Since the 1980s, European political parties such as the Alliance for the Future of Austria, founded by Jörg Haider, and the National Front, founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen, have broadened their electoral base and forced their opponents, that is to say the traditional social democratic left and conservative right, to drop the labels they had used against them. The label “extreme right” became “far-right” and, currently, replaced by “populist.”
Today, we have no extreme right or far-right parties in Europe; we only have “populist” parties that have established themselves as parties of government in more than half of the European Union. Solidly based social democratic regimes in such places as Scandinavia and Finland have been dethroned by coalitions led by “populist” parties.
Similar coalitions are in power in Estonia, Greece, Italy, Poland and Slovakia.
