Is the Far Right on the March Across Europe?

By Matthew Parish

Thursday 10 September 2026

There is a temptation, whenever European politics moves sharply to the Right, to reach immediately for the 1930s. The analogy is frequently abused. Nigel Farage is not Adolf Hitler, Marine Le Pen is not Benito Mussolini, Giorgia Meloni does not preside over a Fascist state and even Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, whose rhetoric and personnel have generated substantially more serious concerns about political extremism, operates within an electoral and constitutional order very different from that of the Weimar Republic. History does not repeat itself so conveniently.

Nevertheless, something important is happening across Europe and it would be equally foolish to dismiss the historical comparison altogether. Parties once regarded as beyond the acceptable boundaries of European democratic politics have become permanent and increasingly powerful features of the continent’s political landscape. France’s Rassemblement National has grown from holding just two of the National Assembly’s 577 seats in 2016 to 123 today. The Alternative für Deutschland, which had no Bundestag seats in 2016, is now Germany’s second-largest parliamentary party. Italy is governed by Giorgia Meloni, whose political tradition has roots in the post-Fascist Italian Right. Right-wing populist parties have participated in or influenced governments from the Netherlands to Finland and Slovakia. Whatever terminology one chooses, European politics has undergone a profound shift.

The most dramatic recent illustration comes from Germany. In September 2026 the AfD won almost 44 per cent of the vote in the state election in Saxony-Anhalt, taking 39 of the state parliament’s 83 seats. It did not obtain an absolute majority, and Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats continue to insist upon the Brandmauer — the firewall prohibiting cooperation with the AfD. Yet a party classified as right-wing extremist by the relevant state domestic intelligence authority has nevertheless become the largest political force in a German state. That is an event of obvious historical resonance in a country whose post-war constitutional culture was consciously constructed to prevent precisely the re-emergence of extremist nationalism.

Yet describing all this simply as a “march of the Far Right” conceals as much as it reveals. These parties are not identical. They disagree about economics, Russia, NATO, the European Union, welfare, religion and even immigration. Meloni has governed Italy in a considerably more conventional manner than many of her critics predicted. Marine Le Pen has spent years attempting to sanitise the Rassemblement National’s image and distance it from the more obviously extremist aspects of her father’s Front National. Reform UK has recently suffered declining support and serious controversies rather than enjoying an uninterrupted ascent. Indeed the wider European picture contains important reversals: Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz lost Hungary’s parliamentary elections in April 2026. The phenomenon is therefore not an organised fascist international steadily advancing towards power. It is something more diffuse and for that reason perhaps more difficult to understand.

What these movements share is less an ideology than a political diagnosis. They tell voters that the institutions governing European life have ceased to represent them. Governments cannot control borders. Politicians cannot provide affordable housing. Public services deteriorate while taxes remain high. Industrial employment disappears. Energy becomes expensive. Real wages stagnate. Governments appear unable to prevent wars, irregular migration or declining standards of living. Meanwhile a professional political class speaks an increasingly technocratic language of regulations, targets, international commitments and administrative procedures. The populist Right offers a brutally simple reply: recover the nation, recover the border and recover political control.

This is why immigration has become so extraordinarily powerful an issue. Immigration is not merely about foreigners. It has become a proxy for the question of whether the state remains sovereign. A voter who watches thousands of people entering a country irregularly while successive governments announce that the practice is unacceptable but seem incapable of stopping it may conclude that the government is either incompetent or dishonest. Once that conclusion has been reached, assurances by the political establishment that an anti-immigration party is irresponsible or dangerous may have precisely the opposite of their intended effect. The voter has already decided that the establishment itself is the problem.

There is also an economic geography to the revolt. The AfD’s extraordinary strength in eastern Germany is not accidental. Saxony-Anhalt remains one of the poorer states of the former East Germany, and the AfD has proved particularly successful amongst voters who feel economically insecure and politically neglected. Its recent campaign combined hostility towards immigration with promises of safer streets, national pride and opposition to established political elites. It also exploited scepticism about Germany’s support for Ukraine and nostalgia amongst some voters for aspects of the former East German order.

The same basic political psychology can be found elsewhere even where the details differ. The French provincial voter who believes Paris neither understands nor respects him; the British voter who thinks Westminster has lost control of immigration; the German worker who fears deindustrialisation; the Dutch farmer who believes environmental regulations threaten his livelihood; and the Italian who spent years watching governments change without obvious improvements in the quality of administration may have little else in common. Yet each is susceptible to the proposition that a self-protecting establishment has insulated itself from democratic accountability.

That is where the analogy with the 1930s becomes useful, provided that it is employed carefully.

The lesson of the 1930s is not that economic hardship automatically produces men in black shirts, concentration camps and aggressive war. Nor is it that every politician who campaigns against immigration is secretly a fascist. The more important lesson is that liberal democracy becomes vulnerable when large numbers of people cease to believe that conventional democratic institutions can solve practical problems.

The Great Depression was politically catastrophic not merely because people became poorer. European societies had endured poverty before. It was catastrophic because established governments appeared incapable of explaining events, much less controlling them. Parliamentary coalitions collapsed. Banks failed. Unemployment became endemic. Political elites seemed detached from the suffering surrounding them. Radical movements then offered explanations of seductive simplicity. Someone was responsible. Communists, Jews, bankers, foreigners, capitalists, Versailles, decadent elites or international conspirators could be blamed according to the ideological preference of the speaker. Complexity was replaced by accusation.

There is an uncomfortable resemblance to contemporary politics. Europe has endured the financial crisis, austerity, the Eurozone crisis, mass migration, Brexit, COVID-19, inflation, an energy shock and the largest European war since 1945. Governments repeatedly announce emergencies and repeatedly fail to restore a sense of normality. Younger generations struggle to buy houses. Older industrial communities fear that decarbonisation and globalisation will eliminate their livelihoods. Public debt rises. Defence expenditure must rise as well. European welfare states confront ageing populations. Artificial intelligence promises another wave of economic disruption. The citizen is constantly informed that enormous historical changes are taking place but rarely that his or her life will become more secure as a consequence.

Under these circumstances the appeal of radical simplification is obvious.

The second disturbing analogy with the 1930s concerns the behaviour of mainstream conservative parties. Inter-war fascist movements did not invariably sweep into office by winning overwhelming democratic majorities. They often advanced because conventional conservatives imagined that radical nationalist movements could be contained, borrowed from, manipulated or incorporated into government. The extremists possessed popular energy; the traditional Right possessed institutions, money and respectability. Each thought it could use the other.

This is why Germany’s contemporary Brandmauer matters. The most consequential question may not ultimately be whether the AfD obtains 30, 35 or 40 per cent of the vote. It may be whether the CDU eventually decides that permanent exclusion of such a large electoral bloc is impossible. After the Saxony-Anhalt result, AfD leaders explicitly sought conservative support, while Merz reiterated that cooperation remained impossible. The pressure upon that firewall will grow if the AfD continues to win elections.

France faces a different version of the same dilemma. The Rassemblement National is no longer a marginal protest movement. It is a vast electoral organisation with a plausible claim upon national power. Its strategy has been precisely to make itself appear sufficiently normal that voting for it no longer seems revolutionary. This process of dédiabolisation — de-demonisation — may be electorally brilliant. Yet it creates a peculiar democratic problem. If a party with historically extremist origins gradually removes its most offensive policies, accepts elections and attracts millions of ordinary voters, at what point does it cease to be legitimately described as extremist? Conversely, at what point does society become so accustomed to radical nationalist rhetoric that ideas previously considered extreme cease to provoke alarm?

Britain presents another variation. Reform UK has demonstrated that a party centred upon immigration, national sovereignty and hostility towards established institutions can transform the entire political conversation without necessarily winning government. Its fortunes have recently become considerably more troubled: its earlier commanding polling position has weakened and the party is now confronting a criminal police investigation into allegations concerning foreign political funding, allegations it denies. Yet even if Reform were to decline electorally, it has already demonstrated its capacity to drag the centre of political gravity towards its preferred subjects.

This may be one of the most important characteristics of the contemporary European Right. Political victory does not necessarily mean holding office. If mainstream parties adopt your language, priorities and assumptions because they fear losing voters to you, you have already achieved a substantial victory.

There is nevertheless a danger in treating every concern raised by these movements as illegitimate merely because extremists may exploit it. That strategy has been tried and it has conspicuously failed. Immigration really does impose costs as well as benefits. Integration really can fail. European governments really have lost control over aspects of their borders. Some environmental policies really do impose disproportionate costs upon working and lower-middle-class households. European Union decision-making can be remote and technocratic. Globalisation has produced losers as well as winners. Governments have sometimes concealed these trade-offs behind moralistic language rather than confronting them openly.

If democratic politicians respond to such concerns merely by telling voters that they are ignorant, racist or manipulated by social media, they will manufacture more populists. Democracy requires politicians to take seriously the grievances of people whose preferred solutions they reject.

This is another lesson from the 1930s that is too often forgotten. Fascism was not defeated intellectually by demonstrating that fascists were vulgar. It was ultimately defeated politically by constructing democratic societies capable of delivering security, prosperity and belonging more successfully than extremist alternatives. The post-war European settlement combined liberal democracy with welfare states, rising wages, mass home ownership, expanding public services and a powerful sense that tomorrow would probably be better than today. Liberal democracy enjoyed legitimacy partly because it worked.

The danger today is that Europe attempts to defend liberalism procedurally rather than substantively. Banning parties, policing language, constructing elaborate coalition arrangements to exclude popular movements and denouncing millions of voters as extremists may occasionally be legally justified, particularly where organisations genuinely threaten constitutional government. But these techniques cannot substitute for competent government. Merz himself has expressed scepticism about banning the AfD, arguing instead that mainstream parties must win its voters back towards the political centre. That instinct is important.

There is a further and darker parallel with the inter-war years: international disorder. The 1930s were not merely a period of domestic political extremism. They were an era in which confidence in the international system collapsed. Revisionist powers discovered that borders could be altered through force. International institutions proved incapable of enforcing their principles. Democracies hesitated because they feared the costs of confrontation. Domestic nationalism and international insecurity then reinforced one another.

Europe again lives beside a major war of territorial conquest. Russia has attempted to destroy Ukraine’s sovereignty by force. Across several European populist parties there are currents sympathetic to restoring relations with Moscow, reducing support for Ukraine or treating the war principally as an inconvenience to domestic prosperity. The AfD campaigned in Saxony-Anhalt in favour of restoring ties with Russia and ending support for Ukraine. The Rassemblement National continues to confront questions about the extent of future French support for Ukraine.

Here the 1930s analogy becomes particularly unsettling. Nationalism at home combined with accommodation of aggressive authoritarian powers abroad is historically a dangerous mixture. A Europe fragmented into governments pursuing narrowly defined national interests would be substantially weaker in confronting Russia, managing migration, competing economically with China and negotiating with the United States. National sovereignty sounds attractive until every European state discovers separately how small it is.

Yet catastrophe is not inevitable. This is perhaps the most important difference between Europe today and Europe in 1933. Contemporary European states possess deeply established democratic constitutions, independent courts, professional civil services, powerful civil societies and electorates with generations of democratic experience. Military organisations are subordinate to civilian authority. The European Union binds its members into an extraordinary density of legal and economic relationships. Memories of fascism and war remain embedded in European political culture. There are far more institutional obstacles to dictatorship than existed during the inter-war period.

Nor is the Right advancing everywhere without interruption. European populist parties suffer electoral defeats, internal scandals, leadership disputes and contradictions between protest rhetoric and the compromises required by government. They are themselves divided profoundly over Russia, economics and Europe. The image of a disciplined continental movement marching inexorably towards power is therefore misleading. Recent analysis of European elections describes not a steady march but an uneven expansion in which radical-right parties have become enduring actors while still suffering significant reversals.

The greater danger is more subtle than a sudden fascist seizure of power. It is the gradual degradation of democratic habits.

Politics becomes a contest between enemies rather than opponents. Compromise becomes betrayal. Journalists become traitors. Judges become conspirators. Foreigners become explanations for domestic failures. Electoral defeat becomes evidence that elections were fraudulent. Political violence becomes understandable before becoming acceptable. Governments respond to populism by adopting increasingly coercive methods of their own. Each side comes to believe that normal constitutional restraints are luxuries because the other side represents an existential threat.

That is how democratic cultures can decay even while elections continue to be held. The 1930s therefore offer Europe a warning but not a prophecy. History does not tell us that Marine Le Pen must become a dictator, that the AfD must destroy German democracy or that Reform UK represents the beginning of British fascism. Such claims are intellectually lazy and may actually strengthen populist movements by making establishment warnings appear hysterical.

History tells us something more useful. Liberal democracy is not self-sustaining. People support political systems because those systems provide them with a reasonable combination of prosperity, security, dignity and control over their collective lives. When democratic institutions repeatedly fail to provide those things, voters begin experimenting with alternatives. When mainstream politicians refuse even to acknowledge the failures, experimentation becomes rebellion.

Europe’s radical Right is therefore simultaneously a cause and a symptom of the continent’s political crisis. Some of its ideas are dangerous, particularly where ethnic nationalism shades into collective punishment, where constitutional institutions are portrayed as illegitimate obstacles to popular will or where admiration for authoritarian foreign powers replaces commitment to the European democratic order. But its electoral strength also reflects genuine failures by the governments and parties that preceded it.

The answer cannot simply be to construct higher walls around the political centre. It must be to make the centre worth voting for.

That means controlling borders while treating migrants humanely. It means restoring economic growth rather than endlessly redistributing stagnation. It means building houses, reforming dysfunctional public services and accepting that energy and industrial policy must ultimately improve citizens’ material lives. It means defending Ukraine because European security requires aggression to fail, while explaining honestly to voters why that defence entails costs. It means reducing the distance between political institutions and the people they govern. Above all, it requires recovering the idea that democratic government is capable of doing difficult things.

The ultimate lesson of the 1930s is not that Europe must be frightened of the Right. It is that Europe must be frightened of political failure.

Extremism flourishes when moderate government becomes synonymous with impotence. The democratic centre survived the twentieth century not because history guaranteed its victory but because, after catastrophic mistakes, it learned how to combine liberty with security, national belonging with international cooperation and capitalism with broadly distributed prosperity.

If Europe can do those things again, the current populist wave may eventually recede or be absorbed into ordinary democratic politics. If it cannot, then the labels attached to today’s parties may ultimately matter rather less than we imagine. The names and uniforms of the 1930s will not return. History almost never repeats itself with such theatrical precision. The conditions in which Europeans cease to trust democracy, however, can return perfectly well. And that is the analogy with the 1930s that ought to concern us most.