trump – actively campaigned for Germany’s far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).

The facts on the ground make Vance’s statement not just his wish, but a reality: as far-right forces gain ground across the continent, firewalls against them (also referred to as the “cordon sanitaire”) are becoming increasingly fragile – if they haven’t already crumbled. However, there are lessons we can learn from the last few years: the collapse of firewalls is not a natural phenomenon beyond our control. There are common dynamics and responsibilities that can be identified at the local, national, and European levels.

Key elements often occur in combination. First, there’s the hope of mainstream actors that they can maintain a leading decision-making role by forming a tactical alliance with the far right (or at least part of it). Second, the business sector prefers to co-opt illiberal parties rather than having to make compromises with political forces calling for redistribution and social justice. When so-called liberal and centrist parties choose to pursue xenophobic propaganda, the public sphere is reshaped in an illiberal direction. Discursive ruptures and political turning points are closely linked.

The republic of values

Paris, 6 April 2025. Thousands of people wave a French flag. Elected officials and politicians sit in neat rows, each wearing a tricolour sash. Words like “republic”, “democracy”, and “rule of law” are repeated obsessively. From the podium, the crowd’s leader declares that politics is the highest commitment, “a secular priesthood”, before inviting the crowd to solemnly sing the national anthem.

Hearing these slogans and the invocation of democratic values, one wouldn’t expect the leader on stage to be Marine Le Pen – the xenophobic politician of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) who has just been found guilty of embezzling EU funds. And yet there she is, addressing her supporters gathered in Place Vauban, Paris, where anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage lobbies have previously demonstrated. The RN summoned militants to contest the court’s ruling, and the judges themselves, accusing them of being politicised. Yet Le Pen’s party co-founded a group in the European Parliament, the Patriots for Europe, together with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán – the European champion of rule of law erosion.

The demonstration in Place Vauban was a striking example of what I call a “mise en scène républicaine” (“republican staging”), and a semantic subversion. As French philosopher Michaël Foessel told me in an interview, the meaning of the word “république” has been distorted: “Originally, ‘republic’ meant a sum of principles guaranteeing constitutional freedom and equality. Now, anyone who challenges the dominant logic is defined as anti-republican. We moved from the republic of principles, with its social vocation, to the republic of values, which becomes exclusionary and disciplinary.”

By appropriating words traditionally associated with the Left, the far right managed to reverse the diabolisation (“demonisation”) to which it was once subjected, and turn it against the gauche. However, the far right’s normalisation efforts wouldn’t have worked so effectively without the initiative and active collaboration of President Emmanuel Macron (who vilified the Left starting from the 2022 election campaigns) and other so-called liberals and centrists. As French semiologist Roland Barthes wrote, “major mutations are linked not to solemn historical events, but to what one might call a discursive rupture’’.

Macron’s contribution to the far right’s success went beyond rhetorical choices. In 2022, in addition to increasing its institutional representation, the RN elected two vice-presidents of the National Assembly, relying on support from Macron’s MPs. Le Pen made compromises with the same system she publicly denounced in Place Vauban. Macron even allowed the RN to determine the fate of a government – the short-lived executive led by Michel Barnier in 2024 – with its external support. The far right’s tactical abstention also allowed the French president to appoint his close friend Richard Ferrand as president of the Constitutional Council in early 2025.

An elixir of longevity

As the French case demonstrates, the far right is no longer cordoned off. On the contrary,  it has become an essential part of the political cordon protecting neoliberalism. This was evident in Austria, where 2025 started with the economic establishment pushing for the centre-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) to form a government with the Nazi-rooted Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), which had won the most votes in the 2024 elections.

The far right is no longer cordoned off. On the contrary, it has become an essential part of the political cordon protecting neoliberalism.

As Harald Mahrer, the president of the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber and a member of the ÖVP’s negotiating team, put it, the FPÖ’s “economic programme has been partly copied from ours and from the Federation of Austrian Industries”. What mattered most to the Federation’s president, Georg Knill, was “that budget is reformed only on the public expenditure side” – a goal that could not be achieved in a government coalition involving the centre-left Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ).

Eventually, the ÖVP struck a deal with the SPÖ. But the reason for this choice was ultimately the same one that had prompted the ÖVP to turn to the far right just a few months earlier, and to form a government with it back in 2000: to be the senior coalition partner and thus the leading player in the decision-making process.

The same strategic objective led to a normalisation of the far right at EU level. Before mainstream parties in Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, and other European countries opened up to collaboration with the far right, the cordon sanitaire was broken in Brussels by the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP). In 2021, its leader, Manfred Weber, established a tactical alliance with the post-fascist Brothers of Italy, the party of Giorgia Meloni and a member of the far-right ECR group in the European Parliament. In 2022, the election of the ultraconservative Roberta Metsola (EPP) as president of the European Parliament, with an ECR vice-president, was just the first signal of a political shift. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen soon started cooperating with the Italian prime minister, driving a “Melonisation” of the EU agenda.

By moving closer to the far right, Weber aimed to ensure that the EPP could maintain its role as a key player in Brussels. On the one hand, the EPP could now blackmail the progressive camp, because a common front between the centre-right and the far right was no longer taboo. On the other hand, Weber managed to shatter potential challengers in the right-wing camp: as part of this tactical alliance, Meloni boycotted the plan for a large, unified far-right group in the European Parliament in 2021.

The illusion of centre-right, neoliberal political forces is that collaboration with the xenophobic, populist far right can grant them an elixir of longevity.

A toxic codependency

But the Right’s elixir comes at a price. It is a poison that threatens to disintegrate social cohesion (which explains why some foreign administrations and oligarchs support Eurosceptic parties such as the AfD). Eventually, it also threatens the very parties that open the door to the xenophobic far right. The German Christian Democrats’ cooperation with the AfD on migration, for example, contributes to normalising the party and accelerates its electoral growth at the expense of mainstream forces.

The illusion of centre-right, neoliberal political forces is that collaboration with the xenophobic, populist far right can grant them an elixir of longevity.

The Dutch case offers a useful lesson. The way the conservative-liberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) rhetorically shifted to the far right contributed to the success of Geert Wilders’ Party For Freedom (PVV), which won the most votes in 2023. As Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde put it, “ultimately responsible for Wilders’ massive victory is, ironically, his personal nemesis, Mark Rutte, the outgoing conservative (VVD) prime minister who decided to blow up his coalition over the specific issue of asylum seekers”, moving the focus back to immigration. “Moreover, his successor, Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, opened the door to a possible coalition with Wilders, helping his normalisation”.

Mudde’s conclusion is clear: “As Jean-Marie Le Pen said almost half a century ago, the people prefer the original over the copy”.

Mutually reinforcing trends

The weakening of the cordon sanitaire is visible throughout Europe. The loss of confidence in traditional parties is accompanied by the electoral growth of right-wing populist forces.

In Sweden, the government works closely with the Sweden Democrats (SD), whose neo-nazi roots are well known. After the 2022 general election, Ulf Kristersson, the leader of the centre-right Moderate Party (a member of the EPP), signed the Tidö Agreement with other right-wing forces, including the SD, in order to be appointed prime minister.

After the 2018 election,  Kristersson had kept his distance from the SD. However, already the following year, he changed his strategy and started working on a deal with the far right. In 2022, he gained the premiership thanks to the SD, granting it political influence in return.

In Finland, too, an EPP member party – the pro-market National Coalition Party – opened the door of government to the far right. Prime Minister Petteri Orpo works closely with the leader of the Finns Party, Riikka Purra, who has served as Finland’s deputy prime minister and finance minister since 2023. She is a fierce advocate of austerity, a neoliberal agenda that glorifies market competition and sacrifices welfare, acting as a magnet that draws conservative, centrist, and far-right parties closer to each other.

The electoral growth of far-right forces and the willingness of centre-right and liberal parties to forge tactical alliances with them are two mutually reinforcing trends. In 2021, when Manfred Weber initiated the dialogue between the EPP and Brothers of Italy, Meloni’s party had far less representation in the European Parliament than today, and was in opposition in Italy. The Brussels establishment – starting with Ursula von der Leyen – chose not only to treat Meloni as a trustworthy interlocutor, but also as a moderate, “pro-European”, “pro-rule of law” ally. By doing so, Weber and von der Leyen actively contributed to the legitimisation and institutionalisation of the post-fascist Italian party. At the same time, Meloni’s propaganda infiltrated public discourse in Brussels, with the anti-immigration rhetoric and tightening of the EU’s external border policy going hand in hand.

The EPP began its tests of a right-wing majority in the European Parliament by aligning itself with the far right against the European Green Deal, as evidenced by Weber’s fight against the Nature Restoration Law in the summer of 2023. The attunement between EPP and ECR on social and environmental deregulation shows further interpenetration: Italy’s prime minister used to say that the state “should not bother those who have a business”. This now seems to be the prevailing mood in Brussels as well.

The proximity between the centre-right and the far right has gone so far that one can no longer speak of a cordon to be broken, because distinguishing between the two political camps has become more and more difficult. This slippage also applies to liberal and centrist parties like Macron’s Renaissance. The controversial immigration bill the French president advocated was a carbon copy of the Rassemblement National’s arguments.

The electoral growth of far-right forces and the willingness of centre-right and liberal parties to forge tactical alliances with them are two mutually reinforcing trends.

An illiberal playbook

Alliances with the far right are often first experimented with at the local level, where they are typically justified on pragmatic grounds. This also drives societies to gradually become accustomed to having the extreme right in government.

In Spain, the Partido Popular (another EPP member) established alliances with the post-Francoist party Vox at the local and regional level before the 2023 general election. In Czechia, former Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, the founder of the right-wing ANO party and a co-founder of the Patriots for Europe, started cooperating with Tomio Okamura, the leader of the far-right Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD), at last October’s regional elections, and has explicitly mentioned the far right as a possible ally for an ANO government after the upcoming general elections in October 2025.

Although the cordon sanitaire often falls first at the local level, global dynamics also play a role. The attacks on LGBTQIA+ rights in Spain following the cooperation between the PP and Vox, for example, closely align with a global illiberal playbook shared by Vox’s leader, Santiago Abascal, Orbán, Meloni, Trump, and other populist leaders.

Trump’s return to the White House, in particular, accelerates and encourages the advance of the far right and its inclusion in governments. Tech billionaire Elon Musk has even gone so far as to explicitly campaign for the AfD, hosting a live chat with its frontwoman Alice Weidel on X.

Global factors such as vast financial resources, international cooperation on an illiberal playbook, and the far right’s surge on both sides of the Atlantic are playing a decisive role in the erosion of the cordon sanitaire. However, as the national and EU examples discussed in this text show, Europe remains responsible for its own fate.