Europe’s far-right turmoil is only the start – all the signs point to worse to come

This recent mayhem in Germany marks the start of the next battle for liberal democracy.

Europe, battered and bruised, is gearing up for a spectacular 12 months: presidential and parliamentary elections will take place in Finland, France, Greece, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, and Spain. The number is not unusual in a European Union of 27 countries, but they involve most of the influential members – at a time of internal turbulence and threats from Russia and the United States.

Several trends are interlinked. Far-right parties are expected to do well everywhere; the traditional arc of centre-left to centre-right is hollowing out, as mainstream governments lack the confidence to confront the new dark reality by enacting radical reforms. And turnout is generally increasing. By tacking further to the extreme, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has identified a new base of voters who had long since given up on the ballot box.

These elections will not follow a straight line. The populists (usually but not always on the right) will not win outright power everywhere. In some places they may not even win a share of power. But, aided and abetted by social-media trolls instigated by the Kremlin and by Donald Trump’s Maga movement, they are dictating the terms and parameters of the debate.

Despite three traumatic defeats for his Christian Democrats, the German chancellor Friedrich Merz appears to have weathered the immediate storm. The AfD – on the extreme of the extremes with policies that include excluding children who don’t have permanent residency in Germany from attending regular schools, citizen patrols and closer economic ties to Russia – continues to surge. The Left party is set to run the capital, Berlin. But, with no more regional elections for six months, Merz has bought some time for his coalition with the Social Democrats to try to deliver meaningful reform and kickstart growth.

Attention is therefore turning elsewhere, particularly to the other nation in the European engine room. Two rounds of voting next April and May will establish whether Marine Le Pen will finally achieve her goal of becoming France’s president. There is still some way to go, and political scientists point out that, according to the cycle, polls only begin to show an accurate direction into the new year.

Yet Le Pen and her National Rally are riding high with polls showing them clearly ahead in first-round voting intentions for next year’s presidential election, while the various parties of the middle ground struggle to alight on a single convincing candidate. If the choice is fragmented, it might allow the far-left firebrand, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, to sneak into the run-off.

Assuming she does win, there are two schools of thought. One is that all bets are off: the cohesion of Nato and the EU would be fatally undermined – after all, think of the damage that Viktor Orban did as president of Hungary, with its population of only 10 million. He repeatedly opposed or qualified Nato’s increasingly strong support for Ukraine, which complicated the alliance’s effort to present a united position towards Russia.

The other is that Le Pen would continue down her path of “de-demonising” her brand, dropping calls to leave the EU and distancing the party from the Kremlin. In so doing, she would emulate Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. But which Meloni? Italy’s elections take place later, by the end of 2027 but already Meloni is feeling the pressure from a party even more to the right. The newly launched National Future party, led by General Roberto Vannacci, is rapidly gathering support and attracting defectors from the governing coalition. It is already polling at around 8 per cent, making it Italy’s fourth-largest political force.

Spain’s Sánchez is an altogether different proposition ... he is going in the opposite direction, making a point of defying Trump and celebrating immigration

He first burst onto the scene with The World Upside Down, a book condemned by critics as racist, homophobic and misogynistic – and became a bestseller. His platform includes remigration – the forced return of immigrants (first popularised by the AfD), a limit on foreign residents, allowing 14-year-olds to enter the workforce and salaries for stay-at-home mothers. Having served in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia and as a military attaché in Moscow, Vannacci plays well on issues of patriotism and identity, providing an ideological “clarity” his supporters say Meloni has jettisoned.

Meloni is responding by seeking to copy him. As well as leading a pan-European denunciation of Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, for the recent migrant “invasion” of the Spanish enclave of Ceuta inside Morocco, she is now promising to ban burqas and niqabs in schools, and to limit the number of foreign students in classes. She is being advised to offer Vannacci a place in a future coalition.

Spain’s Sánchez is an altogether different proposition. With Spain’s socialist government mired in sleaze allegations and assaulted from the right, he is going in the opposite direction, making a point of defying Trump and celebrating immigration.

The cutting of diplomatic ties with Israel back in 2024 due to Spain’s recognition of Palestine, the clash with Trump over Nato defence spending targets, and the banning of the use of Spanish airbases for the US to attack Iran earlier this year have cemented him as a totemic figure for European socialists.

Even so, four recent regional elections have yielded poor results, even in former strongholds in Andalusia and Extremadura. The conservative PP did comparatively well, while the far-right Vox is now kingmaker. In coming months, Sánchez’s wife, Begoña Gómez, could stand trial on corruption charges. She denies wrongdoing, and the prime minister insists she is a victim of so-called “lawfare” – the manipulation of the law for political purposes. But she is not the only one who could be in the dock.

A study from 2025, showed that 41 per cent of respondents across the 10 European countries agreed with the statement that there is a group of people ‘trying to replace the native-born population with immigrants’

Spain’s elections must be held by next August and while Sánchez’s PSOE can’t be written off, it is the right that is making the running. He only prevailed last time after securing fragile deals with another leftist group, Sumar, and Basque and Catalan separatist parties. Relations since then have soured and a recent poll shows far-right separatist party Catalan Alliance would claim over 15 per cent of the votes.

Portugal has so far managed to buck the trend of a far-right surge, with presidential elections earlier this year seeing António José Seguro of the centre-left comfortably defeating the candidate of the far-right Chega (which means “Enough”). Yet, in echoes of Meloni vs Vannacci and Reform UK being challenged by the new Maga darling, Restore, Chega is being threatened by an insurgent that is even more extreme. Reconquista has already achieved over 5 per cent and it hasn’t even been registered formally as a party yet.

The movement has campaigned around what it calls “population replacement” theory as well as remigration. Afonso Gonçalves, its leader, looked to the results in Germany as “proof that nationalist and identitarian policies are exactly the kind of policy we need to win elections and save our countries”. That language is borrowed almost verbatim from the US National Security Strategy published last November, which talked of supporting “patriotic” movements in their quest to stave off “civilisational erasure”.

What was once a fringe far-right belief – that immigration amounted to the deliberate “replacement” of native populations – has moved firmly into the political mainstream. In fact a study from 2025, showed that 41 per cent of respondents across the 10 European countries agreed with the statement that there is a group of people “trying to replace the native-born population with immigrants” – 17.5 per cent strongly agreed.

Finally, to Poland, where next autumn’s parliamentary elections will be crucial, particularly in terms of Russia-Ukraine. Since late 2023, the country has had two seats of power, the presidency run by the centrist-conservative Donald Tusk, and the presidency of the far-right Karol Nawrocki. As in so many places, it feels like Poland is split down the middle.

However, complicated electoral arithmetic suggests that the parties on the right and far-right will better coalesce than those in the mainstream, ushering in a return of the Law and Justice party. That would give the far-right total dominance, producing not just a return to constitutional gerrymandering and national-conservative policies but also the withdrawal of what is left of cooperation with Ukraine.

What happens in Poland will strongly influence the rest of Central and Eastern Europe. When Orban ran Hungary, he could rely on Robert Fico of Slovakia, to join him in defying Europe and aligning with Moscow. Since then, Fico has gone quiet, but he and the recently elected prime minister of the Czech Republic, Andrej Babiš, would sharpen their ultra-nationalist positions again.

To think that just a few months ago many political scientists wondered whether the spectacular ousting of Orban might suggest the bubble was bursting.

John Kampfner is author of ‘Braver New World’