Today’s New York Times highlighted the growing role of the far-right parties in Europe. Anti-immigration parties with fascist roots—and an uncertain commitment to democracy—are now mainstream. The growth of right-wing populism often takes the form of distrust of the European Union and of politicians in general. They want a return to “traditional, national values.”

The result is that anti-immigrant parties may win as many as a quarter of the seats in the 720-seat European Parliament. This could lead to a hardening of immigration regulations Europewide, hostility to environmental reform, and pressure to be more amenable to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Across Europe, the far right is becoming the right, absent any compelling message from traditional conservative parties. Not only have the parties of an anti-immigrant right surged, they have seen the barriers that once kept them out crumble as they are absorbed into the arc of Western democracies.

In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has political roots in a neo-fascist party, now leads Italy’s most right-wing government since Mussolini. In Sweden, the center-right government depends on the fast-growing Sweden Democrats, another party with neo-Nazi origins, for its parliamentary majority. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders is a Dutch politician who leads the Party for Freedom. His party did well in national elections. Center-right parties have agreed to negotiate with him to form a governing coalition. Wilders called Moroccan immigrants “scum.”

Could this resurgence of parties with fascist roots really overturn European freedom and democracy? The optimistic view is that they are no more than pale descendants of history’s tyrants, constrained by the existence of a European Union that was created to guarantee peace among its members. That is a lulling view. The language of these parties may be less incandescent than former President Donald J. Trump’s invocations of “bloodshed,” but as they whip up support by scapegoating immigrants, and even move to lock in systems that could perpetuate their power, the threat to the postwar order seems real enough.

Historical lessons, it seems, fade after three generations. Warnings of the disasters that engulfed 20th-century Europe under fascist governments tend not to resonate with 21st-century supporters of xenophobic nationalist movements that have none of the militarism of fascism, nor the personality cults of its dictatorial leaders, but are fed by hatred of “the other” and jingoistic hymns to national glory.

The path to power, or the brink of it, by the far right has been a long one. Over the almost 80-year arc of the postwar period, the once-dominant center-left and center-right — represented in France by the Socialists and the Gaullists, and in Germany by the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats — have seen the foundations of their support (labor unions for the left and the church for the right) gradually erode.

Thomas Bagger, the state secretary of the German Foreign Office said, “We lost our trust that we had figured out the long arc of history and that it bends toward democracy. Russia lost its idea of the future, and Putin turned to the past. We are in danger of falling into the same trap.”

Mass immigration — some 5.1 million immigrants entered the European Union in 2022, more than double the number the previous year — is the core issue behind the changing nature of the right in Europe.

Mass immigration is widely resented. Aging populations fear that immigration will put enormous pressure on their social safety nets that they have long paid into. Overlooked are the benefits that immigrants can bring to societies with shrinking labor forces and tax bases. Instead, the focus is on migrants benefiting from handouts.

Jordan Bardella who is president of France’s National Party, a right-wing populist party, said, “We have to make our country less attractive to a form of immigration that sees us as a social cash machine. The vocation of France is not to support all the world’s misery! Social assistance and child benefits must be reserved for French citizens.”

Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, who has been in power for a total of 18 years and is an ally of Mr. Trump, has established a template for the new right:

  • Demonize migrants and neutralize an independent judiciary,
  • Subjugate much of the news media,
  • Create loyal new elites through crony capitalism,
  • Energize a national narrative of victimhood and heroism through the manipulation of historical memory and,
  • Claim that the “people’s will” overrides constitutional checks and balances.