“I’m not sure what the point of me staying really is, to be honest,” a close friend told me over lunch in early June. “I’ve got a child to raise and I’m not quite certain about how things are looking. Is it going to get worse here? Will it be harder for people who are different?”
I thought she was being a tad melodramatic. After all, we were basking in the sun over a bowl of fresh pasta in the centre of one of the most beautiful cities in the world, Rome.
Yet rather than being besotted with the views and the history around her, there she was talking about moving back home to Birmingham after living in Italy for eight years. In her time here, she had bought a house, started a family and progressed in her career. Life surely couldn’t be that bad here, could it?
Fast-forward a few days and my friend’s questions and doubts seemed valid enough. In elections to send MEPs to the European parliament, the continent hadn’t just taken a slight rightward turn – it had gone all out.
The indications of how the Italian population would vote were crystal clear from the get-go. Experts predicted Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy would win, and they were right. Meloni got 29% of the vote.
Would my friend be comforted that the runners-up, centre left Partito Democratico, didn’t do so badly either, getting 24%? Maybe not.
A five-point gap is a big margin, especially as more than half of the electorate didn’t even vote. The same applied to the rest of the continent – only a half of EU citizens voted, and even that was the biggest turnout in a European election in 30 years.
My thoughts turned to another expat friend, now pondering the consequences of French president Emmanuel Macron deciding to throw his toys out of his pram and call a snap election.
“You can’t make this up,” says Caroline Williamson, who currently lives in Bordeaux. “I moved from the UK to get away after Brexit, and now I might be faced with living in a country with an extreme right party in charge. You have to laugh about it or you’d cry.”
Caroline, like me, was one of the thousands who moved to the continent between 2016 and 2018, which according to data from Eurostat, was around 70,000 a year. Post-referendum, Europe seemed like a safe haven then. But with Marine Le Pen’s National Rally representing France in Europe, and Labour looking almost certain to defeat the Conservatives in the elections back home, Caroline now has an unexpected choice: will she stay or will she go?
“It’s a tricky decision to make, but as much as I love living here, I wouldn’t want to live in an extreme right place,” she says.
You only have to search any EU expat Facebook group to see that people are worried by what they see. What if France does become an extreme right country? And what if the grass then looks greener back home in the UK?
Jessica Lionnel is a freelance journalist based in Rome
