Far-right parties advance across Europe while Germany's AfD remains isolated

Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, has formally classified the Alternative for Germany as a confirmed right-wing extremist endeavour. The designation places the AfD under surveillance and cements its pariah status: every other party in the Bundestag refuses cooperation, and senior politicians have floated a ban. Yet across the European Union, parties with overlapping rhetoric on migration, Islam and national sovereignty are not merely surviving. They are governing, collapsing coalitions, winning presidencies and reshaping the continent's political architecture.

The Dutch coalition collapses over asylum

The most recent rupture came in the Netherlands. Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom emerged as the largest force in the November 2023 general election, but the PVV leader was blocked from the premiership by prospective coalition partners who judged him too radical. An independent technocrat, Dick Schoof, took the post instead. The arrangement lasted eighteen months. In June 2025 Wilders walked out, declaring that the four-party cabinet had failed to implement the hardline asylum measures he had made a condition of his support.

Wilders told reporters he had presented a plan to close the borders to asylum seekers, expel those already present and shut reception centres. His partners refused to sign. "I signed up for the strictest asylum policies, not for the demise of the Netherlands," he said. New elections are now scheduled for autumn 2025. The PVV's sole registered member is Wilders himself; deputies and ministers are formally only supporters, giving him unilateral control over candidate selection and the party programme. That structure insulates him from internal dissent but also concentrates accountability.

Poland's dual executive: Tusk governs, Nawrocki vetoes

Poland offers a different template. Donald Tusk, the liberal former European Council president, has led a pro-European coalition since December 2023. Yet the Law and Justice party, defeated in that election, retained a powerful foothold: the presidency. In May 2025 PiS-backed Karol Nawrocki narrowly won a runoff against the liberal Warsaw mayor Rafal Trzaskowski. Nawrocki campaigned on an explicitly anti-European, anti-German platform. The Polish presidency carries a legislative veto and control over foreign policy appointments, meaning Tusk's government must now negotiate every major bill with a head of state elected on a platform hostile to the EU's current direction.

PiS remains cautious in Brussels. The party knows that cohesion funds and recovery money, amounting to tens of billions of euros over the current budget cycle, flow from the very institutions its rhetoric attacks. On Ukraine, PiS aligns with the mainstream: it supports Kyiv and a strong NATO eastern flank. But on migration, social policy and the rule of law, the overlap with its European allies is near total. The party opposes abortion liberalisation, same-sex marriage and adoption rights, positioning itself as the political arm of the Catholic Church's conservative wing.

Orban's illiberal model enters its fifteenth year

Viktor Orban's Fidesz-Hungarian Civic Alliance is the longest-serving far-right government in the EU. Founded in 1988 as a radical liberal youth movement, the party pivoted sharply right after 2015, when Angela Merkel's welcome culture for refugees triggered a backlash across Central Europe. Orban now speaks openly of illiberal democracy, frames the "Christian West" as under threat from foreign infiltration, and seeks to limit EU influence over Hungarian domestic affairs. Unlike PiS, Fidesz has cultivated Moscow. Orban maintains energy ties with Russia and has met Vladimir Putin repeatedly since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, most recently in Beijing in October 2023 and in Moscow in July 2024. The Hungarian leader argues that engagement is pragmatic; critics call it ideological affinity.

Fidesz does recognise anthropogenic climate change, a rarity among its European peers, and has not opposed the EU's green transition as vocally as Wilders or Abascal. But on the rule of law, media freedom and judicial independence, Budapest has clashed repeatedly with the Commission, triggering Article 7 proceedings and the freezing of cohesion funds. The Hungarian model demonstrates that a far-right party can entrench itself for decades, rewriting the constitution, capturing the media landscape and neutralising institutional checks while remaining inside the EU.

Slovakia's pivot toward Moscow

Robert Fico's Direction-Slovak Social Democracy (Smer) won the September 2023 election on a platform that blended social spending with hardline nationalism. Fico, serving his fourth term as prime minister, immediately halted military aid to Ukraine, declaring that NATO and the United States had provoked Russia's attack. He described Ukrainians as "Nazis and fascists" and called EU sanctions against Moscow "meaningless and counterproductive." The moves triggered mass protests in Bratislava and other cities, but Fico's parliamentary majority has held.

Smer's migration rhetoric mirrors its neighbours: Fico has said Muslims cannot integrate and that Islam has no place in Slovakia. The party's name retains the "Social Democracy" label, but its policy mix, generous pensions, opposition to LGBT rights, pro-Russia foreign policy, bears little resemblance to the centre-left tradition in Germany or Scandinavia. Slovakia's shift matters because it breaks the Visegrad Group's previous unity on Ukraine. Poland and the Czech Republic remain firmly pro-Kyiv; Hungary and Slovakia now form a dissenting bloc within the EU's eastern flank.

Vox and the Spanish exception

Santiago Abascal's Vox has risen from 0.2 per cent in the 2016 general election to 15 per cent in 2019, making it the third-largest force in the Congress of Deputies. Its support has softened since, but the party remains a fixture. Unlike its northern counterparts, Vox's defining obsession is territorial integrity. Abascal demands the revocation of autonomy for Catalonia and the Basque Country, advocating a recentralised Spanish state. His anti-immigration rhetoric carries a specifically Iberian flavour: he has called for a new Reconquista, invoking the centuries-long Christian reconquest of the peninsula that ended in 1492.

In February 2025 Vox hosted a "Make Europe Great Again" summit in Madrid. Orban and Marine Le Pen attended, signalling an attempt to coordinate a hard-right bloc ahead of the European Parliament's new term. The conservative Partido Popular has occasionally governed regionally with Vox support but refused a national coalition, leaving the party in opposition. Spain's electoral system, with its 350-seat Congress and 3 per cent threshold in most provinces, allows Vox to sustain a significant parliamentary presence without ever crossing the threshold into government.

Denmark: the mainstream absorbs the fringe

The Danish People's Party offers a cautionary tale for populist entrepreneurs. Founded in 1995, it spent two decades as kingmaker for centre-right governments in Copenhagen, extracting ever-tighter asylum laws in exchange for parliamentary support. Its vote share peaked at 21 per cent in 2015. Then the Social Democrats, under Mette Frederiksen, adopted the People's Party's restrictionist platform wholesale. The 2022 election reduced the People's Party to 2.6 per cent. Denmark now operates one of the toughest asylum regimes in Europe, externalised processing, temporary protection only, and a cap on non-Western residents in deprived neighbourhoods, enacted by a social democratic government. The fringe did not need to win; it needed only to set the terms of debate.