Across Europe, the far right is rising. That it seems normal is all the more terrifying

Austria, France, Germany, Sweden and now Spain – the firewall between the mainstream and the far right is crumbling

Santiago Abascal, leader of Spain’s far-right Vox party: a snap general election has been called for July. Photograph: Rodrigo Jimenez/EPA

Owen Jones

THEGUARDIAN

Wed 31 May 2023 

Normalisation is the process by which something unusual or extreme becomes part of the everyday. What once provoked horror and outrage soon barely registers. The way the presence of Donald Trump became a mere fact of political life is perhaps the most familiar example. But the normalisation of the far right is happening across the democratic world.

Once Trump became “normal”, events that seemed even more extreme did too. A 2022 survey found that two in five Americans thought civil war was “at least somewhat likely” in the next decade. One political scientist speaks of the possibility of rightwing dictatorship in the US by 2030.

The same creep of normalisation is happening in European politics. At the turn of the millennium, when Austria’s far-right Freedom party (FPÖ) – led by Jörg Haider, who had made comments suggesting he was sympathetic to the Nazi regime – entered a coalition with the conservative People’s party, mass protests not only erupted in Vienna but across Europe and in the US. The EU even imposed diplomatic sanctions on Austria. It was understood that an important red line had been crossed; that given Europe’s blood-soaked history, the far right had to be kept firmly outside the tent.

No longer. When the FPÖ formed a new coalition in 2017, the protests were relatively small. Today, the party picks up victories in local elections and leads Austria’s opinion polls. Now the country’s main political force, it has every chance of leading the next government. Meanwhile, under pressure from its right flank, the People’s party has adopted ever harsher anti-migrant policies.

Then there’s Spain. For years after the financial crash, the country appeared to buck the trend of many European nations because of its lack of a rising far-right party. Leading lights in the leftwing Podemos party had an explanation: the mass indignados protests against austerity, which erupted in 2011, seemed to ensure that discontent was directed at powerful interests, rather than vulnerable groups such as migrants. But in the 2019 general election, the far-right Vox party – defined by its hostility to migrants and opposition to regional autonomy in Spain – came third, and in last weekend’s local elections exceeded expectations. A snap general election has been called for July, and Vox could soon be in government, the first time the Spanish far right would be in corridors of power since the fall of Franco.

The pattern is strikingly clear. In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is surging: one recent poll forecast it would come second in a general election, ahead of the ruling Social Democrats. While other parties claim they will refuse to work with the AfD at the national level, such relationships already exist at the local level, leading Foreign Policy magazine to recently declare that “Germany’s far-right ‘firewall’ is starting to crack”.

This is, after all, what happened in Sweden, where other parties refused to work with the Sweden Democrats party, which has neo-Nazi roots. In 2016, Anna Kinberg Batra, the leader of the conservative Moderate party, denounced it as racist. But in the last election, it came second, and negotiated a deal to prop up a rightwing government.

In France, Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party scored their best ever results in presidential and parliamentary elections last year. Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, is of the far-right Brothers of Italy party. In eastern Europe, we have Hungary, ruled by a de facto far-right autocracy, with an even more extreme party – Our Homeland Movement – surging in the polls. Similarly, note Poland, ruled by a hard-right government which is now manipulating the Ukraine crisis to set up a commission to supposedly investigate Russian influence in the country: in practice, just a bogus excuse to harass the opposition.

How did we descend so far into the mire? There’s no question that growing economic insecurities and inequalities provided ample material for far-right parties that offered scapegoating as an answer. If leftwing movements had proved more successful at redirecting that anger at the right targets – like politicians slashing social provision, bosses offering low-paid jobs and a financial system that plunged the world into crisis – then perhaps the far right would have enjoyed less appeal.

But they also wouldn’t be where they are without the complicity of mainstream parties. Trump is clearly the monster created by the very US Republican establishment – with its anti-Obama crankery, Islamophobia and hallucinated anti-communism – that now seems to abhor him. Across the western world, mainstream parties tend not to vigorously oppose the far right and offer an alternative vision of the future, but imitate their rhetoric and policies. All they’ve achieved is legitimising the zealots and allowing them to set the terms of debate.

We thought we had learned from our darkest moments in history. But unless the far right is once again treated as beyond the political pale, new horrors await.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist