Eighty years ago, American soldiers vanquished the Axis powers, first in Europe, and at last in Asia. Now, in the year 2025, it appears the ideas of the Axis have been laundered and come home. Our political developments in the United States do not exist in a vacuum. When speaking about the peak of right-wing populist politics in America, we can look over to Europe and how three far-right parties have moved from a pariah status to the foremost threat to the postwar liberal consensus, all the while tightly connected to a larger international right-wing ecosystem.
Italy’s Fratelli d’Italia (FdI) has arguably had the most success of any right-wing populist party in Western Europe. Founded only twelve years ago, FdI has gone from garnering less than two percent of the vote to winning the most recent national election in 2022. This gave Italy its first female prime minister in Giorgia Meloni, who has been described as the country’s furthest right head of government since Benito Mussolini. At 15, Meloni joined the youth wing of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement), a neo-fascist party founded by Mussolini’s supporters. She later co-founded Fratelli d’Italia and has served as its president since 2014. Meloni has taken a hardline stance against illegal immigration and asylum seekers in Italy, but goes beyond the pale in her views on what Italy should look like. She has, on multiple occasions, expressed the idea that Italy and other European countries are the victims of an international plot to replace historical “white” populations with migrants from Asia and Africa – a belief known as the Great Replacement theory. Her promotion of this conspiracy theory has been ridiculed in the Italian press, but it shapes how her government crafts immigration policy.
The far-right party with the longest history of political relevance is Rassemblement National, formerly known as Front National, of France. Front National (FN) was founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen and languished in the periphery of French politics until the 2002 presidential election, wherein a splintered left allowed him and the FN to enter the runoff for the first time. More than a million Frenchmen took to the streets to protest the indignity of a choice between an incumbent president widely considered corrupt and untrustworthy, and a demagogue who reveled in Holocaust denial and racial invective. Le Pen won just under 18 percent of the vote in 2002, but twenty years later, his daughter, Marine Le Pen, would win 41 percent in her rematch against incumbent president Emmanuel Macron. Marine Le Pen has worked hard to soften the image of her party, going so far as to expel her father and rename the party to Rassemblement National (RN). Her efforts have proven fruitful: after taking advantage of popular dissatisfaction with Macron’s tenure as president and pushing her anti-immigration policy ideas into the mainstream, her party garnered 37 percent of the national vote in the 2024 legislative elections, and a poll showed her to be the most popular politician in the nation.
The party most objectionable and furthest away from power is Germany’s Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD). The AfD was founded in 2013 as a mainstream, Eurosceptic alternative to the Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (Christian Democratic Union of Germany), but quickly moved to the furthest fringes of German political discourse. Like its counterparts across the continent, the AfD’s centerpiece policy is its steadfast opposition to immigration and multiculturalism in Germany, but its way of expressing this stance has drawn condemnation from all other political parties. The party revels in banned Nazi slogans like “Alles für Deutschland”, has called for a “180-degree turn” from the current paradigm of Holocaust remembrance in Germany, and has referred to Berlin’s Holocaust memorial as a “monument of shame.” Its politicians have referred to the Third Reich as “just a speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history,” and advocate for the deportation of non-ethnic Germans. Recently, the AfD faced public outcry after a secret meeting was leaked, wherein members of the party, with other right-wing extremists, detailed plans to forcibly remove millions of minorities from Germany should they win control of the government. Due to their extreme positions, all other political parties in Germany have sworn to block the AfD from government at all levels in the nation.
These three parties face different challenges in their home countries, but they are all closely allied with the right wing in the United States. After Vice President JD Vance delivered his widely panned speech at the Munich Security Conference in February, he snubbed then-chancellor Olaf Scholz and instead met with AfD leader Alice Weidel. He criticized the political firewall against the AfD shortly before the election in February of this year, where they placed second in the national legislature, winning every fifth German’s vote. The two largest mainstream parties proceeded to block the AfD from government and formed a centrist coalition. When Marine Le Pen was found guilty of embezzlement and barred from running in the 2027 French presidential election, President Donald Trump called it a “witch hunt” and compared it to his own legal problems. Meloni and her party are by far the least embattled, as it is the only one with a majority in its country, and she has cleaved to Trump to such a degree that her domestic opponents have slammed her as a “courtesan” of the US President. A report from the European Council on Foreign Relations asserts that these moves from the President and his administration are not random, but rather coordinated to weaken mainstream parties and strengthen right-wing extremists, whom they believe are “civilizational allies” against multiculturalism and the “global liberal project”.
These parties, at the present moment, either sit in power or on the brink of grasping it. They have arrived at this point by no accident, but rather through carefully manipulating the political issues of the day for their benefit. At a moment when the ruling party in America is right beside these extremist parties, their opponents in Europe may very well long for an allied power to play the role the United States did eighty years ago, but there is no other state comparable in status and might. For better or worse, there is no replacing us.
