| A looming hard-right shift casts a shadow on June’s EU elections and Europe’s left is using the topic to mobilise their voters, but the consequences are rather damaging. Two years into the new millennium, the French felt for the first time that a new age had truly dawned when hard-right enfant terrible Jean-Marie Le Pen made it to an unprecedented run-off in the presidential elections. Within a day, “the Le Pen earthquake” (Le Monde) moved all the major left-wing parties, from the Socialists to the Communists, to rally around the Conservative candidate, Jacques Chirac. Chirac won by a landslide of 82% of the vote after 800,000 people packed the streets of Paris to protest against Le Pen – a first successful demonstration of how the threat of the hard right can help mobilise voters. The European election is gearing up to become the umpteenth iteration of this strategy, this time deployed by the left. As voter enthusiasm for reforms has hit rock bottom, left-wing parties appear to have identified mobilisation against the hard right as their best chance and are briefing feverishly about the danger of an impending rightward shift, both on and off the record. The examples across the spectrum are numerous, with Spanish Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez vowing to “stop the reactionary wave throughout Europe”, and the German Linke declaring the elections to be an epic battle against “Italy’s fascist forces”. This is driven by a genuine threat and a genuine fear. | 