EUROPE’S right-wing populists will take votes off an array of mainstream rivals at next weekend’s election to the European Parliament. But what exactly do they want? To that, the nationalists provided answers of sorts at their big end-of-campaign rally in Milan’s Piazza del Duomo today. Under sporadic rain showers in the shadow of the city’s cathedral, right-populist leaders from eleven EU countries demanded a “revolution” to overthrow the existing order in Brussels and build a “Europe of nations”. They were confident. They were loud. They reaped the applause of thousands of supporters of Italy’s hard-right Lega, the host party, gathered in the square waving giant flags in the drizzle.

They were also incoherent to the point of parody. Europe’s hard right is going through something of a transformation. Time was, these people straightforwardly disliked the EU and often wanted to pull their member states out of it. But support for the union among voters has risen, common threats loom larger and Britain has made a terrible mess of Brexit, putting off would-be copycats. Meanwhile rising anti-establishment and anti-migrant sentiments in much of Europe have blurred the boundaries between the nationalists and the mainstream. A new, hybrid sort of European nationalist populism is emerging that attempts to be subtler than the old “yah boo to Europe” sort. Matteo Salvini, the League’s leader and Italy’s deputy prime minister, wants to organise a new group around this idea in the next European Parliament.

Hence the Europe-of-nations bluster from the speakers. A common theme was that the EU is not innately a bad thing. It is just run by the wrong people (decadent, politically correct bureaucratic types) and to the wrong ends (letting in Muslim immigrants and cozying up to bankers). That, went the argument, was destroying ancient European nations and endangering and impoverishing their citizens. With the right people in charge (the nationalist populists and especially “Matteo”) and the right goals (giving powers back to member states and shielding ordinary people from Muslims, criminals, bankers and the like) the EU could help defend the autonomy of nation states and the security of their peoples.

“It is up to us,” said Tomio Okamura, leader of the Czech far-right, “to decide whether Europe should remain European or whether Merkel, Juncker and Macron [cue boos from the crowd] will be able to Islamise Europe.” Jörg Meuthen of Alternative for Germany issued a shopping list including a leaner EU, powers returned to national governments, more free trade, more security for citizens and a “Fortress Europe” on migration. Then came Geert Wilders, a Dutch populist: “No more dictates from the EU superstate…The political elites in Brussels can’t be trusted. They want to take away our identity and our security.” Georg Mayer from the Freedom Party of Austria praised Mr Salvini (and said precisely nothing about the contracts-for-support scandal consuming Heinz-Christian Strache, his party leader and Austria’s then vice chancellor, back in Vienna.)

The star of the show—her operatic rhetorical flourishes unmatched by other speakers, including a rambling Mr Salvini—was Marine Le Pen of France’s National Rally. She pledged to fight “savage globalisation” and proposed adapting the first line of France’s anthem (“Arise, children of the fatherland”) to make “Arise, children of the fatherlands” the motto of the Europe-of-nations that would emerge from the “peaceful revolution” launched here in Milan. “Our Europe is not 70 years old but millennia old,” she bellowed, citing the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, Milan’s Duomo, Leonardo da Vinci and myriad other artists, writers and philosophers as examples of this common continental culture.

Which all sounded, coming from a collection of nationalists, rather European. Indeed, several speakers emphasised the point: “We are not anti-Europeans as the mainstream claims,” protested Mr Meuthen: “We are the true Europeans. We are against the current Europe and its current elites.” Talk of leaving the EU, of Frexit or Nexit or Öxit, had gone. In its place was the assertion that with a change of guard in Brussels and more “common sense” (a frequently occurring buzzword that none of the speakers troubled to unpack) it would be possible to dodge trade-offs between collective European action and individual national autonomy.

Yet those trade-offs were revealed in all the unanswered questions about this brave new Europe-of-nations. If national identities are uniquely sacred, for example, then why were so many Lega supporters in the crowd flying regional flags? Why did one band of them describe themselves to me as “Tuscan nationalists”? Why did so many banners bear the “Sun of the Alps” design associated with the separatism of Padania, or the northern Italian regions, for the rest of Italy? (Partial answer: the Lega was until recently for Padanian autonomy from Italy’s poorer south). And why did several speakers wax lyrical about a common European identity? If Leonardo da Vinci and Joan of Arc belong to Europe as a whole as well as to their respective nations, as Ms Le Pen seemed to claim, then perhaps national identities are more fluid and intertwined than the nationalist ideal preached in other parts of the speeches allowed. “Viva l’Europa” said several speakers in accented Italian in their perorations, comparing the continent to a living being in a fashion they might have been expected to reserve for their precious nation states.

The conceptual muddles explained the practical contradictions in the prospectus advanced on the Piazza del Duomo. Does protecting the nation stage mean more market discipline, as Mr Meuthen’s free-trade overtures and Mr Salvini’s tax-slashing promises demanded, or less, as Ms Le Pen’s anti-globalisation arguments seemed to suggest? Wouldn’t building a “Fortress Europe” with a common security architecture—plus the general “togetherness” of patriotic European action that most speakers seemed to favour—take the union farther in the direction of a superstate and away from nation-state autonomy? Were powerful nationalists involved in running their own nation states, like Mr Salvini, exempt from the “elites” label? And what about those nationalists, like Mr Strache, seemingly willing to sell out the interests of their nation state for that of another, namely Russia?

The lack of clarity on all this contained an awkward truth: even for the nationalists, it turns out, the nation state is one ideal among many. It is relative, contested and messy. Sometimes advancing its interests involve trade-offs with other ideals and priorities. Sometimes other layers of identity and power are also important and even more relevant.

Europe’s nationalists have a method for avoiding these complexities: they reduce debates to personalities. Many of the speakers praised Mr Salvini to win applause and mentioned Angela Merkel, Jean-Claude Juncker, Emmanuel Macron and other mainstreamers to elicit boos. Mr Salvini went a step further and turned chunks of his speech into a sort of PowerPoint presentation, flashing up images of historical figures who had, apparently, respected nation states where others had not. These included Pope Jean Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Alcide de Gasperi and Charles de Gaulle. Never mind the crashing contradictions contained in the list: these were the pro-nation-states good guys, the others were the bad guys. A Europe-of-nations is whatever the good guys want and whatever the bad ones do not want.

All of which snake oil might work in an election campaign. But afterwards, once a new Parliament is formed, things will become trickier, when a Europe-of-nations will pass from being a political slogan to the supposed organising ideal of a new political block. The parties represented on the stage in Milan have different positions on Russia and China, on the distribution of migrants in Europe, on trade and industrial policies, on the EU’s border regime, on Brexit and on the environment and agricultural policies. So the chances of a consolidated hard-right block forming successfully after the next parliament are low. Today, Europe’s nationalists proudly claim that with a Europe-of-nations they have found a way to square national interests and national autonomy painlessly. But soon enough they will prove that they are just as incapable of doing that as the mainstream elites against whom they fulminate.