And considering there have been declines in the extreme-left in favor of the extreme-right (for example the case of Die Linke in Germany), it's clear that a huge chunk of voters don't care about the difference.
Almost one-third of Europeans now vote for populist, far-right or far-left parties, research shows, with wide support for anti-establishment politics surging across the continent in an increasingly problematic challenge to the mainstream.
In a sign of how far the rise of the nativist, authoritarian far right has shifted Europe’s politics rightwards, the researchers considered classifying several of the continent’s better-known centre-right parties as borderline far-right.
“We talked a lot about reclassifying the UK’s Conservatives, Mark Rutte’s VVD in the Netherlands, Les Républicains in France and the ÖVP in Austria,” Rooduijn said.
Critics say populists in power often subvert democratic norms, undermining the judiciary and media or restricting minority rights, sometimes in ways that will long outlast their mandates.
Andrea Pirro, another of the study’s co-authors and a comparative political scientist at the University of Bologna, said the mainstream – the big, catch-all centre-right and centre-left parties – was partly to blame.
Cas Mudde, a professor in international affairs at the University of Georgia who formulated the widely accepted definition of populism, said core support for anti-establishment, particularly radical right parties had not actually grown much.
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