On Thursday, the Dutch will be the first to go to the polls in the European elections, which are technically a collection of 27 national ballots held over the four days from 6 to 9 June. This is fitting, given that the last Dutch general election in November 2023, which produced a shocking landslide for the far right, has been defining the narrative of the 2024 European elections “campaign”. Although polls predict huge gains for the far right, its deep divisions mean the victory may prove to be a pyrrhic one.

A much-cited report by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) predicts that the combined far right will win roughly a quarter of the 720 seats in the new parliament. This would be an increase in support of some 4 to 5%, and is in line with a longer-term trend: the far right made big gains in the European elections of 2014 and 2019.

But while the far right may be the best-represented political ideology in the European parliament, its political influence will most likely again fall well short of its electoral weight. The reason is that EU politics is group politics and the far right is the most divided political “family” in Europe. In the outgoing........

© The Guardian