The collapse of social democratic parties in Europe, whether in the Netherlands, France or Poland, and the electoral failures of the Democratic Party in the United States have been blamed on the supposed rise of neo-fascist forces across the West. In reality, these are marginal figures who have been inflated and used as scapegoats.

The term ‘fascist’ has been used most recently during the Italian election. Weeks before Italians went to the polls, news outlets like The Guardian published articles with titles such as ‘[t]he fascist movement that has brought Mussolini back to the mainstream’ when referring to groups like CasaPound. ‘How massive is this party?’, you must be wondering. It must be a major parliamentary party for a national newspaper to cover it, no? No. In March’s election, this explicitly fascist organisation garnered less than one percent. The second biggest result of a genuine neo-fascist movement was that of Forza Nuova, which managed to convince just above one third of one percent. Are these the people bring il Duce back to the mainstream? Evidently not. Yet none of this, it seems, stopped CNN from running a headline claiming that ‘[i]n Italy’s elections, the fascists did scarily well.’

“Is a party a reflection of its supporters or are the supporters a reflection of a party?”

More often than not, explicitly neo-Nazi ‘parties’ — if one is so generous to describe them as such — can be seen parading and marching rather than actually electioneering. In Sweden, Svenskarnas Parti (Party of the Swedes), which sought to implement an ethnic requirement for naturalisation, dissolved due to a lack of members. Arguably the most successful neo-Nazi movement in Sweden is the Nordic Resistance Movement, whose greatest breakthrough so far has been gathering 500 members for a march in Gothenburg last year. Even the failed Beer Hall Putsch by Hitler had at least two thousand participants.

Any electoral success that has been garnered, rather, can be attributed to the moderation of formerly extreme parties. Perhaps the most striking example would be that of Jobbik, a Hungarian nationalist party. The party has gone from being explicitly anti-Semitic (with one of their MEP’s, Csanad Szegedi, regularly denouncing international Jewry prior to discovering that his grandmother was an Auschwitz survivor and soon after emigrated to Israel) to having a leader who has renounced the party’s anti-Semitic past. He even sent a Hanukkah greeting letter to Hungary’s Jewish community! In many ways, the party is to the left of the ruling Fidesz party of Prime Minister Viktor Orban regarding European affairs, relations with Middle Eastern states, and economic issues.

But a crucial question needs to be answered: is a party a reflection of its supporters or are the supporters a reflection of a party? In the case of the parliamentary parties, it is difficult to say for those that stand on the edge of the spectrum. A portion of their voter base is made up of people who are more extreme than the party platform itself but are unable to bring themselves to vote for an extra-parliamentary party out of fear that their vote would be wasted. Therefore, while most neo-fascists vote for nationalist parties, nationalist parties are not necessarily neo-fascist in and of themselves.

In the case of eastern Europe, a certain redefinition of ‘neo-fascist’ might be useful. Unlike in other parts of the continents, some political beliefs, particularly related to immigration and social issues (most notably LGBT+ rights and abortion), are fully mainstream. As such, the narrow confines of xenophobia and extreme social conservatism, will be of little practical use. Consequently, one should not superimpose western European norms of socially acceptable views when analysing those in the east. Rather than ‘extreme’ being a relative term between states, it should be a qualifier within states.

In a recent study titled ‘Return to the Politically Abandoned’ by the Berlin think tank Das Progressive Zentrum (Progressive Centre), ‘low wages and the collapse of social and transport infrastructure’ were found to be the real drivers of anxiety. Anti-migrant, anti-Islam, and anti-Europe slogans have relatively little impact on alienated voters. It would be a grave error for parties that have been electorally weakened to lay the blame externally. Fringe parties did not succeed; mainstream ones failed.

For the time being, don’t worry too much about the rise of a Fourth Reich.