Far-right threat exaggerated despite hysteria of some media

IS NAZISM making a comeback? You might think so reading some of the headlines this week. “Behind the migrant row, Europe keeps shifting to the far-right,” warns Time magazine. “Finland leads rise of the far-right in Europe,” according to The Daily Telegraph.

The Irish Times went with the same theme, editorialising, “As similar nationalist parties have done recently in Sweden, Denmark, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Belgium, and Hungary, the True Finns have also, although even more dramatically, become a lightning rod for popular alienation from politics and immigration.”

Is Europe slipping into the abyss? Are we really heading for a new Dark Age, with Europe’s Nazi past coming back to haunt us? Are fascistic far-right parties really ‘on the march again’ everywhere from Greece to France, from Italy to Holland? In a word, no. The current obsession with the rise of the far right tells us far more about the European elites’ crisis of confidence and legitimacy than it does about any Nazi reality.