More than halfway through this year of momentous elections, liberal democratic parties have mostly managed to hold the line against the advance of the dark forces of nationalist populism in Europe.

Yet it is too early to declare victory for this firewall against the extreme right. The US presidential election could have destabilising knock-on effects in Europe and beyond if Donald Trump returns to the White House. On the other hand, a victory for the vice-president, Kamala Harris, who has restored the Democrats’ hopes of retaining power in just three weeks since President Biden pulled out of the race, could energise progressive forces around the world.

In Europe, the loose alliance of mainstream parties that has kept the forces of illiberalism, intolerance and bigotry out of power in Brussels, Paris, Berlin and Warsaw is fragile. They have been aided by the congenital inability of hard-right parties, which won about 25% of the vote in EU-wide elections in June, to form a united front in the European parliament. Despite the attempt of Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, to forge a single nationalist Internationale, there are now three rival Eurosceptic rightist groupings instead of the two in the previous legislature.

In addition to personal rivalries, these groupings differ over whether to support Ukraine against Russian aggression, as well as over whether to try to transform the EU into a looser grouping of sovereign states or to break away from the union completely. The more “respectable”, pragmatic national conservatives around Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, want to keep their distance from more aggressively nativist parties, which advocate expelling immigrants who have........

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