Immigration the key as left faces loss of power

German defeat will seal eclipse in EU council.

Leaders of Europe's left were last night facing a continued political drift away from them across the continent. The election result in Holland was the third turnover from left to right in the last three major parliamentary elections within the EU.

The arrival of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy last year and Jose Manuel Durao Barroso's conservative Social Democratic party in Portugal last month has already started to even out the balance between left and right governments.

With Spain, Austria and Ireland already on the right and key elections coming up in France and Germany, Europe's left was last night set to lose yet another seat around the table at the EU's council of ministers.

If centre-left chancellor Gerhard Schröder fails to hold on in Germany in September and France's already battered socialists also lose in June, then a majority of the 15 EU governments will be from the right. Many will also have smaller far-right parties leaning over their shoulders.

Many European leaders now believe that the lesson of the rise of Pim Fortuyn, Austria's Jorg Haider and France's Jean-Marie Le Pen is that the key battleground between right and left will be immigration.

Spain's conservative prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, this week blamed the rise of the radical right on the inability of leftwing parties to address popular concern about immigration.

"Radical parties triumph in areas that were traditionally leftwing bastions," he told a conference of international Christian Democrats. He claimed the left was trying to run and hide from popular opinion on immigration and simply did not want to talk about it.

"But we do want to talk about it," he said. Mr Aznar is in favour of Europe-wide immigration policies, a view mirrored by Britain's Europe minister, Peter Hain, this week.

In Germany, however, Mr Schröder made what appeared to be a bid to turn the rise of the far right to his advantage. He has been signalling that he intends to lump in his opponents with the anti-immigrant populists of other countries.

In a Guardian interview last week, he defied the mainstream right to join the centre-left in outright public rejection of their policies.

This week he has claimed that the centre-right Free Democratic party was undergoing a process of "Haiderisation" - a reference to the Austrian extreme right leader, Jörg Haider. The FDP leader, Guido Westerwelle, accused Mr Schröder of "losing his grip".

In Paris, officials said the government was unlikely to offer any early reaction to the Dutch election result. "Only 10 days ago, voters rejected a presidential candidate who is a lot more dangerous than Pim Fortuyn ever was," said one. "France has had a bad scare and there is a strong feeling that we shouldn't be meddling in other people's affairs for some time to come."