In 2000, the Freedom Party of Austria entered government. The response from the rest of the European Union was immediate. The other fourteen member states recalled their ambassadors and imposed diplomatic sanctions. The heirs of fascism, the message went, did not sit at Europe's table.
In 2022, Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy, whose lineage runs back through the Italian Social Movement to Mussolini's party, won Italy's general election and formed a government. There were no sanctions. No ambassadors came home. It was business as usual.
Something happened in between, and it was not that the far right got more moderate.
The process has three stages, and it has run the same way in country after country.
First, articulation. The far right says something about Islam that the mainstream calls unacceptable. The party is condemned and kept outside.
Second, adoption. The mainstream notices that the position wins votes. So it takes the logic and softens the language. It is not becoming the far right, it says. It is addressing "legitimate concerns."
Third, legitimation. Once the mainstream has said it, it is no longer extreme. It is common sense. The far right, now respectable, pushes further, and the cycle starts again.
The stage that matters most is the second, and the party that matters most is the one you would expect to resist.
When the centre-right adopts anti-Muslim positions, it can claim to be following its own voters. When the centre-left does it, the signal changes. It says this is no longer left versus right. It is common sense versus naivety.
Denmark's Social Democrats adopted immigration and integration policies that were, in substance, indistinguishable from those of the Danish People's Party. It worked. They returned to power. They did not fail to resist the machine. They operated it.
I have voted in every British election since I was old enough. Over twenty years I have watched the party I might have supported take up the language of the party I feared, and the party I feared take up the language of the one I would never support, until the space for a Muslim voter shrank to nothing visible.
That is the real achievement. The machine has not captured one wing of European politics. It has captured the spectrum. The argument is no longer whether to restrict Muslim life, but how fast.
So stop waiting for the firewall to hold. It was not broken down from outside by the far right. It was opened from the inside, by parties that discovered the far right was only saying out loud what their own voters had been thinking.
The far right is not the machine. It is the machine's voice. And it is getting louder.