Across Europe, the far right is in power, or agitating for it, or on the cusp of securing it. In 2025, European liberal democracy will be in a fight for its survival.
Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party is in power in Hungary. Giorgia Meloni‘s Brothers of Italy runs Italy. In the Netherlands, the Party for Freedom is sharing power. In Finland, the Finns Party is in coalition.
In the UK, Nigel Farage watches all this hungrily. He knows that their victories make him appear relevant, as he seeks to damage Labour and the Conservatives and drag British politics further to the right. Then, of course, there is Donald Trump, the man across the water. He is the lodestar. He gives the disparate global movements for populism a sense of inevitable victory and geopolitical momentum.
And then at the extreme end of populism is Vladimir Putin who provides its most virile manifestation in the war in Ukraine, and works to advance the cause through his disinformation campaigns overseas.
The two key countries in what comes next are France and Germany. If they fall, the twin-engine of European leadership will have broken down. With Trump in the White House, it will feel as if the West is crumbling before our eyes.
Sometimes, this feels almost like destiny. Journalists cover right-wing populists with a sense of excitement and inevitability that they never grant to mainstream parties. But there is nothing inevitable about history. It has no direction.
Back in the early 20th Century, the danger was fascism. Today it is right-wing populism. We can get in to the weeds of what distinguishes them, but they share the same ideological root and deal in many of the same ideas. They also share the same dangers.
People often talk about Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to explain how fascism rises. That’s fine – it’s a perfectly useful example. It reminds us how it happened last time. It involved a sense of mainstream political paralysis, leaving voters with the feeling that normal political parties could not help them amid worsening economic conditions. It teaches us the warning signs to look out for.
But our obsession with Nazism does us a disservice. It restricts our historical knowledge to the moment when fascism triumphed. There are other stories in history which can guide us as well, and they teach us a different lesson. They tell us how fascism can be defeated.
On 6 February, 1934, far-right groups rioted in Paris’s Place de la Concorde and managed to bring down prime minister Édouard Daladier. At the time, France had the ideal conditions for fascism. The mainstream parties were shattered and failing. The country had gone through 12 prime ministers in a little over four years, including four in the previous five months.
But French anti-fascists had learned from what happened earlier in Germany. They noticed the way that communists and social democrats in the Weimar Republic had failed to work together, allowing the fascists in. So instead, they deployed a broad anti-fascist alliance. It was called the Popular Front. It swept the 1936 election under the Jewish socialist Léon Blum and promptly banned all far-right leagues.
This is the basic principle that can halt the far-right advance: you refuse to cooperate with it. No matter our political differences – socialists, centrist or conservative – we agree to work together and defeat it. We maintain absolute organisational resistance.
This is the under-reported story of how Europe is preventing the growth of the far right today. It is happening now, all around us.
In Austria, the far-right Freedom Party secured the highest percentage of the vote this year, ahead of the center right and centre left. It had already been part of coalition governments on three separate occasions, providing a growing sense of normalisation. But the other parties held firm. They refused to work with it, preventing the populists from being able to form a coalition. The parties will continue to negotiate a government into the new year, but the gates stand firm. The barbarians are being held back.
In France, the Popular Front was revived in 2024 to keep Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally out of power. But in the aftermath of that electoral success, the temporary alliance between centrists and socialists broke down. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, of the far-left France Unbowed, seemed angrier towards centrist president Emmanuel Macron than he was towards the far right. Macron failed to respect the left’s impressive performance, rejecting their candidates for prime minister and installing the right-winger Michel Barnier instead.
It was a selfish and short-sighted way to behave. The Barnier experiment soon fell apart, with the far-left voting with the far-right to bring him down. It was a grim sight: total failure, across the spectrum.
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Read MoreThe parties which had worked together to defeat Le Pen are now too selfish and inward-looking to maintain their unity in the face of her advance. And suddenly those alarm bells started ringing again: the dangerous sense of mainstream parties in a state of disarray, unable to help voters, pushing them into the arms of Le Pen.
But things now appear marginally more hopeful. François Bayrou, a veteran centrist, has been picked by Macron as the new prime minister. He is still not to the left’s liking, but he is a more generous and conciliatory figure than Barnier. He has spoken of a “glass ceiling” that cuts off the elites from ordinary voters. He will probably include old centre-left and centre-right figures in his government and scrap at least some of Macron’s spending cuts.
For his part, Socialist leader Olivier Faure has recognised that many of his supporters were aghast at the party backing the extremes. He is now preparing a more responsible left-wing approach based on “reciprocal concessions”. The Greens are also open to a non-aggression pact as long as certain conditions are respected.
In Germany, the mainstream has been in the same worrying state of paralysis as in France. Olaf Scholz’s centre-left Social Democrats governed in a coalition with the pro-business Free Democrats, but it had been reduced to a state of comatosed ineptitude by the government’s internal debate over loosening spending limits. Scholz detonated the arrangement in November, kicking off an election campaign which will culminate with a vote in February.
The far-right Alternative for Germany is performing strongly. The party won the state of Thuringia last September. It is currently at around 18 per cent in the polls, putting it ahead of Scholz’s Social Democrats. It has chipped away at public support for Ukraine. Tino Chrupalla, its co-leader, is calling for Germany to pull out of Nato – the precise same message that Trump issues in the US.
But the party is still well behind Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats on the centre right. Barring some calamity, Merz will be the next chancellor. That is a reassuring proposition. Merz is right wing on any number of issues – including migration and economics – but he is a staunch supporter of Ukraine and an implacable opponent of Alternative for Germany. He will not work with them under any circumstances. The far right in Germany is trapped, without anyone willing to work with it.
The populists might feel that they have the wind at their back, but there are strong countervailing forces stopping them from making progress. Mainstream politicians in Germany and France are rejecting co-operation with the far right. They are showing signs that they can end the stalemate and deliver for their voters. If they succeed, they can still hold back the tide.
In 2024, the battle for liberal democracy took place in the US. It was lost. In 2025, the battle will take place in France and Germany. We better hope they’re more successful. For all the doom and gloom, they’re showing signs that they might well be.
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