Europe's surging populist right reshapes establishment politics

London — From the upper floors of Millbank Tower, a skyscraper overlooking the River Thames in London, the U.K. Houses of Parliament are just a few hundred yards away. For decades, the building housed the headquarters of Britain's Conservative Party, one of the world's oldest political parties. 

Today, it is home to Reform UK, the right-wing populist party led by Nigel Farage that is hoping to — and by some measures may already have — replace the Conservatives as the dominant force on the British right.

The change of occupants reflects a wider political upheaval sweeping some of Europe's biggest democracies. In France, Marine Le Pen's right-wing National Rally has overtaken much of the traditional right ahead of the next year's presidential election. 

In Germany, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, has made historic electoral gains, challenging the center-right Christian Democrats. There are similar trends in Italy, Spain, Sweden and other corners of the continent.

While the histories and ambitions of the movements in all these countries differ, collectively, their rise is forcing many of Europe's established conservative parties to make a choice: either adopt some of the populist right's increasingly hard-line positions on immigration and national identity and cooperate with them, or risk losing voters to them altogether.

"The larger issue is the general great realignment of politics towards identity and nationalism being the main axis of debate, not the economy," Steve Baker, a former British Conservative government minister, told CBS News.

The European Commission forecasts EU economic growth of just 1.1% in 2026, down from 1.5% in 2025. Baker, who pointed to President Trump's election in the United States as evidence of the same wider trend, believes the shift reflects a deeper frustration with political and economic institutions.

"The world does not work for far too many people, and almost no one is able to explain why," he said. "In that environment ... someone gets the blame."

Increasingly, he warned, that blame is being directed at ethnic and cultural minorities.

Britain's battle for the right

In Britain, the Conservative Party is fighting for its political survival after its 14-year hold on power was brought to an end with a crushing electoral defeat in 2024.

Reform UK, led by Farage, has capitalized on and encouraged anger over immigration, accusing successive Conservative governments of breaking promises to reduce immigrant arrivals as net migration reached a record of nearly a million in the party's final years in power. A September poll found that 44% of Britons considered immigration one of the most important issues facing the nation.

But the battle for Britain's political right is increasingly about more than immigration numbers. It has become a debate over British identity, ethnicity and who can call themselves English, with research finding support for ethnicity-based definitions of citizenship increasing.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, whose parents are Nigerian, has challenged those on the right who seek to define Englishness through ancestry alone, after London-born senior Reform UK politician Suella Braverman — who is of Indian descent —  said she does not consider herself English, because "Englishness is an ethnicity."

"I don't want to live in a country run by people who ... debate whether my mixed-race children are English," Badenoch said at the Conservative Party conference in October. "We must not let these people take us backwards."

Baker, who represented the Wycombe constituency in southeast England as Conservative Member of Parliament, told CBS News that voter concerns about immigration and demographic change cannot simply be dismissed.

He said in some local areas of his constituency, "the minority white population remaining will often express discontent that the area in which they live now looks radically different to when they moved in, and people do object to that," he said. Census data does support his assertion that in some local areas of Wycombe, white residents have become minorities, though not in the constituency as a whole.

Baker added that he opposes the turn to ethnicity in Britain's current political debates.

"None of us were talking about ethno-nationalism a few years ago," he said. "I recoil in absolute horror to see this conversation going mainstream."

After polling at around 28% in May, Reform U.K.'s support has recently fallen to 22% in some surveys as the party deals with internal controversies and financial scandals. 

Farage and Reform are also facing pressure from parties further to the right. 

Restore Britain, led by former Reform lawmaker Rupert Lowe and publicly backed by billionaire Elon Musk, is targeting voters who believe Farage's party isn't pushing hard enough on immigration, Islam and national identity.

One poll put Restore's support as high as 9%, suggesting the battle for Britain's conservative hearts and minds is far from settled.

Germany's political firewall under pressure

In Germany, the direction of right wing political movements is especially fraught given its history as the birthplace of the Nazi party. Since World War II, all of Germany's established parties have maintained what's become known as a political firewall against far-right extremists, refusing to enter governing coalitions with any party associated with nationalist, anti-democratic rhetoric or with links to extremist movements. 

That firewall, or brandmauer in German, has stood against the AfD, which has been designated an extremist group by some regional authorities due to the associations and rhetoric of figures within the party.

The AfD openly uses the term and espouses "remigration," a notion anti-hate groups say has been employed by extreme right-wing activists to advocate the expulsion of all immigrants and, in some cases, non-white European citizens.

The party insists its own definition is different, describing remigration as "all measures and incentives for the lawful and legally compliant return of foreigners who are required to leave the country to their homeland." 

The AfD explicitly rejects the removal of German citizens on the basis of their ancestry, stating "all Germans are part of our nation, regardless of origin, ancestry, worldview, or religious affiliation.". 

But German security authorities have documented links between AfD figures and extremist activists who advocate for a broader, ethnicity-defined concept of remigration. 

The AfD's recent gains in local and regional elections is putting the firewall under pressure. 

In September, the AfD won 43.8% of the vote in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, more than doubling its support from the previous election. Chancellor Friedrich Merz's center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which had previously led the state government, finished a distant second with 17.2% of the vote. 

The AfD has built its strongest base in eastern Germany, seizing on lingering resentment over the unification of the country's Cold War-era East and West, economic inequality and a widespread distrust of political institutions. But its support now extends well beyond those traditional strongholds. 

The AfD's rise has also been fueled by dissatisfaction with Germany's handling of the 2015–2016 European migration crisis. The country, under former Chancellor Angela Merkel and amid broad sympathy for people being displaced by Syria's civil war, welcomed about 890,000 asylum seekers in 2015 alone, more than any other European nation. 

A decade later, in the 2025 federal election, the AfD won approximately 32% of the vote in eastern states and 18% in western Germany, becoming the country's second-largest party nationally.

AfD politician Tomasz Froelich told CBS News the party has attracted voters from across the political spectrum, especially "working-class voters, skilled workers in industrial occupations who fear for their economic future, and small business owners who are not financially secure."

Froelich predicted the major parties that have led Germany for decades would eventually fail to maintain the firewall keeping his own out of power.

"If the AfD continues to rise towards 35% nationally ... and comes to represent more than one third of voters, this approach will sooner or later become impossible to sustain," he said.

While electoral popularity alone may not compel other parties to cooperate with a movement they consider a threat to Germany's constitutional order, the AfD argues it has already forced its mainstream rivals to change their own policies.

"Calls for rigorous border controls, a cap on migration or a stronger emphasis on national interests were long portrayed as politically unacceptable," Mary Khan, another AfD politician, told CBS News. "Today, many of these positions are being openly discussed even within the CDU, and far beyond."

In January 2025, Merz, then the leader of the opposition Christian Democrats and now the German chancellor, faced a major backlash after backing a parliamentary motion calling for tougher immigration controls that passed with the support of AfD lawmakers. The vote prompted nationwide protests and criticism from former chancellor Merkel. A subsequent attempt to pass an immigration bill into law failed, with 12 conservative lawmakers declining to back it.

The AfD stands out in Europe as its positions have alienated some of its potential allies on Europe's nationalist right. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has cited fundamental differences with the AfD over Russia's war on Ukraine, while France's National Rally broke with the German party in 2024 after a leading AfD candidate made remarks appearing to downplay the crimes of the Nazis' notorious SS paramilitary force. 

From political outsider to presidential contender

Few European politicians illustrate the transformation of the continent's right wing more clearly than France's Marine Le Pen. An early October survey found Le Pen would likely garner between 31% and 36% of first-round votes in a national election, leading her nearest rival by at least 11 percentage points. France's next presidential election will be held in April.

For years, Le Pen has worked to distance her National Rally (RN) party, formerly the National Front, from the extremist reputation it held from the time of its inception at the hands of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

His antisemitic statements made the National Front politically toxic to much of the French electorate. His daughter has changed the party's name, moderated some of its positions and sought to persuade voters it is capable of governing France. The strategy, known as dédiabolisation (de-demonization), has helped National Rally shed its political outsider skin and become one of the country's most powerful electoral forces.

It has consigned France's traditional conservative party, Les Républicains, to near irrelevance, with national support around only 9% according to recent polling.

Stéphane Azihari, a French essayist who writes for the newspaper Le Figaro, said Le Pen has succeeded by appealing to voters who feel abandoned by both the traditional right and left.

"She has simultaneously filled the void left by a right wing that's greatly disappointed voters on immigration and security, while also capturing working-class voters from the left," he told CBS News. "The primary driver of RN voting remains, of course, the fear of non-European immigration, and Muslim immigration in particular."

France has a long tradition of democratic secularism, but political debate in the country has increasingly focused on perceptions of immigration and Islam as threats.

A 2024 poll found that 77% of National Rally voters considered immigration an important factor in their voting, while research published by the Brookings Institution in 2020 found that 73% believed Islam was incompatible with French society.

Around 10% of adults in France between the ages of 18 and 59 identify as Muslim, according to official statistics, the highest proportion in western Europe. 

Azihari argued that concerns about Islamist terrorism, particularly following the deadly 2015 attacks on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper and the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, have helped normalize National Rally's positions on immigration and security.

"The center's inability to effectively address security and immigration concerns explains much of the National Rally's progression," he said.

President Emmanuel Macron, who cannot seek a third consecutive term in 2027, has also backed more restrictive immigration measures during his presidency. But adopting tougher positions has not necessarily diminished the National Rally's appeal.

Across Europe, established parties face a similar dilemma: Embrace tougher positions on immigration and national identity and cooperate with populist rivals, or risk losing more voters. 

According to one survey of party support across 31 European nations from earlier this year, almost a quarter of voters say they now support far-right parties.  

Even if those populist parties fail to win control of governments on the continent, their influence is already being felt, and the question now is how far to the right they will pull other parties that have long rejected their legitimacy.