European democracies are running out of time to turn away from the abyss | Rafael Behr

Not all that long ago, Europe was a beacon of liberal idealism. One memoir recalls it as an era “comfortably saturated with confidence in the unfailing and binding power of tolerance and conciliation”. The economic system seemed obviously preferable to barbarous alternatives. “People honestly believed that the divergencies and the boundaries between nations and sects would gradually melt away into a common humanity,” the author added.

Those words could describe the spirit of globalisation at the turn of the millennium. They were written in the 1930s by Stefan Zweig, reflecting on the optimism of late 19th-century Vienna from the perspective of a Jewish émigré whose world had been destroyed by murderous nationalism. Zweig took his own life in 1942. He never saw fascism defeated. He couldn’t have imagined a renaissance of liberalism in the second half of the 20th century so complete as to attain a pitch of complacency rivalling the one he remembered from his childhood.

Now momentum is with the nationalists again. Victory for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in the region of Saxony-Anhalt over the weekend is not the biggest electoral prize won by a far-right party in Europe in recent years, but it is one of the most shocking because it is Germany. No country had more to learn from history if it wanted to immunise its democracy against extremism. None pursued a more systematic programme of inoculation. The word for it is Vergangenheitsbewältigung – hard to say and tricky to translate, meaning roughly coming to terms with a shameful past.

There is no excuse of ignorance about the AfD’s rise. It is a knowing repudiation of atonement. The party flirts with Nazi imagery and embraces racist definitions of nationhood, seeking to deport Germans whose credentials it sees as biologically improper. It is extreme enough to induce squeamishness in Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right National Rally (RN). She has spent years carefully cultivating respectability and is leading the polls ahead of next year’s presidential election. She doesn’t want to jeopardise her mainstream credentials by affinity with it.

That is less of an impediment across the Atlantic. Elon Musk is an AfD fan, deploying his control of X to boost the party’s campaign messages. Last year, the US vice-president, JD Vance, met Alice Weidel, AfD co-leader, during a visit to Munich. There was no space in his diary for Olaf Scholz, then the German chancellor. Clearly, the AfD meets the criteria for endorsement set out in Donald Trump’s national security strategy, which pledges support for “patriotic resistance” movements committed to halting the “civilisational erasure” of Europe by immigration.

In Britain, Nigel Farage could once have assumed entitlement to that status as an early and enthusiastic cheerleader for Trump. But in the competition for Maga accolades, Reform UK has lost ground to parties and people even further to the right – Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain; ultra-nationalist agitator Tommy Robinson; pretty much anyone who can muster a mob of blackshirts or a passing troll who catches Musk’s eye posting racist conspiracy theories online.

It would be absurd if it wasn’t so effective. “We never fall into the same abyss twice,” writes Éric Vuillard, the French novelist. “But we fall in the same way, in a mixture of ridicule and dread.”

The reach and pungency of the US right, drenched in white supremacism, interferes with Farage’s old strategy of banking far-right support and feinting moderation to make gains in the mainstream. Chasing credibility with fanatical racists in an international digital arena makes it hard to reassure a domestic analogue audience that he should be allowed near Downing Street.

The tension shows in Farage’s attitude to the AfD. He spoke at a rally for it in 2017. Now he describes it as a “mixed bag” of a party, whose cultural stances are “utterly respectable and decent” but whose enthusiasm for dictators is “very difficult”.

Farage has called AfD support for Vladimir Putin “hard to understand”. It can’t be that far beyond comprehension for a man who, in 2014, described the Russian president as the world leader he most admired, albeit “as an operator, not a human being”.

If Farage needs further insight into what might motivate a Kremlin fellow traveller, he could reach out to Reform’s former leader in Wales, Nathan Gill, who is serving a prison sentence for accepting bribes to make pro-Russian speeches in the European parliament when he was a Brexit party MEP.

Proximity to the Moscow line is a fairly reliable measure of fanaticism and venality on the spectrum from far-right to even further-right politics in Europe and the US. The same applies on the left, where a credulous appetite for Russian propaganda endures decades after the demise of Soviet ideology.

Thankfully, there is not much of a market in British politics for openly pandering to Putin. That is one reason why Trump is also unpopular, although opinion polls suggest he is viewed more favourably by Reform supporters than the wider public. Farage has stopped boasting of his White House connections, perhaps because they have dried up, or maybe because sycophantic flapping around a foreign tyrant, even an American one, doesn’t project strength in a wannabe prime minister.

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It is striking how little the Reform leader has to say about the rest of the world and Britain’s place in it. The topic was hardly mentioned at the party’s annual conference last week.

There was a theatrical appearance by Jordan Bardella, the young Le Pen protege and likely prime minister if she wins the presidency. He signed a legally meaningless “deal” with Farage on stopping small-boat traffic across the Channel and was immediately criticised back home for selling out to the UK. The likelihood of a French far-right government taking in more migrants as a policy favour to the UK is close to zero. Having xenophobic nationalists setting the agenda in Paris and London wouldn’t make relations easier, no matter what ideological amity they now claim.

As the architect of Brexit, Farage is one of the most consequential politicians of his generation, but he can’t plausibly claim it as an achievement, even when addressing an auditorium of loyal fans. They know it has failed as well as everyone else.

Farage probably misses the simplicity of his old crusade against Brussels. He might envy nationalist counterparts on the continent, who get to rail against liberal Europeanism while enjoying the economic and strategic privileges afforded by EU membership. They don’t have to explain why it’s so cold on the outside. They play the Eurosceptic game, mobilising the same resentments, targeting the same scapegoats, but modifying the demands in recognition that Farage’s victory was pyrrhic. It doesn’t pay to actually leave. The ambition is to capture the European project, not destroy it, although it amounts to the same thing if the transformation happens through connivance with Maga ideology and Kremlin money.

This doesn’t have to be Europe’s destiny. Nationalists do not form a monolithic bloc. The essence of their creed militates against cross-border partnership. Their egos generate more rivalries than alliances. Their selfishness sabotages deals. Countervailing forces can be mustered. There is no law of history that says a height of liberal optimism must be followed by an equivalent fall into chaos. The “binding power of tolerance and conciliation” was not defeated in the 20th century and it won’t be suffocated in this one either. We see the abyss. We can pass without plunging to the bottom.

• Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist