Twenty-four years ago, France went to the polls to stop Jean-Marie Le Pen from becoming President of the Republic. In the second round of the 2002 election, Jacques Chirac won 82.21 percent of the vote to Le Pen’s 17.79. Le Pen’s presence in the run-off was treated as a political emergency requiring something close to national mobilization. Three years later in Germany, the NPD, then the country’s most visible far-right party, won just 1.6 percent in the federal election. Between them, the CDU/CSU and SPD commanded almost 70 percent of the German electorate. The far right was nowhere near exercising serious influence over the federal government.
By the summer of 2026, that Europe survives only in political memory. Marine Le Pen enters the 2027 presidential race with 36 percent in the first round in an Ifop poll conducted in July. In Germany, the AfD won 20.8 percent in the 2025 election and is polling as high as 27 percent in the summer of 2026, enough for first place. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni has already done what Le Pen is still trying to do, and what the AfD remains far from achieving: the right won power, kept it, and then increased its support at the next major electoral test.
The easiest explanation is that Europe has simply become more radical. It is also the laziest and the most superficial.
The Europe of 2005
Europe’s political order in the early years of this century rested on a broad consensus between parties of the center-left and center-right. They differed over taxation, the welfare state, the labor market, and the pace of European integration, but their basic assumptions were shared. Globalization brought more benefits than costs. European integration widened the space for prosperity and stability. Migration was something the state could manage. Europe’s industrial competitiveness was regarded as an enduring advantage.
This was the last period in which a large part of the European electorate could believe that the established parties might get individual policies wrong, but that the system itself basically worked. Over the following decade, that assumption began to unravel. The 2008 financial crisis and the eurozone debt crisis raised a more fundamental question: who pays when the system gets it wrong? Banks were rescued with public money, governments imposed fiscal retrenchment, and industrial regions watched production patterns shift and job security weaken.
For much of educated, urban Europe, openness, mobility and integration meant greater freedom and more opportunity. For many middle and working-class Europeans, the same changes increasingly meant less secure jobs, weaker economic security, and a sense that they were being asked to bear the consequences of decisions over which they had almost no control.
2015 changes the political arithmetic
The migration crisis did not create Europe’s right. The right entered that crisis with an established base of support. Marine Le Pen won 17.90 percent in the 2012 presidential election, and two years later the Front National came first in France in the European elections. In Germany, the AfD came close to entering the Bundestag in 2013, only months after it had been founded.
Then came 2015. More than 1.25 million first-time asylum applicants were registered in the EU that year, more than twice the number recorded the year before. By the autumn, immigration had become one of the most important concerns for European citizens. Migration became bound up with borders, national sovereignty, integration, public services, security, and cultural identity.
Parties of the right now had an opportunity to demonstrate what they had been arguing for years: that states no longer exercised sufficient control over their borders or over decisions that directly affected the lives of their citizens. After that crisis, their growth accelerated. Marine Le Pen reached the second round of the presidential election in 2017, while the AfD entered the Bundestag for the first time that same year as Germany’s third-largest political force.
Europe’s political center spent years misreading that rise. Votes for the new parties of the right were often explained in terms of radicalization, populism, xenophobia, or disinformation. All of those phenomena exist. None of them, however, can by itself explain why the political shift has lasted for years, spread across different social groups, and survived changes of leaders, scandals, and individual crises. Voters began judging governments by a much simpler test: can the state still control the things for which it is responsible?
From 2021 to 2026
The pandemic temporarily reordered political priorities, but it did not restore confidence in the old political order. In Germany’s 2021 election, the AfD fell to 10.4 percent. Four years later, it won 20.8 percent. Between those two votes, European voters were handed the bill for several crises at once.
EU inflation reached 9.2 percent in 2022. The cost of housing, water, electricity, gas, and other fuels rose by an average of 18 percent. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine brought large-scale war back to the European continent, energy dependence became a matter of national security, and industrial policy once again became a question of jobs, production, and competitiveness.
Questions of identity and everyday living standards ceased to be separate political issues. A family paying more for energy, struggling to find a home, waiting too long for a medical appointment, seeing pressure on its school or local services and at the same time hearing arguments about new European obligations does not sort each problem into a separate political category. It asks whether those in power can set priorities and do what they promised.
At the 2024 European elections, rising prices and the cost of living were among the main reasons for turning out to vote for 42 percent of EU citizens, while the state of the economy was cited by 41 percent. In the spring of 2026, the cost of living remained among the greatest concerns of citizens across the EU. That is why the rise of the right today cannot seriously be explained by migration alone. Prices, housing, industry, energy, borders, crime, integration, and public services all feed into the same judgement by voters: who can still govern the country?
The shift extends far beyond the young
France has certainly undergone a generational shift. Among voters under 25, Rassemblement National (RN) rose from 15 percent in the 2019 European elections to 26 percent in 2024. But support also rose sharply among women, people in professional and technical occupations, and parts of the better-educated electorate. The RN list led by Jordan Bardella won 31.37 percent of the vote in France. This is no longer a party confined to one narrow section of the electorate.
Germany further undermines the idea that this is merely a revolt of the youngest voters. In the 2025 federal election, Die Linke, Germany’s democratic-socialist left, came first among voters aged 24 and under. The AfD was strongest among voters aged 25 to 34 and stronger still among those between 35 and 44.
Europe’s right is growing through two processes at once. Younger generations are entering politics without the historical inhibitions that once shaped attitudes towards parties such as RN and the AfD. At the same time, a much larger shift is taking place among voters who spent years supporting social democrats, Christian democrats, republicans or conservatives, and now vote for the right. It is precisely this departure from the traditional political center that explains the scale of the change. The new generation is accelerating it, but it is not producing it on its own.
Italy shows what comes next
The rise of the right is unfolding in a Europe that has retained its core institutions and alliances. In the spring of 2026, 51 percent of EU citizens expressed trust in the Union, support for the euro reached a record 74 percent, and 76 percent of Europeans supported continued assistance to Ukraine until a just and lasting peace is achieved. Europe, in other words, has not become a continent of mass anti-Europeanism. What has changed are political priorities and trust in those who govern.
That is precisely why the Italian case matters so much. Giorgia Meloni brought Fratelli d’Italia to power in 2022 with around 26 percent of the vote. By the time Italians returned to the polls two years later for the European Parliament elections, they had spent two years watching her govern. Fratelli d’Italia was not punished at the polls. It won 28.8 percent and remained by far the strongest political force in the country.
More important still is what did not follow her victory. Italy did not leave the EU, call NATO into question, or change sides over Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Meloni continued to reaffirm her support for Kyiv in 2026. At the same time, she did not abandon the policies that had brought a large part of her electorate to her in the first place: a tougher approach to illegal migration, stronger border protection, public order, and a more forceful defense of national interests within the EU.
This is why Meloni matters politically far beyond Italy. She has shown that voters can demand a far tougher migration and security policy, and greater national control, without wanting to turn away from Europe or break with the West. For years, part of Europe’s political center offered voters what amounted to a near-binary choice: either the existing policy or the risk of isolation, institutional chaos and foreign-policy adventurism. Italy has seriously weakened that argument.
That makes Meloni a more formidable opponent for Europe’s traditional parties than a politician who remains on the margins. She has denied them the easy argument that every move to the right is a leap into the unknown. When she came to power, Italy remained firmly anchored in its European and Atlantic commitments, and her party won a larger share of the vote at the next major election than it had when it entered government.
What Europe’s political center lost
Accepting European integration no longer means being prepared to treat every consequence of open borders as unavoidable. Supporting the green transition does not imply indifference to the electricity bill or the fate of a factory. Solidarity with refugees does not remove the demand that the state know who is entering, who is staying and under what rules. Support for Ukraine does not remove the question of how much European security costs and who will pay for it.
The parties once confined to the margins understood this earlier than the parties that governed Europe. Their greatest advantage is not necessarily that they offer better solutions. RN and the AfD have serious internal contradictions, particularly on economics and in their attitudes towards the EU and Russia. Their advantage is that large numbers of voters believe they at least acknowledge problems that the political center spent years downplaying, postponing or explaining in language that had ceased to mean anything to those voters.
In France, a Marine Le Pen victory in the presidential election is no longer unthinkable. In Germany, the question is no longer whether the AfD belongs in the Bundestag, but how long the political system can function with a party supported by roughly one voter in four while every other major party refuses to work with it. In Italy, that threshold has already been crossed: the right won power and retained its support.
If the traditional parties continue to explain the rise of these parties in terms of the people who vote for them, those voters will have even less reason to return. If they merely borrow their language without demonstrating that the state can control its borders, secure energy supplies, protect industry, build homes, maintain public order, and finance the welfare state, they will strengthen the original rather than the imitation.
For decades, Europe’s political center won because it represented stability. For a growing number of people, stability no longer means preserving the status quo. They want change on a scale large enough to make everyday life feel predictable again.
Perhaps the most important change is the one least visible in opinion polls. Once, a far-right voter had to explain to himself and to others why he was voting for a party outside the bounds of acceptable politics. Today, in millions of European families and among colleagues and friends, such a vote is no longer an isolated one. When a political choice no longer requires social justification, what was marginal ceases to be marginal.
The greatest responsibility therefore lies with the parties that for decades constituted Europe’s political center. They did not lose support because voters suddenly became more extreme, but because they spent too long assuming that old authority, historical reputation, and fear of the alternative would continue to deliver votes. As the cost of living, the labor market, migration pressure and security risks changed, traditional parties often responded late and cautiously, while the language in which they discussed those problems increasingly bore little resemblance to the lives people were actually living.
The greatest danger to Europe’s political center today does not come from Marine Le Pen, the AfD or Giorgia Meloni in themselves. It lies in the center’s insistence on treating their voters as the problem, rather than acknowledging that millions of those voters walked away because they no longer trust the parties that governed Europe for decades. That trust has been lost because too often they have watched the same parties recognise problems only once they become crises, promise changes they fail to deliver, and ask citizens for yet more patience with the consequences of policies they themselves pursued.
After decades in power, many traditional parties began to treat voters’ support as an entitlement. Italy has shown just how dangerous that assumption has become.
Giorgia Meloni did not win because Italians had decided to leave Europe. She won because enough of them had stopped trusting parties that for years insisted they alone could govern the country responsibly. When she took office, Italy did not leave the EU, call NATO into question, or turn its back on Ukraine. What changed were the political tone, the priorities, and the approach to the issues on which the old center had been losing voters’ trust for years.
That is precisely why Meloni matters more to Europe today than the strength of her party alone would suggest. She has shown that the right can retain its political convictions and priorities while assuming full responsibility for governing the state. Voters, for their part, no longer have to choose between change and stability. In Italy, that barrier has already fallen. If the traditional parties in France and Germany fail to understand why, they may soon discover that their voters already have.