Euroviews. The far right is already part of the European mainstream — it’s just high time to finally admit it

In late November, Geert Wilders and his far-right PVV’s victory in the snap Dutch general elections seemingly stunned political observers across the media spectrum.

Analysts were quick to point out how the success of the far right was the result of "mainstreaming" by predominantly centre-right parties who tended to take over the far-right’s rhetoric and programmatic talking points on immigration.

And while Wilders’ result of 23.5% of the vote in a very fragmented partyscape was arguably a political "earthquake" in the Netherlands, dire statements about the far right’s ascendancy in Europe and pessimistic predictions about the upcoming European elections followed.

It seemed quickly forgotten that just a month earlier in October, in Poland — a country with more than double the population of the Netherlands — a broad alliance of opposition parties managed to trounce the competing radical and far-right parties in an ugly and heavily contested election signalling the likely end of eight years of illiberal rule under Law and Justice (PiS).

Also in October, the far right underperformed in local elections in Bulgaria, a country where various far-right parties (ATAKA, NFSB, VMRO) had been junior governing partners or offered necessary silent support to minority governments for most of the past decade and a half.

Admittedly, neither Poland nor Bulgaria, owing to their post-communist transitions after 1989, have any traditional centre-right parties of the western European kind such as Christian-democratic or liberal parties that would have mainstreamed a generic far-right.

Nor is opposing immigration an exclusive talking point of the far right or centre-right in Central and Eastern Europe, as the nominally left-wing and populist SMER of