Yet, in just eight years, 2010-2018, the world has seen the extreme right move from being outside the corridors of power to the center of power itself.There is, of course, Donald Trump. But before his surprise electoral victory in November 2016, Viktor Orban had come to power again in Hungary in 2010, this time reincarnated as a man of the hard right instead of the liberal democrat he was in the late nineties. Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalists achieved a smashing electoral victory in India in 2014. And Rodrigo Duterte’s tough law-and-order line carried him to the presidency of the Philippines in May 2016.
And after Trump, the Alternative fur Deutschland won 94 of the German Bundestag’s 630 seats in the September 2017 elections, the first time the far right has gained a presence in that body, and the anti-immigrant Northern League came to power in alliance with the Five-Star Movement in Italy in the aftermath of the March 2018 elections. In France, it took an informal electoral alliance to fend off the presidential bid of the National Front’s Marine Le Pen in the electoral runoff of May 2017.
