The rise of populist right-wing parties has become a permanent feature of Europe’s political landscape over the past five years. Regardless of the outcome of any single election, right-wing forces are now an established political presence with growing influence over European policy.
Major research centres increasingly argue that populist right-wing politics is no longer a temporary “wave”, but a structural feature of the global political landscape. Among the main drivers are prolonged economic stagnation, declining real wages and mounting housing costs, particularly for younger generations.
At the same time, political rights and civil liberties have deteriorated in 54 countries while improving in only 35. Just 21 per cent of the world’s population now lives in countries classified as “free”, compared with 46 per cent two decades ago, while authoritarian systems had come to outnumber democracies by the end of 2025.
Germany
Germany has become one of the clearest examples of the far right moving from the political margins towards the centre of the system.
In the 2025 federal election, Alternative for Germany (AfD) finished second with 152 seats, behind the CDU/CSU bloc with 208 seats. The Christian Democratic Union nevertheless ruled out any coalition with the AfD and instead formed an alliance with the Social Democrats. Official election results confirm the AfD’s 152 seats and the combined CDU/CSU total of 208.
The most dramatic change came in September 2026, when the AfD won 43.8 per cent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, its strongest result in any German state election. The result brought the party closer to state-level power than at any previous point, according to reports examining the significance of its breakthrough.
The result was more than double the 17.2 per cent secured by Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU. The AfD won 39 of 83 seats in the state parliament, falling three seats short of an outright majority.
In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the party also led polling with 37 per cent. Earlier polling cited by the German Press Agency placed the governing Social Democrats well behind, reflecting the scale of the AfD’s expansion from the 16.7 per cent it secured in the state election of 2021.
At the federal level, the AfD has also climbed to approximately 27 to 28 per cent in national polling, placing it ahead of the CDU in several surveys. German domestic intelligence authorities classified the party as a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation, a designation the AfD has challenged in court. Major German parties continue to rule out cooperation with it, raising the prospect of increasingly fragmented and unstable coalition arrangements.
France
France has experienced a similar transformation.
The populist share of the first-round presidential vote rose from around 10 per cent in the 1980s to approximately 44 per cent in the 2022 election. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has become one of the two political forces reaching the second round in each of the past two presidential elections.
With less than a year remaining before the 2027 presidential election, polling from May 2026 suggested that more than a third of French voters could support a National Rally candidate in the first round, putting the party well ahead of its competitors and leaving it strongly positioned for a second-round contest.
Some National Rally figures have even privately examined the possibility of winning outright in the first round, according to The Connexion. Such an outcome has never occurred in the history of France’s Fifth Republic.
Italy
Italy represents a different stage in the same political transformation: the populist right has already reached government.
Brothers of Italy won the largest vote share of any individual party in the country’s general election, propelling Giorgia Meloni into the prime ministership.
By 4 September 2026, Meloni’s government had reached 1,413 consecutive days in office, surpassing the 1,412 days of Silvio Berlusconi’s second government from 2001 to 2005 and becoming the longest-serving single government in the history of the Italian Republic. The milestone was marked at a Brothers of Italy gathering in Bari.
Berlusconi nevertheless remains Italy’s longest-serving post-war prime minister when his separate terms in office are combined.
The durability of Meloni’s government is particularly significant in a country that has gone through 68 governments over the approximately 80 years of the republic. No Italian government has completed an uninterrupted full five-year parliamentary term.
Sweden
For years, the Sweden Democrats represented one of Europe’s clearest examples of a gradual rather than sudden populist right-wing rise.
The party expanded over six consecutive parliamentary elections and became Sweden’s second-largest political force in 2022. It subsequently gained substantial influence over government policy from outside the cabinet, providing parliamentary support without taking ministerial portfolios, partly because of the political sensitivity surrounding its historical links to racial supremacist movements.
The election of 13 September 2026, however, produced a genuine setback.
The Sweden Democrats fell to third place behind the Moderates, winning 62 seats, 11 fewer than in the previous parliament. The four-party left-leaning bloc led by Magdalena Andersson secured 176 of the 349 parliamentary seats, against 173 for the right-wing bloc, prompting Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson to announce his resignation.
Kristersson had broken a longstanding political taboo before the election by pledging to bring the Sweden Democrats formally into government for the first time if his alliance won. That prospect disappeared with the election result.
Government formation remains complicated, however. Sweden required 37 days to form a government after the 2022 election and 134 days after the 2018 election.
Netherlands
The Netherlands produced a more ambiguous picture.
In the October 2025 election, the centrist D66 party led by Rob Jetten won 16.94 per cent of the vote and 26 seats, while Geert Wilders’ right-wing Party for Freedom received 16.66 per cent and also secured 26 seats. Wilders’ party lost 11 seats.
Yet the result is more accurately understood as a redistribution of support within the broader right rather than a straightforward collapse of populism.
Armida van Rij, senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, argued that the election was “unlikely to represent the end of populism in the Netherlands”. She pointed to the rise of the right-wing JA21 party, which increased its representation from one seat to nine. Van Rij described it as a more moderate version of Wilders’ party that nevertheless carries similar anti-democratic ideas.
Austria and Poland
Austria has also seen a major right-wing breakthrough.
The Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), led by Herbert Kickl, finished first in the 2024 legislative election with 28.8 per cent of the vote and 57 seats, gaining 26 seats. It finished ahead of the Austrian People’s Party on 26.3 per cent, while the Social Democratic Party recorded the worst result in its history at 21.1 per cent and fell to third place.
Perhaps more symbolically significant was the party’s breakthrough in Vienna, historically a stronghold of Austrian social democracy.
In the 2025 Vienna election, the FPÖ jumped from 7.1 per cent and eight seats to 20.4 per cent and 22 seats, an increase of 13.2 percentage points.
In Poland, Karol Nawrocki, backed by the Law and Justice party (PiS), won the presidential runoff with 50.89 per cent against 49.11 per cent for Rafał Trzaskowski. Turnout reached 71.63 per cent.
It marked the third consecutive presidential victory for a candidate backed by PiS.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies described Nawrocki as a hardline nationalist. He had never previously held elected office.
His victory created an institutional confrontation between a right-wing president and the liberal government of Donald Tusk, a political balance likely to shape Poland until the 2027 parliamentary election.
Hungary and the United Kingdom
Hungary stands out as a major exception to the broader populist right-wing advance and represents one of its most significant reversals in 2026.
In the 12 April 2026 election, the centre-right Tisza Party, led by former Fidesz member Peter Magyar, won 141 of the 199 parliamentary seats with 53.18 per cent of the list vote.
That gave Tisza the two-thirds parliamentary majority required to amend Hungary’s Fundamental Law, while the Fidesz-led alliance collapsed to 52 seats, losing 83. Turnout reached 78.99 per cent, 9.4 percentage points higher than in the previous election. Official final figures confirmed the Tisza Party’s 141 seats and 53.18 per cent vote share.
Magyar formally became prime minister on 9 May 2026, ending Viktor Orban’s 16 years in power.
In Britain, Reform UK secured major victories in local elections in both 2025 and 2026, although its 2026 results also showed a decline in vote share compared with the previous year.
The limited public profile of many of its candidates has fuelled the argument that some voters were effectively voting for Nigel Farage rather than for individual local candidates. That phenomenon could prove more difficult to reproduce in a highly scrutinised general election, where individual candidates receive far greater public attention.
United States
The trend extends beyond Europe.
The V-Dem Institute at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg reported that the United States’ score on its Liberal Democracy Index fell by 24 per cent in a single year, while its global ranking dropped from 20th to 51st among 179 countries.
V-Dem described the pace of democratic deterioration as unprecedented in modern US history, with the country’s Liberal Democracy Index score falling to 0.57, its lowest level since 1965.
The report formally downgraded the United States from a “liberal democracy” to an “electoral democracy”, the first such downgrade in more than half a century. Legislative and judicial constraints on executive power were also assessed as having fallen to their weakest levels in more than a century.
Freedom House, meanwhile, gave the United States a score of 81 out of 100 in its 2026 assessment, three points lower than the previous year and part of a cumulative 12-point decline over two decades under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
Argentina
In Argentina’s midterm elections on 26 October 2025, President Javier Milei’s La Libertad Avanza exceeded expectations by winning more than 40 per cent of the national vote.
It became the most-voted party nationwide and won in 15 of the country’s 24 electoral districts, despite the government’s sweeping reductions in public spending.
The result demonstrated that the political impact of Milei’s austerity programme had not prevented his movement from consolidating electoral support.
Chile and Bolivia
The right also registered major advances elsewhere in Latin America.
In Chile’s presidential runoff on 14 December 2025, right-wing candidate José Antonio Kast won 58.2 per cent of the vote against 41.8 per cent for Communist Party candidate Jeannette Jara.
In Bolivia, the left suffered a major defeat as President Rodrigo Paz ended two decades of dominance by the Movement for Socialism (MAS), which was reduced to just two seats.
In Honduras, right-wing candidate Nasry Asfura secured 40.3 per cent, while the left-wing candidate remained below 20 per cent.
Nine Latin American countries are now governed by presidents identified with the political right, including Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Daniel Noboa in Ecuador and Santiago Peña in Paraguay.
Japan
Japan has also seen the emergence of a serious populist right-wing current.
In the July 2025 House of Councillors election, the Sanseito party increased its representation from two seats to 14 while campaigning under the slogan “Japanese First” and opposing what it described as the “excessive acceptance” of foreigners.
One Japanese researcher described Sanseito’s result, rather than the defeat suffered by the governing Liberal Democratic Party, as the election’s real “historic moment”.
The significance lay in the emergence of a serious populist right-wing force in a country long considered relatively insulated from the political phenomenon already visible across numerous Western states.
Since taking office in October 2025, the government of Sanae Takaichi has maintained approval ratings of around 70 per cent.
Her popularity has been attributed partly to her position as Japan’s first female prime minister and partly to an image of firm leadership modelled on figures such as Margaret Thatcher. More fundamentally, her conservative political positioning has coincided with Japan’s wider shift towards the populist right.
Echoes of the Period Before the Second World War
The growth of these movements has revived a historical question: how far can the current political climate be compared with the years preceding the Second World War?
A University of Oslo historian, writing in an analysis published in 2022, identified significant parallels between today’s democratic erosion and the circumstances surrounding the fascist and Nazi seizure of power during the 1930s.
One central point is that fascism did not necessarily arrive through military coups. In several cases, extremist political forces first advanced through electoral politics and existing institutions.
Economic uncertainty, immigration, ethnic nationalism and the narrative of the strong leader are among the themes that historians identify both in contemporary European politics and in the interwar period.
David Ekbladh, professor of history at Tufts University, has similarly argued that the collapse of the optimism of the 1920s, sometimes described as the “first wave of democratisation”, combined with the Great Depression to produce authoritarian populist governments in countries ranging from Japan to Poland.
For historians, the contemporary prominence of figures such as Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping is a reminder of the continuing attraction of authoritarian politics during periods of uncertainty.
The two eras also share another feature: increasing fragmentation of the global economy and renewed reliance on tariffs.
James McDougall, professor of modern history at the University of Oxford, argued in an analysis published by The Conversation that fascism’s expansion during the 1920s was strengthened by the failure of liberals and traditional conservatives to take it seriously.
Rather than maintaining a clear distance, parts of the traditional political establishment absorbed and normalised elements of the new movements. McDougall argues that elements of today’s centre-right are following a comparable pattern.
His argument is not that the world is simply reliving the 1930s. Rather, he sees strong similarities between ideas promoted by the far right in the early twentieth century and those advanced by some contemporary movements.
Historian Ian Kershaw, one of the leading scholars to reject a literal comparison between the two periods, has nevertheless acknowledged that some similarities he encountered while researching Europe between 1914 and 1949 were enough to “make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up”.
Kershaw has argued that Europe today is not necessarily descending into the same political tunnel.
One of his reasons was Germany itself. He viewed a liberal and peaceful Germany, conscious of its past, as fundamentally different from the country that emerged from the crises of the interwar period. He also argued that the European Union’s deeply institutionalised culture of negotiation leaves the continent better equipped to absorb political and economic pressures than it was during the 1930s.
That assessment, however, preceded the AfD’s 2026 victory in Saxony-Anhalt, where the party recorded the strongest state-election performance in its history. The result places the German component of Kershaw’s argument under greater scrutiny than it faced when his assessment was made.
Kershaw also emphasised major differences between the two eras. The balance between military and social spending is different, nuclear weapons have fundamentally altered strategic calculations about war, and governments have so far avoided the comprehensive retreat into economic protectionism that characterised the 1930s.
Sheri Berman, a scholar specialising in historical fascism and the development of European democracy, has likewise argued that important similarities coexist with fundamental differences.
One crucial distinction is that politicians such as Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen present themselves as the “real democrats”. The fascist movements of the 1930s, by contrast, openly expressed contempt for democracy and established armed militias.
An analysis by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute reaches a similar conclusion, arguing that contemporary European far-right parties do not meet the minimum criteria required to classify them as fascist.
The fascist movements that emerged after 1918, including weaker variants such as Francoist Spain and Romania’s Iron Guard, remain historically distinguishable from today’s far-right movements.
Europe Rearms as Military Warnings Intensify
Political change is unfolding alongside Europe’s largest military build-up since the Cold War.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, following talks with General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, said Russia could be ready for confrontation with Europe as early as 2027. He called for “vigilance and focus without frightening people”.
Germany’s foreign minister has also warned that intelligence services are issuing urgent assessments that Russia is, at minimum, creating the option of launching a war against NATO by 2029.
Estonia’s Foreign Intelligence Service offered a more cautious short-term assessment in its 2026 annual report.
It said Russia did not intend to attack Estonia or another NATO member militarily over the following year and expected a similar assessment for the subsequent year, arguing that European deterrence measures were forcing Moscow to calculate the consequences carefully.
At the same time, however, the service warned that Russia was expanding ammunition production quickly enough to replenish stockpiles for future wars.
European Union defence expenditure rose from €218 billion in 2021 to an estimated €381 billion in 2025.
In absolute terms, Germany led with approximately €95 billion in defence spending in 2025, roughly double its 2021 level, with plans to increase spending to €162 billion by 2029.
As a share of economic output, NATO’s eastern members are among the highest spenders.
Poland spent 4.48 per cent of GDP on defence in 2025, the highest proportion in NATO, followed by Lithuania on 4.00 per cent, Latvia on 3.73 per cent and Estonia on 3.38 per cent. The relative ranking shifted somewhat in 2026 as Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia increased expenditure further, while Poland raised its defence allocation towards 4.8 per cent.
At the alliance level, NATO members agreed at the 2025 Hague summit to invest 5 per cent of GDP annually in defence and defence-related requirements by 2035.
The picture that emerges is therefore more complicated than a simple revival of the 1930s.
Right-wing populist movements have become embedded across numerous democracies, authoritarian tendencies are expanding in several political systems, traditional parties are losing ground and Europe is rapidly rearming. Yet contemporary institutions, nuclear deterrence, political structures and the character of today’s right-wing movements remain substantially different from those that defined the interwar period.
The historical parallel is therefore not one of repetition, but of conditions, pressures and political behaviours that increasingly resemble some of the forces that destabilised the democratic order a century ago.
