At the end of his 1981 book, Bringing AH to San Cristobal, George Steiner asks readers to imagine the unthinkable, writes The New York Times. It’s 1980, and Mossad agents have just made an incredible capture in the South American jungle: Adolf Hitler.

In the parallel universe of the novel, a former dictator fled Germany in 1945 to hide across the Atlantic. Captured by a team of Nazi hunters, Hitler, now 91, delivers a speech in which he apologizes while pondering the future of humanity. “In a world that tortured political prisoners and deprived the Earth of plants and animals,” exclaims Hitler, “it was believed that the species of ‘one from hell’ had disappeared.” One day, however, his people will return, and their “crimes will be equaled and surpassed by the crimes of others.”

It is hard not to notice the modern resonance of Steiner’s words. Four decades after the publication of this novel, the far right is on the march again. While the trend is clearly global and manifests itself from New Delhi to Washington, one continent in particular has undergone a stunningly unified slide to the far right: Europe.

Such avant-garde countries as Hungary and Poland have been under the leadership of the extreme right for several years. Today, countries like Italy and Finland are ruled by far-right forces, and in Belgium, France and Sweden they are getting closer and closer to power. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose party, the Fratelli d’Italia, is drawn directly from Mussolini’s fascists, stands out as the new face of the Nationalist International, on both sides of which[ de personaje precum Viktor Orban, Mateusz Morawiecki și Marine Le Pen.

Mareea extremei drepte europene își adună forțele de multă vreme. Primele reușite răzlețe le-a avut în anii ’80 și ’90, pentru a începe să avanseze consecvent după 2000, nu în ultimul rând și în Austria, unde extrema dreaptă a intrat în guvern. Însă în urma pandemiei și a războiului din Ucraina a avut loc o transformare importantă. În loc să mai pară simpli participanți la jocul electoral sau vectori ai opiniei publice, partidele europene de extrema dreaptă încep să arate acum ca niște forțe plauzibile și normale, apte de a guverna. După ce a stat vreme îndelungată exclusiv în opoziție, extrema dreaptă se mută la putere.

How can this new and disturbing development be explained? After the vote for Donald Trump and Brexit in 2016, and then the first electoral successes of Le Pen and the Alternative for Germany party, many tried to explain the rise of the far right in terms of populism. But this explanation concealed more than it revealed.

One after the other, the explanation clearly states that the far-right leaders are the true representatives of the forgotten people, even if the politicians in question also belong to the elites. On the other hand, he appears to blame the rise of the far-right on the irrationality of voters, ignoring those who have held power on the continent for 30 years.

Since the signing of the Maastricht Agreement in 1991, which limited government spending and deflation, European politicians have become increasingly subservient to business interests at the expense of citizens. In what political scientist Peter Mair calls “elite retreat,” the public has become increasingly reluctant to make big promises to the electorate for fear of undermining any of their pro-market measures. [aici, mai degrabă „pro-afaceriști” – n.trad.].

So politicians had to find another way to maintain their control. And this is where the far right proved its usefulness. With the imminent threat of right-wing extremism, politicians from established parties can present themselves as the lesser evil. While power remained untouched by others, politicians seemed to sit back and watch political common sense — especially on immigration and welfare — slide further and further to the right.

By and large, it worked. Because for three decades, the continent’s dominant parties held power without any serious opposition. But their problem was that they were too successful. With the absence of opposition forces that once balanced Europe’s unstable societies, such as powerful left-wing radical parties and trade unions, all defeated in the 1970s and 1980s, European leaders have lost their discipline. Under their rule, inequality began to rise, the economy began to fail, and public services fell into disrepair.

However, in such a dangerous situation, the far-right gradually managed to position itself as the only reliable force challenging the system. And now, having received all the support from the periphery, her time has come.

Europe’s drift to the extreme right inevitably prompts us to make historical comparisons. It is clear that Europe is returning to the 1930s with the extremist wave of those times. But the comparison is untenable in several respects. First, European fascists rose to power amid bitter social opposition: both Hitler and Mussolini won after trade union movements tried to foment revolutions. But today in the European arena, the absence of a strong proletariat, fatally undermined by deindustrialization and the loss of labor markets, is striking.

Unlike the 1930s, when fascist street violence was at its peak, today’s far right is based on demobilization. Maloney’s party won a majority in a vote in which nearly 40 percent of Italians chose not to vote, a drop of almost 10 percent from the previous election. In France, Le Pen’s National Assembly has always performed best in regions with the highest absenteeism. And in Poland, the Kaczynski family, which controls the Law and Justice party, rules a country where less than 1% of citizens are registered in the party.

There is another significant difference. Hitler and Mussolini promised national elites that they would build colonial empires similar to those their British and French competitors already had. Modern far-rights have a different view of the world. Instead of seeking expansion, their main desire is to protect Europe from the rest of the world. They have resigned themselves to the idea that Europe will no longer be a major player in the 21st century; the best we can hope for her is to protect her from the hordes.

In Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel Camp of the Saints, which has become a textbook for today’s far-right, the goal of the supposed saviors of Europe is not to conquer Africa, but to keep its inhabitants south of the Mediterranean.

Modest ambitions define the international approach of the extreme right, starting with the EU. For decades, far-right parties have focused their anger on the bloc’s undemocratic restrictions, sometimes even calling for an exit from the union. This disobedience gradually disappeared. Far-right politicians still oppose immigration laws, but they remain silent about their country’s dependence on EU funds. As for the country, it is increasingly dependent on the US from a geopolitical point of view, and its industry is losing competition to China’s.

If Hitler had sought to destroy the Anglo-American order and gain world domination, the new authoritarian powers of Europe would have been content to occupy only a niche in the already existing power structure. Their goal is to adapt to decline, not reverse it.

The rise of the European extreme right does not obey any natural law. The far-right Vox party lost the electorate in the last Spanish election in part because the left-wing ruling coalition managed to impress in the fight against inflation.

However, Vox succeeded in moving the center of gravity of Spanish political life further to the right. Even though many Spanish farmers were unable to plant seeds this summer due to a prolonged drought, the issue of ecology was almost entirely absent as a campaign issue. Elsewhere, particularly in the Netherlands, the popularity of the far right has seriously undermined efforts to address climate damage.

In a world that is destroying “plants and animals,” as Steiner’s hero Hitler predicts, “the one from hell” seems to have returned. But it can hardly be said that he is back in the form we expected, this time with completely new dangers.

Article by Anton Jager (Professor of Political Science at Oxford University)

The material was created with the support of Rador Radio Romania