by Patrick Fearon-Hernandez | PDF
Despite the European Union’s current challenges with slow economic growth and weak financial markets, the bloc remains an important investment region. It retains a large, extraordinarily productive industrial sector. It is home to big, profitable financial and service firms. It has powerful scientific and creative organizations. We therefore think it’s important for investors to understand the EU’s major political trends and how they might affect the value of EU assets.
In this report, we focus on the way that nationalist, populist, ultra-conservative political parties are gaining ever more support among European voters. In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy party has already been in power for years. In France, recent opinion polls suggest the National Rally (RN) is well placed to take power in next year’s presidential election. And in Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) has won a series of state elections that will leave it positioned to take power nationally in the coming years.
We discuss how the actual policy agendas differ among these far-right parties and how their goals may change once they control the government. As always, we also lay out the investment implications of our analysis.