What is India to make of Europe’s elections?

Former British prime minister Theresa May was a strenuous advocate of India taking back an estimated 100,000 illegal Indian immigrants in the United Kingdom. Eventually, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government signed a Migration and Mobility Partnership Agreement with India that formalised deportation, though not much appears to have happened since.

India may be asked to cooperate in addressing Britain’s immigration problem so that it can stave off a threat from its far right. Whether this will mean London offering a resettlement package in lieu of India accepting its unlawfully residing nationals remains to be seen.

The Labour Party has an uneasy relationship with the BJP. The front organisations of the BJP and RSS in Britain have been assiduously canvassing British-Indian Hindus in the direction of the Conservatives for at least five years. They finally struck success by dethroning Labour in its stronghold of Leicester East with a Hindu candidate.

Labour is likely to forgive but it won’t forget. New British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is keen on consolidating relations with India for the sake of improving the British economy. At the same time, the significant increase in Sikh MPs in the House of Commons — all from Labour — could oblige him to take up the matter of Jagtar Singh Johal’s detention in India.

Also, Christian Michel’s arbitrary imprisonment in India for 67 months without a trial cannot be ignored by a Labour government, since his brother-in-law, the late Lord Matthew Evans, was a Labour peer.

There is no avoiding filling a skills gap either. This will have to continue if Germany, France and Britain are to remain competitive versus Asia and America. But they will have to find a solution to illegal immigration.

British passport holders in Hong Kong have a right to relocate to Britain. Ukrainians have also been allowed to seek sanctuary in the UK, as are others fleeing conflict zones where ruling regimes are disapproved of by Whitehall, such as Afghanistan, Iran, Syria and Sudan.

But economic migrants from other parts of the world — many of whom desperately cross the English Channel — can possibly be checked by reaching understandings with the countries they originate from. In other words, instead of the Rwanda-type scheme the Conservative prime minister Rishi Sunak was controversially backing, Starmer’s dispensation can explore a diplomacy-led resolution.

The countries concerned, if extended a financial incentive to resettle the refugees back in their own countries, might find it worth their while to cooperate. The cost to Britain would also possibly be lower than indefinitely paying hotel bills and disbursing social security while processing asylum applications.

The Brexit referendum of 2016, which took effect in 2020, was mainly about white Britons feeling swamped by the free movement of people within the European Union. Now they fear they’ve

jumped from the frying pan into the fire, with workforce demand being filled from non-white countries. Besides, the inflow of asylum seekers from Asia and Africa continues unabated.

The June elections to the European parliament saw a surge in far-right support. Patriots for Europe, as they call themselves as a bloc, came third after conservatives and social democrats. National Rally, which won the highest number of seats in France, joined hands with Hungary’s Fidesz party, the Czech Republic’s ANO party, Austria’s Freedom party and like-minded parties in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands to form Patriots of Europe.

Germany’s strident Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), or Alternative for Germany, was not invited to join this group. Butit emerged with the second highest vote share among German parties, pushing the ruling Social Democrats into third place.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s response to National Rally’s performance was a snap mid-term election to the country’s National Assembly. Historically, politics in France was a straight contest between the rightist Republicans and the Socialist Party. In 2016, Macron, a minister in the Socialist government of President François Hollande, turned the status quo upside down by announcing a centrist En Marche party, which in 2021 evolved into Ensemble.

National Rally’s nominee Marine Le Pen was runner-up to Macron in the French presidential election two years ago. Thereafter, with the biggest chunk of popular votes — 31.37 per cent in June’s European elections — her party far outstripped others.

French voters baulked at re-endorsing the National Rally when Macron threw down the gauntlet. They relegated it to third place behind a left-wing New Popular Front (NPF) and a coalition led by Ensemble. The outcome was a hung Assembly — unknown territory in France — with the leftists winning 182 seats, the Ensemble group 168 and National Rally 143 in a house of 577. Macron’s gamble had paid off. He had, without retaining his party’s majority in the Assembly, managed to prick the far-right bubble.

Convention dictates Macron name a prime minister from the largest party or alliance in the Assembly. But NPF needs the support of at least 289 lawmakers to stake a claim to governance, and the required extra seats can only come from a tie-up with other groups.

In the NPF, the hard-left France Unbowed party won the most seats. Its leader Jean-Luc Melenchon, though, may find it difficult to obtain support from parties outside the NPF because of his fiery views. Raphael Glucksmann of the Socialist Party or 37-year-old Marine Tondelier of the Green Party, on the other hand, may stand a better chance of securing such consensus.

While this is unlikely to be either’s priority, Melenchon or Tondelier might favour unblocking of the stalled investigation by a Paris prosecutor into the 2015 Rafale deal, including Narendra Modi’s allegedly corrupt role in it.

The fascism of Adolf Hitler that gripped Europe in the 1930s and 1940s essentially spread from Germany to sympathisers in countries the Nazis invaded and controlled. After the decisive victory of the Allies in World War II, Europe turned its back on supremacism, but signs of a re-inclination towards it in Germany have principally arisen in its eastern half, which was under communist rule after WWII and until reunification with West Germany in 1990.

During the war, Germany overran northern France and established a fascist regime there. But there was no danger of ultra-nationalism returning to French politics until the formation of the National Front in 1972, which has now become the National Rally. Its popularity grew steadily and in 2022 it became the main opposition party in the French National Assembly. Thereby surfaced concern about it potentially seizing power in the country.

Fascism in Britain was inspired by the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. The British Union of Fascists in the 1920s and 1930s was founded and led by Oswald Mosley, but without much success. In recent times, the Europhobic UK Independence Party, followed by the Brexit Party and now Reform UK have enticed a greater following with their resistance to immigration.

Britain has swung to the centre-left after 14 years of right-of-centre Conservative Party hegemony. The Labour Party amassed 412 seats in a 650-strong House of Commons, just shy of its best-ever record of 418 under Tony Blair’s leadership in 1997.

But it isn’t all roses: the Conservatives did collapse to their worst-ever tally of 121 seats since their founding in 1832, but a sizeable chunk of its traditional voters migrated to the right-wing populist Reform UK, which notched up the third highest vote share of 14 per cent, albeit prevailing in only five seats. Labour attracted no more than a third, or 34 per cent, of the votes.

The question is: can Reform’s advance be interpreted as a temporary protest vote? Or is something more durable in the offing? An improvement in the British economy would recede Reform’s presence. At the same time, Labour cannot ignore indigenous Britons’ impatience with immigration.

For France, those in its former or present colonies spread across Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific, including Puducherry in India, are entitled to residence in France, and cannot legally be prevented from doing so. Yet, these are the very people whom the National Rally rails against, particularly Africans and Muslims.

Post-unification, Germany has been strikingly generous in absorbing asylum seekers. An estimated 900,000 refugees from former Yugoslavia were granted residence in the 1990s. Another 800,000 were accommodated from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria around 2015. This triggered a far-right backlash, but the centre-right Chancellor Angela Merkel survived it by winning the next general election.

The point here is that Europe can no longer take immigration lightly. A certain intake is inevitable to meet demand, given the continent’s declining birth rate since 2008. The fertility rate in 2022 stood at 1.46 live births per woman. The number of native people entering the job market are not keeping pace with the number who are retiring.

Europe cannot afford to annoy its majority communities beyond a point — letting it fester is a recipe for unrest and a creeping capture of power by the far-right.

Ashis Ray can be found on X @ashiscray