On Sunday, September 1, the voters in Thuringia and Saxony, two states in eastern Germany, elected delegates to their state’s legislatures. Nearly 33 percent in Thuringia and 31 percent in Saxony voted for the Alternative for Germany (known by its German initials as the AfD), a radical right-wing party that evokes memories of Germany’s darkest past. Three weeks later, the AfD won 29 percent of the vote in Brandenburg, just slightly behind the Social Democrats. We should not overestimate the significance of these elections: the three states make up a small minority of the German electorate, and in none of them will the AfD be able to form a government. And finally, the AfD is much stronger in the east than in the rest of Germany. Nevertheless, it has a foothold everywhere in the Federal Republic, with about 15 percent of the electorate nationwide. The party’s popularity is another sign of the hemorrhaging of support for Germany’s fractious and fragile governing coalition, whose members—the Social Democrats, Greens, and Free Democrats—all did poorly in Thuringia and Saxony, just as they had in the elections for the European Parliament held in June. The coalition collapsed in early November and is not likely to survive the national election scheduled for next February. It is by no means clear what combination of parties will be able to take its place.

While the prospect of political instability in Europe’s most important state is certainly worrisome, the strength of the radical right in Germany has a resonance well beyond the Federal Republic. Right-wing populist parties like the AfD have become a prominent feature of the political landscape in every European state. First in Hungary, then in Italy and the Netherlands, these parties have formed governments; in France, only a hastily constructed alliance of left-wing and liberal groups prevented Marine Le Pen’s National Rally Party from winning a majority in this summer’s National Assembly elections. Even in Britain, where Labour won a substantial majority in the most recent parliamentary elections, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK received over four million votes. In the Austrian elections held on September 29, the right-wing Freedom Party won almost 30 percent of the vote, slightly more than the conservatives and well ahead of the Social Democrats.

There are some important differences among these various parties, each of which is shaped by its nation’s history, political culture, and—last but not least—electoral system (for example, under the British system, Reform UK won 14 percent of the vote, but just one percent of the seats in the House of Commons; France’s complex two-stage voting helped prevent a right-wing majority). Despite these differences, what these parties have in common points to a significant structural change in European politics.

In the first place, all these parties are the beneficiaries of a widespread deterioration of the established political movements that had shaped European politics since the Second World War. In Italy, for example, both the Christian Democrats and the Communists, the rival parties that represented most Italians for several decades, have essentially disappeared, leaving in their place a variety of new, loosely organized groups. German voters tend to be more conservative than their Italian counterparts, but even in Germany, traditional loyalties have substantially weakened: all the established parties have recently lost ground, especially the Social Democrats, Germany’s oldest party and the core of the current coalition, which did badly in the local and European elections this summer. The Social Democrats currently have less support nationally than the AfD. In Britain, the two major parties, Labour and the Conservatives, won a smaller percentage of the vote (57.4 percent) than they had in any election since 1945. Throughout Europe, political loyalties have become unsettled and voters are in the market for new ways of expressing their interests and anxieties. The recent state elections in Germany illustrate this widespread increase in electoral volatility: not only did the AfD do very well, but a left-wing party founded in January by Sahra Wagenknecht, a former Communist, won nearly 16 percent of the vote in Thuringia, 12 in Saxony, and 13.5 in Brandenburg. This is quite an extraordinary accomplishment for a new political organization and one more sign of voters’ disaffection with the existing parties.

Like the supporters of the AfD and similar radical right-wing parties in Europe, the Germans in Thuringia, Saxony, and Brandenburg who voted for the BSW (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht) are united by a belief that their destiny is being determined by outsiders. Alexis de Tocqueville once defined democracy as a society of people “like oneself.” Throughout its long and often troubled history, democracy has been disrupted by citizens’ fear that power would fall into the hands of aliens, people fundamentally unlike themselves. In the past, the list of these alleged aliens has included Jews, Catholics, Communists, Black people, and many others. In contemporary Europe, people fear several groups of aliens, but by far the most prominent are immigrants, especially the recent arrivals from Africa and the Middle East who have come to Western Europe in search of security and opportunity. There is no doubt that this new wave of immigration has created problems, but the popular anxiety and antagonism that are exploited by right-wing parties go well beyond actual social, economic, or political issues. To borrow a concept deployed by the Israeli historian Shulamit Volkov to understand modern antisemitism, anti-immigrant sentiments are a “cultural code,” an encrypted way of expressing a diverse set of the real fears and exaggerated dangers that are supposedly generated by sinister forces at work in the modern world. Because these codes define and sustain communities, they are easily exploited by politicians in search of supporters. The appeal of these codes also tends to be contagious (as was the case with antisemitism in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), threatening to spread from the radical fringe into the political establishment.

Everywhere in Europe the radical right is held together by what its supporters oppose: first and foremost, immigrants, but also the distant but intrusive agents of the European Union, global economic interests, and apparent threats to traditional family values and social norms. Aside from laws that would curtail the influence of these alien elements, what the radical Right wants is much more difficult to establish. Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister and one of the Right’s most prominent leaders, once pointed to Singapore, China, India, Turkey, and Russia as models of successful societies. But what on earth do these polities have in common except for the fact that none of them is a liberal democracy?

In the short run, the radical Right’s failure to propose alternatives may be an advantage because it allows them to mobilize a broad and diverse constituency of the discontented. In the long run, however, the hollowness at the parties’ ideological core will be a serious weakness. In some nations, the parties are prone to internal divisions, bitter personal feuds, and financial mismanagement. When a right-wing movement does form a government, it risks being seen as part of the establishment its voters oppose. Even in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz Party has been undermining the legal and institutional foundations of democracy since coming to power in 2014, a new opposition group has emerged, creating the (still remote) possibility that Orbán could lose the next national elections scheduled for 2026. The real test for Orbán’s regime will be whether he would accept an electoral defeat—a test recently failed by the Maduro government in Venezuela.

The radical Right’s inability to implement—or even to articulate—an alternative social and political order sets them apart from the anti-democratic movements of the inter-war years. Unlike Fascists and Communists in the 1920s and ’30s, contemporary radical parties may spark riots, but they do not make revolutions; they engage in rhetorical excess, but do not create visions of a new order. Their appeal is based on misinformation and conspiracy theories, not the promise of a different social and political system. The real danger from today’s radical Right, therefore, is not that it will violently overthrow and replace democratic regimes, but that it will make them increasingly dysfunctional. Even if the Right remains no more than a powerful-but-alienated minority, it can interfere with the creation of an effective governing majority (it recently took the Netherlands several months to form a government). As a result, there will be a further decline in people’s confidence that their government works, and especially that it works for them. In a recent poll of German voters, fewer than 40 percent strongly agreed with the statement that “politics is capable of meeting the challenges of the future” and just 50 percent believed that “all in all, the democratic system works well.” These voters were not asked what they would prefer instead of a democratic system.

Western democracies—and here we must include the United States—face many real problems: climate change, global inequalities, the enduring danger of international violence, and more. While we should not underestimate the magnitude of these challenges, none of them is beyond governments’ capacity to manage. To do that, it is essential to retain or recapture a sense of possibility and self-confidence. “Despotism may govern without faith,” Tocqueville wrote two centuries ago, “but liberty cannot.” And in democratic societies this means, above all, faith in the political community’s capacity to live and work together. As we contemplate ways to nourish this essential faith, we should keep in mind Winston Churchill’s famous description of democracy: “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise,” Churchill told the House of Commons in November 1947. “Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Churchill was certainly right. Since its origins in the eighteenth century, modern democracy has always looked best when compared to the alternatives, which may be why its current critics are so reluctant to tell us what they want to put in its place.