László ANDOR

FEPS Secretary General

90 years ago, in July 1936, the Bayreuth opera festival featured Richard Wagner’s Siegfried, as it had many times before and since. After this performance, however, one of the festival’s regular guests, who was the leader of Germany at the time, received two envoys from the Spanish nationalist general Francisco Franco. As a result, Germany helped Franco to attack the Spanish Republic from Morocco, and later, Italy also provided massive military support to the fascist forces to wage a civil war on the democratic Republic, which lasted almost three years. 

In 1936, the emerging Italo-German axis sought to suppress, in particular, the possibility that a broad democratic coalition (‘popular front’) would implement social reform in Spain and represent an alternative to their retrograde, violent and chauvinistic politics in the eyes of Europeans. In interwar Europe, democracy was young and fragile. In Italy, it was not given a proper chance. In Germany, in 1933, once the Great Depression destabilised economic and social relations, it was easy to sweep aside the Weimar Republic. The fascists in Germany and Italy even felt they were entitled to impose their views in other countries as well. 

The historic parallel might seem far-fetched, but let us just acknowledge that over the last two years, political commentators repeatedly raised the question whether fascism is making a return – on both sides of the Atlantic. Europeans often think of history as moving in cycles. What happened before can become a pattern that repeats itself. Karl Marx added to this, in his comments on Napoleon III’s coup d’état (1851), that it can first be a tragedy and, the second time, a farce (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1852). The continuing and seemingly irresistible rise of the far-right in Europe, however, is not a joke. We are not only witnessing a slip in public sentiment, but also strong international cooperation among anti-democratic nationalist forces and, increasingly, a slow but steady centre-right alignment with far-right positions. Their program is to undo as much as possible of the progressive reforms of recent decades. And they have found one main enemy: the Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. They see red whenever Sánchez or the current Spanish government appear in the news. 

For right-wing politicians and their propaganda machinery, it took just a few seconds to instrumentalise the late July border incident in Ceuta. But Spain’s immigration policy is just the tip of the iceberg. The right-wing axis hates the Spanish Socialist experience because they are standard bearers of gender equality as well as climate security, and also delivered more than minuscule wage growth to working people since returning to power. They wanted to crucify Sánchez for injecting social objectives into the implementation of the EU’s post-Covid-19 recovery fund. Italian right-wing politicians were leading the chorus after Ceuta, and even provoked a tit for tat around the suspension of Schengen. A letter taking aim at Sánchez’s migration policies for “undermining the security of the bloc’s borders” was quickly circulated. Spain’s actual neighbours – France and Portugal – kept their calm and didn’t sign, but Germany did not resist the temptation.

While it is easy to explain why the nominally centre-right Merz aligns with the hard-right Meloni, the behaviour of Denmark’s Social Democrats has become puzzling. It is one thing to be pragmatic on migration and rebalance a wide range of policies in the domestic context, but it is a completely different one to join in the campaign of a far-right leader of another country, in a supportive role. Something really is broken in the state of Denmark. The Danish EPP MEP Henrik Dahl called Sánchez a ‘Red Orbán’, forgetting not only that Orbán’s and Sánchez’s positions have been diametrically opposed on all critical issues (Trump, Ukraine, gender, climate, migration etc.), but also that it was exactly the EPP which provided a cover for Orbán when he was moving away from the European laws and values after 2010. 

The alliance between German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni did not begin with the Ceuta crisis and the social media carpet-bombing of Spain. The flirtation between the increasingly anti-social centre-right and the tactically sophisticated far-right started years ago, in several EU member states, when they formed government coalitions. They became emboldened by the green and liberal losses in the 2024 European Parliament elections. 

Foreign policy is a major factor behind this right-wing campaign. In the EU, Sánchez has been most consistent in his policies to defend human rights, preserve EU cohesion, and promote an alternative to Merz and Meloni’s economic deregulation paradigm, inspired by the Argentinian President Javier Milei and largely implemented by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. On the other hand, the right bloc assumes that appeasing Trump, step by step militarising Europe and providing continued support to the Netanyahu regime in Israel would be sufficient to retain the US’ ‘goodwill’, on which Europe’s security apparently rests. 

Europe would not be in this sorry state without the weakness of Social Democracy. But, interestingly, the silver lining is emerging exactly where the populist deformation seemed to have started ten years ago: the US and the UK. After Brexit and Trump ten years ago, new and potentially inspirational progressive beginnings in both countries deserve attention. In the US, there is a democratic socialist awakening underway, notably with New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and in the UK, the successful start of Andy Burnham’s tenure as Prime Minister is delivering crucial corrections and recovering the public confidence in Labour. 

Of course, one cannot simply translate municipal achievements from Manchester or New York into national success. And neither local nor national experience, however thrilling, can simply be copied and pasted to other countries. But it is certainly true that local politics can be an excellent school for serving the people’s interests in public office and for developing skills in policy innovation and effective communication. And iIt might be that the two-party system (as in the US and the UK) is more efficient at producing clear alternatives. The European continent has more pluralistic systems, making coalition politics increasingly inevitable and eventually changing the individual political parties’ profile. Social Democrats can be active and successful in centrist coalition politics, but if they are taken for granted by more right-wing coalition leaders, their influence and credibility decline. 

Without policy alternatives, neither demonstrations nor administrative measures can halt the drift towards the far right. We have lived through episodes of protest against violence, militarism, racism and a right-wing populist surge in general. More mobilisation is needed, but also more organisation, which is apparently where the progressive side is lagging behind. According to the Oxford political scientist Anton Jäger, we live in an era of ‘hyperpolitics‘: intense politicisation without political institutionalisation. The latter may be one of the missing links today, without assuming that future institutions would look like those of the past. However, the reasons for speeding up might be similar.

In 1936, as it is well known, Adolf Hitler travelled from Bayreuth to Berlin to open the Olympic Games. Of course, history does not repeat itself, but in 2026 we again witnessed the over-politicisation of a worldwide sporting event: the FIFA football 2026 World Cup. After a lot of controversy, Spain triumphed, Argentina was humiliated, Germany had a disgraceful exit and Italy was not even there. This, however, should not make anyone complacent. Coincidentally, a young Mussolini (a great-grandson of the duce) has just made his debut at Lazio’s football team!

Photo credits: Shutterstock/Sandra Moraes