In Europe, the centre will not hold 

For about five years, those longing for a centrist restoration have been declaring that the madness is on its way out and the sensibles are back. Donald Trump, Matteo Salvini, Marine Le Pen: all of them were just temporary horrors. In Poland’s recent election, Donald Tusk was returned to power, with his whole entourage of Europhiles and progressive foundations. Europe can breathe once more. Or so the argument goes. But it’s becoming harder to make the case.

Look around and we see Trump not only the runaway favourite for the Republican nomination but also on short odds for the presidency itself. Polls for the European parliament elections in June show Le Pen comfortably ahead in France. Giorgia Meloni is consolidating power in Italy. Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom (PVV) recently won the most seats in the Netherlands, and Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) leads the polls for this year’s German state elections in Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg. Meanwhile, populists are helping to govern Finland and Sweden. 

Anyone seeking to understand the coming shift in Europe should examine an incident that took place at a bal populaire in the French countryside, three nights before Wilders’s surprise victory. Four of five carloads of young men, all of them apparently from a crime-ridden housing estate in the old shoe-making city of Romans-sur-Isère, burst into a village dance hall 11 miles away. They reportedly shouted anti-French insults and stabbed several party-goers; one, a 16-year-old rugby player, died on the way to hospital. The following weekend, dozens of French youths marched through the housing project shouting: ‘Islam out of Europe.’

This is not exactly an immigration problem. The killers, though of immigrant descent, were French citizens. But public opinion took it for an immigration problem. Pressure mounted on President Emmanuel Macron to harden an immigration law passed in December that he had hoped to use to shore up his party’s prospects before June.