The threat of the far-right in Europe is overstated – and it’s counter-productive to keep claiming it

When the first results of Spain’s “snap” general election came through last weekend, the response, at least in much non-Spanish commentary, seemed to be less relief than disappointment. What had been widely billed as a chance for the country’s far-right to win their first share of power since the Franco dictatorship – shock, horror, will those Continentals never learn - turned out rather to have produced more of the same old.

With all the results in, it was clear that Spain was very far from embarking on a new flirtation with fascism. The centre-left had performed better than expected, while the far-right Vox party had not only failed to make any breakthrough, but lost more than a third of the 52 seats it had held. The election merely reinforced the left-right stalemate that had persuaded the prime minister to call a vote in the first place, with Catalan and Basque independence parties holding the balance of power.

The upshot is that Spaniards may be heading back to the polls before long. Vox – and, not for the first time in recent European elections, the opinion pollsters – emerged the chief losers.

But why is it that European far-right parties attract so much fearful anticipation from outsiders when their actual vote invariably fails to match the projections? Whether it is a French presidential election, or a region of Germany or – as now – a general election in Spain, the supposed threat from the far-right tends to dominate pre-election reporting, only to dissolve at the ballot box.

Now it could perhaps be argued that hyping a threat from the far-right is a deliberate scare tactic by the mainstream parties – and maybe there is a bit of that. But it also seems that the tendency to magnify the threat, which might be termed populism, or nationalism, or extremism, comes even more from outside the country.

The hype often seems to be particularly insistent from the UK, where it carries more than a hint of superiority – as in we “stood alone” in the face of Nazism and fascism, while our continental cousins succumbed. However, it might also be said that the lack of a serious far-right party in the UK today may have as much to do with our first-past-the-post electoral system as with any popular rejection of far-right ideas as such. After all, there was a time, let it not be forgotten, when the British National Party won seats at local level, even if the party’s heyday was 20 years or so ago.

Could it be, then, that having appeared to slay the dragon at home, we now tend to magnify it abroad? There may be some of that, but also a tendency not to realise that some of what doomed the BNP may also doom some of Europe’s far-right and may help to account for the Vox party’s losses last week. This is that, once in receipt of an electoral mandate, they find it hard to meet the expectations they have raised.

It was striking. for instance, that Vox performed particularly badly in the regions where it had shared local power with the mainstream right. This could have been because some voters failed to understand the constraints of shared power and felt betrayed when Vox failed to honour its promises. It could also have been because some, especially younger, voters, had suddenly seen aspects of the party’s creed – including its social conservatism – that they found unacceptable, so they reverted to the more centrist right. A spell in power can act as more of a deterrent than a source of appeal.

Nor should the deterrent effect of historical memory be discounted. It was easy, from the outside, to believe that, after the best part of half a century, Spaniards might have banished the Franco experience to the distant past – or that some might see it now in a rosy glow. The results of this election suggest that history does still exert an inoculating effect – as it also does elsewhere.

Practically every French election over the past 30 or so years has come with the warning that first Jean-Marie Le Pen, then his daughter, Marine, could snatch power for the National Front – now renamed the National Rally party. This has not happened. The year that the prospect seemed closest, 2002, when Jean-Marie Le Pen reached the run-off against Jacques Chirac, was also the year that it receded the furthest, with Chirac winning by an unprecedented margin.

The National Front has won control of some councils, the zenith perhaps being the naval city of Toulon in 1995, when there was a strong vote for the far-right in much of the south. But the same voter experience of the far-right in power that may have militated against new gains for Vox has generally led France’s far-right to lose as much as it gained. The extent to which a far-right vote is a local protest – against deprivation, neglect by the centre, poor infrastructure etc - should not be excluded either – which may also be why a local success often fails to translate into a national trend.

Particular conditions help to explain why recent victories for Germany’s far-right, the Alternative fuer Deutschland (AfD), are unlikely to become a national phenomenon. Historical memory is one reason, but social specifics are another: the AfD’s strength is mostly in the former East, which can still feel neglected, despite the best efforts of the central government, and where there was less effective inoculation against the past. It was in Sonneberg, a relatively small administrative district, in the east that the AfD recently won control of a council for the first time. But the leader of the centre-right CDU party, Friedrich Merz, had to retreat smartly after broaching the possibility of local cooperation – which suggests how far the AfD is from wider power.

Specifics are also important in the two European countries where the far-right could be said to have won national power. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, whose Brothers of Italy party is described as having “neo-fascist roots”, is in coalition with the far-right Lega and the late Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. Her government has been as pragmatic as ideological, kept in line by the limitations of domestic democracy, but also by Brussels.

And Brussels is the authority that at least partially reins in Viktor Orban’s ambitions in Hungary. The perpetual tension between Orban’s electoral mandate at home and the judicial and other requirements of the EU does not make for smooth-running politics in either capital, but it restricts how far Orban can be considered a leader of the stereotypical far-right.

There is no room for complacency, of course. But the idea that the far-right, in whatever guise, is about to sweep to power across Europe seems very far from reality – and even further, given last week’s results in Spain. What is more, the hype and the scare-mongering about “populism” that tends to come, most vociferously, from the UK, risks being counter-productive. We need to be more discriminating about when to cry “wolf”.