Realignment of Europe's parliamentary right

Europe's political right is realigning, and the question of who will cooperate with whom has become a defining fault line of Union politics. In the European Parliament the European People's Party increasingly passes measures with the Conservatives and Reformists and the Patriots for Europe rather than with the centre-left, while national-conservative parties coordinate across borders and position for a larger share of power. Running beneath it is the "cordon sanitaire", the long-standing refusal of mainstream parties to govern with national-populist ones, which is being tested and in places abandoned. Coverage divides between outlets that frame the realignment as the belated normalisation of parties with millions of voters and a legitimate majority, and those that frame it as the mainstream right lending respectability to movements it once excluded and eroding a norm that protected liberal democracy; Russian and Chinese state media present the shift as the decline of the European centre. It is distinct from the domestic party contests in Germany, France and Hungary, which have their own nodes.