This is the second installment of this series. Click here for part 1.
Section 1 established the central continental pattern. Section 2 disaggregates that pattern by region: where the overall movement appears concentrated, where it is offset by countervailing national trends, and where regional averages may conceal as much as they reveal.
The regional lens is useful, but it should be interpreted carefully. Regions are not causal explanations. Countries grouped together geographically may still differ sharply in electoral systems, party histories, economic trajectories, institutional resilience, and political cleavages. The purpose of this section is, therefore, not to suggest that Western, Northern, Southern, or Eastern Europe each follows a single political script. Rather, it is to present how the broader European pattern is distributed across regions, where regional averages clarify the picture and where they might risk concealing important national variation.
At the same time, regional distinctions are not arbitrary. They capture historically and politically meaningful contexts: Western Europe’s long postwar democratic and integrationist traditions, Northern Europe’s welfare-state and high-trust political models, Southern Europe’s exposure to the Eurozone crisis and austerity politics, and Eastern Europe’s experiences of communist rule and post-communist transition. These shared contexts do not determine outcomes, but they help explain why similar continental pressures may appear in different forms across different parts of Europe.
Figure 6 tracks the annual regional average of the normalized seat-share-weighted parliamentary ideology index. For each country within a given region, the chart carries forward its latest observed election result until a new election occurs. In the earliest years of the chart, some regional averages are based only on the countries in that region that already had election observations in the dataset. The black-outlined points mark those years of partial regional coverage; these early values should therefore be read as transitional rather than fully representative regional averages.
The most striking feature of Figure 6 is the persistent distinctiveness of Eastern Europe. From the moment all three Eastern countries are represented in the dataset the region sits well to the right of the others. Its average remains above 1.0 on the ideology scale (past the ‘center-right’ classification) for much of the period, rising above 1.2 by the mid-2020s before dropping sharply in 2026. That decline is driven overwhelmingly by Bulgaria, whose index swings from roughly 0.83 to −0.23 in a single election; Hungary contributes only a modest share of the drop, easing from 1.45 to 1.32 even as Fidesz’s sixteen-year government was voted out outright. Poland, meanwhile, holds steady and remains the most right-leaning latest parliament in the dataset. Eastern Europe therefore illustrates both the value and the limitation of a regional average: it captures the region’s unusually right-leaning position, but the final drop is driven by distinct national disruptions rather than a uniform regional turn.
Southern Europe displays a different pattern. Its regional average moves from near the ideological midpoint at the start of the period to the most right-leaning position outside Eastern Europe by the latest years in the dataset. The movement is not linear. Southern Europe dips leftward in the mid-2010s, reflecting the post-Eurocrisis realignments that reshaped Greece, Italy, and Spain in different ways, before moving sharply right from 2018 onward. By 2023, the region’s average rises to approximately 0.53 and then remains there through the end of the period. This makes Southern Europe central to the broader rightward shift documented in Section 1, but not because all three countries followed the same path. Rather, the regional trend reflects a shared period of party-system disruption followed by different forms of rightward recomposition.
Northern Europe appears comparatively stable, but that apparent stability is partly misleading. Denmark and Norway remain close to the ideological center throughout the period, with modestly negative seat-share slopes and relatively low volatility. The Netherlands, by contrast, moves strongly right. As a result, the Northern regional average rises gradually, reaching approximately 0.34 by 2026. The regional line therefore masks a clear internal divide: Scandinavian stability on one side, Dutch rightward realignment on the other.
Western Europe is the most internally mixed region. Its regional average moves only modestly to the right, from approximately 0.11 in the first observed country elections to approximately 0.20 in the latest. But this relatively muted net change conceals major national divergence. Western Europe’s regional average, therefore, reflects various offsetting movements rather than regional stasis.
Figure 7 makes this internal variation more visible by comparing each country’s first and latest seat-share-weighted ideology index. The regional averages show net first-to-latest movement, while the country arrows represent the national trajectories that produce those averages. These distinctions matter because regional averages can be produced by very different underlying patterns. In Southern Europe, the regional movement is broad-based: Greece, Italy, and Spain all move right from their first to latest elections, with Italy accounting for the largest shift and beginning from the most right-leaning starting position. In Western Europe, by contrast, the modest regional rightward movement masks stark internal disparity: Germany, France, and Austria move right, while Belgium, Ireland, and the United Kingdom move left. Thus, the regional average can reflect both shared regional movement and offsetting national trajectories.
Figure 7 also clarifies why absolute ideological position and direction of movement must remain analytically distinct. A country can move left and still remain right of center, as Hungary does. A country can move only modestly right over time yet end at a very right-leaning position, as Poland does. Movement measures change; ideology scores measure position. Both are crucial for understanding what is happening.
Figure 8 adds a third dimension: volatility. The x-axis marks each country’s seat-weighted ideology slope, the same directional measure used in Section 1. The y-axis denotes annualized absolute ideological movement: how much a country’s parliamentary ideology changed from election to election, regardless of whether those changes moved left or the right.[i] Unlike the slope, this measure captures the magnitude of ideological movement regardless of direction. A country may therefore appear relatively stable by slope while still registering substantial election-to-election movement.
This distinction is especially important for Bulgaria. Its seat-weighted slope falls within the “relatively stable” band, but Figure 8 places it among the most volatile countries in the dataset. Bulgaria’s parliamentary ideology moved substantially over time, but repeated swings in different directions partly cancel out in the net slope. Italy, by contrast, also appears highly volatile, but its movement is more directional: high volatility coincides with the strongest rightward slope in the dataset. Greece occupies a third position, with high annualized movement but a slope that remains just inside the “relatively stable” band. These cases demonstrate why direction alone is not enough. The pace and instability of movement also matter.
This same chart separates steadier rightward movement from more turbulent change. The Netherlands, Germany, and France all sit to the right of the +0.02 threshold, but their annualized movement is lower than that of Italy, Greece, or Bulgaria. Their trajectories are therefore better described as sustained rightward movement than as repeated ideological whiplash. On the leftward side, the United Kingdom is the only country whose slope crosses the −0.02 threshold. Hungary, by contrast, registers one of the lowest annualized movement figures in the entire dataset: across five elections spanning sixteen years of Fidesz rule and the single election that brought it to an end, its parliamentary ideology barely moved at all, even as the identity of its governing party changed entirely in 2026.
Viewed through Figures 6, 7, and 8, the idea of a single European rightward drift becomes more complicated. The regional picture reveals at least four distinct patterns. Western Europe is internally divided, with major rightward movement in Germany and France offset by leftward parliamentary movement in Ireland and the United Kingdom. Northern Europe is comparatively stable, except for the Netherlands’ strong rightward shift. Southern Europe produces the clearest regional movement to the right, rooted in post-crisis party-system disruption and subsequent recomposition. And Eastern Europe begins from the most right-leaning regional position and remains highly distinctive, but its latest movement reflects reversal and instability rather than a simple continuation of the earlier pattern.
The continental story, then, is not erased by the regional analysis. It is sharpened. Europe has moved right in important and measurable ways, but the geography and momentum of that movement matters. In some regions, the rightward shift appears gradual and cumulative. In others, it emerges from crisis, volatility, reversal, or institutional amplification. The following subsections examine these regional patterns in greater detail.
2.1: Western Europe (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, UK)
Western Europe is one of the regions where the stakes of this analysis are most symbolic. This is not just another grouping in the dataset. It contains countries that did not merely participate in the postwar European order, but helped build it; countries whose institutions, empires, wars, revolutions, and democratic settlements shaped not just the architecture of European integration, but also the political world far beyond Europe.[ii] France and Germany became the central axis around which the European project was rebuilt after two world wars.[iii] Belgium was one of the founding states and hosts much of the European Union’s institutional machinery. The United Kingdom and France were global imperial powers whose political, legal, and colonial legacies reach across continents. Germany and Austria rebuilt their postwar democratic orders in the shadow of Nazism. Ireland’s modern party system emerged from independence, civil war, and state formation rather than from a conventional left-right cleavage alone. If rightward pressure, far-right growth, and institutional strain are visible here, they are not appearing at the periphery of European democracy. They are appearing in countries that helped define its core.
That context makes Western Europe’s internal divergence especially consequential. In the aggregate, the region appears relatively restrained: its regional average moves only modestly right, from approximately 0.11 in the first observed country elections to approximately 0.20 in the latest. But this average is less a sign of regional calm than a statistical compromise among countries moving in different directions. Germany, France, and Austria move right. Belgium, Ireland, and the United Kingdom move left. Western Europe’s narrative, then, is not one of uniform ideological movement. It is a story of pressure meeting institutions: electoral systems, party-system legacies, historical memory, and norms of far-right containment.
France and the UK indicate how electoral systems can reshape the translation of ideology into power. In France, the far-right National Rally (Rassemblement National, RN), associated with Marine Le Pen and now led nationally by Jordan Bardella, has become one of the central vehicles of anti-immigration, nationalist, and Eurosceptic politics. Yet its 2024 first-round strength collided with the mechanics of France’s two-round legislative system. RN and its allies led the first round, but the runoff stage created room for tactical withdrawals and anti-RN coordination that limited the party’s final seat conversion.[iv] The result was not the absence of far-right strength, but the institutional containment of that strength before it could become a parliamentary majority.
The UK filters pressure differently. Its first-past-the-post system rewards parties that can win constituency-level pluralities, disadvantaging parties whose support is substantial nationally but spread too thin. In 2024, Labour won a large parliamentary majority with roughly one-third of the national vote, while Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist party rooted in the UKIP/Brexit Party lineage, won a substantial national vote share but only a handful of seats. The result, in this dataset, is a striking representational gap: the UK’s vote-share-weighted ideology index remained slightly right of center, while its seat-share-weighted parliamentary index moved sharply left. That leftward parliamentary shift should not be read as a simple leftward transformation of the electorate. It reflects the collapse of the Conservative seat position after fourteen years in government, the fragmentation of the British right after Brexit, and an electoral system that can turn dispersed support into underrepresentation.
Germany and Belgium represent another kind of mediation: political containment. In Germany, the rise of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a far-right party that began as a fringe Eurosceptic challenge and evolved into a central vehicle for anti-immigration and nationalist politics, has placed postwar democratic memory under renewed strain. The Brandmauer, or “firewall,” refers to the self-commitment of established parties not to cooperate with the AfD. In practice, it is meant to keep the party from becoming a normal coalition partner or necessary parliamentary ally. But the firewall is a political norm, not a structural guarantee. As popular support for the AfD has grown, this boundary has become harder to maintain: district-level evidence suggests that while the firewall often holds, cooperation or tactical reliance on AfD votes has occurred in some local contexts.[v] At the national level, the pressure is clear in the data: Germany records one of the strongest rightward parliamentary slopes in Western Europe, and AfD received 20.8% of the vote in 2025.
Belgium’s containment model is more explicit. Vlaams Belang, a Flemish nationalist, anti-immigration, Eurosceptic far-right party, is the successor to Vlaams Blok, which dissolved and reconstituted itself after a 2004 racism conviction.[vi] Since then, Vlaams Belang has remained constrained by Belgium’s cordon sanitaire: a formalized non-cooperation agreement among mainstream parties designed to block the far right from governing power.[vii] This is where the symbolism of Belgium matters most. Brussels, a city often treated as shorthand for the European Union itself, sits inside a country where a far-right party can gain electoral support while still being formally blocked from national power by democratic containment norms. In this dataset, Belgium’s far-right-coded vote share rises from 3.7% in 2014 to 13.8% in 2024, while its overall parliamentary ideology trend moves slightly left. Far-right votes and far-right access to power are not the same thing.
Austria complicates the containment story. Austria was annexed into Nazi Germany in 1938, and postwar Austrian politics absorbed the political afterlives of former Nazis.[viii] The Freedom Party of Austria (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ) emerged from this postwar milieu. Its first leader, Anton Reinthaller, had been a Nazi minister and SS officer, and scholarship traces the party’s origins to former National Socialist networks and the League of Independents.[ix] Unlike Germany’s AfD, however, the FPÖ has not remained a party permanently held outside governing politics. It has repeatedly oscillated between exclusion, coalition participation, scandal-driven collapse, and renewed electoral strength.
That fluctuation remains visible today. In 2024, while the FPÖ finished first nationally, FPÖ-led coalition talks failed and a centrist coalition took office without it. In the dataset, Austria begins from an already right-leaning parliamentary position and moves further right over time; its far-right-coded vote share begins high, at 17.5% in 2008, and reaches 28.8% in 2024. Austria therefore offers a different mode of far-right normalization: not an insurgent party held permanently outside the system, but a party that repeatedly moves between protest, participation, collapse, and return.
Ireland sits apart from the rest of the region. Its parliamentary ideology moves left over the period studied, and it records no far-right-coded vote share under the narrow measure used in Figure 4. That does not mean Ireland is immune to right-wing, anti-immigration, or exclusionary politics. It means that, within the structure measured here, those forces have not consolidated into a far-right-coded parliamentary party in the same way. Ireland’s party system developed along a different axis. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, the two parties that dominated Irish politics for much of the twentieth century, emerged from opposing sides of the Irish Civil War and have long been difficult to map cleanly onto the conventional Western European left-right spectrum.[x] Sinn Féin’s rise, the weakening of the old Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael pattern, and the broader restructuring of Irish party competition therefore carry a different ideological meaning than similar movements might elsewhere.
Western Europe, then, reveals less a single direction than a set of democratic stress tests. The connective tissue across these cases is not simply the rise of the right. It is the weakening of older structures of party competition. Established parties still matter, and in some cases they still govern. But across Western Europe, they increasingly govern amid fragmentation, challenger-party pressure, tactical containment, and unstable mandates.[xi] That is what makes the region’s modest average movement so misleading. Western Europe’s story is not one of democratic collapse. But it is also not one of democratic immunity. It is a warning from the center.
2.2: Northern Europe (Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway)
Northern Europe appears, at first glance, to be the most stable region in the dataset. Its regional average moves gradually rather than dramatically, and Denmark and Norway remain close to the ideological center across the period studied. But that stability is uneven. In this dataset, Northern Europe is not a single political model. It is a split regional category: Scandinavian stability on one side, Dutch rightward realignment on the other.
That distinction matters because Denmark and Norway are often associated with a broader Scandinavian political tradition: strong welfare states, high institutional trust, proportional representation, and long social-democratic influence.[i] Yet the data does not imply an absence of right-wing pressure. It instead demonstrates systems that have, so far, absorbed that pressure without producing the same scale of parliamentary realignment visible in the Netherlands.
Denmark is the clearest example of this pattern. Its seat-share-weighted ideology index remains comparatively close to the center, with a modestly negative slope and relatively low volatility. But its far-right-coded vote share has fluctuated meaningfully. The Danish People’s Party, a right-wing populist party built around nationalism, immigration restriction, and welfare chauvinism, reached 21.1% of the vote in 2015, before falling to 6.3% in 2022 and rising again to 11.2% in 2026. Denmark convolutes the idea that ideological stability means ideological calm. The pressure is real, but it has moved through the party system in ways that do not produce a sustained rightward parliamentary slope.
Part of that story is the adaptation of established parties. Denmark’s Social Democrats have attracted international attention for combining expansive welfare-state commitments with a more restrictive position on immigration, a strategy sometimes described as an attempt to reclaim voters drawn to the populist right.[ii] This does not mean Denmark has moved uniformly right. Rather, it suggests that right-wing pressure can be absorbed into mainstream competition, blurring the line between far-right electoral strength and broader policy influence.
Norway follows a similar but not identical pattern. Its parliamentary ideology remains close to the center, and its movement is far less volatile than the more turbulent cases in the dataset. Yet Norway also has a long-standing right-wing populist actor: the Progress Party (Fremskrittspartiet, FrP), a party associated with tax cuts, stricter immigration, law-and-order politics, and criticism of bureaucratic government. Unlike newer insurgent parties elsewhere, FrP has already been integrated into governing politics, participating in a Conservative-led coalition from 2013 to 2020.[iii] Its incorporation reflects a longer process of institutionalization: FrP is one of the oldest and most embedded right-wing populist parties in Scandinavia, and because it was not subjected to a full cordon sanitaire, it developed a more practical relationship with center-right coalition politics.[iv] FrP’s mainstream assimilation also reflects strategic moderation at the party-elite level, as FrP leadership pursued office-seeking credibility, distancing itself from most extreme party members and radical counterparts across Scandinavia.[v] Norway’s stability, it seems, is more so a form of incorporation, as opposed to an absence of right-wing populist politics.
The Netherlands breaks the regional pattern. Its parliamentary ideology moves strongly right, making it the clearest source of Northern Europe’s upward regional movement. The central actor is Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (Partij voor de Vrijheid, PVV), a far-right, anti-immigration, anti-Islam, and Eurosceptic party that has long challenged the Dutch political mainstream. The PVV’s breakthrough came after the exhaustion of the long rule of Mark Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), amid intense debate over migration and asylum and against a wider backdrop of housing pressure, cost-of-living concerns, and dissatisfaction with established politics.[vi] In 2023, the PVV became the largest party in parliament, while the liberal-conservative VVD, the long-dominant center-right party associated with Rutte’s years in government, fell behind it.[vii] That result marked a major rupture in Dutch politics: not simply a rise of the far right, but a weakening of the established center-right’s ability to anchor the conservative side of the party system.
The Dutch case also explains how fragmentation can turn rightward pressure into governing instability. After the PVV’s 2023 breakthrough, a right-leaning coalition took office in 2024, but collapsed in 2025 after Wilders withdrew over migration policy.[viii] The following election did not erase the PVV’s influence, but it did underscore the volatility of the Dutch party system. In this dataset, the Netherlands’ far-right-coded vote share rises from 15.5% in 2010 to 25.7% in 2023, before falling to 21.2% in 2025. Even after that decline, the Dutch far right remains far stronger than it was at the start of the period.
Northern Europe ultimately tells a more complicated story than the regional average alone suggests. Denmark and Norway register relative ideological stability, but not immunity from right-wing or populist pressure. The Netherlands displays the opposite: not gradual Scandinavian-style absorption, but visible rightward realignment, center-right weakening, and coalition fragility. The region’s apparent stability is therefore partly real and partly misleading. It reflects the steadiness of Denmark and Norway, but also conceals the extent to which the Netherlands has become one of the clearest rightward movers in the dataset.
2.3: Southern Europe (Greece, Italy, Spain)
Southern Europe is the clearest regional case of crisis-driven party-system rupture and rightward recomposition. In the regional overview, Southern Europe moves from near the ideological midpoint at the start of the period to the most right-leaning position outside Eastern Europe by the latest years in the dataset. But that movement should not be read as a simple, linear far-right surge. Greece, Italy, and Spain were all reshaped by the Eurozone crisis and the austerity politics that followed it. They were not the only European countries hit by the crisis, but they were three cases where economic shock most visibly became political rupture.
The crisis mattered not only because it produced economic pain, but because it exposed the political constraints of the eurozone itself. Greece became the most severe sovereign-debt case, entering repeated bailout and adjustment programs under intense external pressure.[i] Spain’s crisis was tied more closely to the collapse of a housing and banking boom, followed by mass unemployment and severe pressure on the party system.[ii] Italy faced a different but related problem: high public debt, weak growth, market pressure, and fiscal constraint inside a currency union that limited national adjustment.[iii] Across all three cases, elected governments were squeezed between domestic demands and externally imposed fiscal discipline. The result was not only austerity, but a politics of subordination: national electorates were asked to absorb cuts, surveillance, and reform conditions that narrowed the space for democratic choice. In Greece especially, this discipline was also experienced through a moralizing creditor–debtor hierarchy, in which crisis-era discourse often contrasted supposedly “responsible” northern Europeans with “irresponsible” or profligate southern debtors. Italy and Spain were not subjected to the same intensity of bailout-era humiliation, but they too were situated within a wider North–South divide that treated the Eurozone’s southern periphery as a problem to be disciplined. That dynamic turned the economic crisis into a broader crisis of representation.
This context is essential for interpreting Figures 9 and 10. The charts do not simply track parties gaining or losing votes. They capture what happened when older systems of representation were placed under extraordinary strain. Figure 9 traces the weakening, collapse, or recomposition of traditional center-left and center-right anchor parties. Figure 10 isolates the first wave of post-crisis challenger politics: SYRIZA and related anti-austerity left challengers in Greece; the Five Star Movement in Italy; and Podemos, Unidas Podemos, Sumar, and related formations in Spain. This category is intentionally selected rather than exhaustive. It focuses on the challenger formations most central to the post-crisis rupture measured here, rather than every new party that entered competition.
The key pattern is sequential: in each country, the first major rupture came through the weakening of traditional anchor parties; only afterward did the longer-term direction of recomposition become clear.
That sequence is what makes Southern Europe so important to the broader findings of this report. The region’s rightward movement did not emerge from a stable party landscape. It emerged after crisis weakened older structures of representation, opened space for post-crisis challengers, and left each party system to resolve that rupture differently.
Greece records the most dramatic collapse of a traditional center-left anchor party. PASOK (the social-democratic party that had dominated much of the post-1974 democratic era alongside the traditional center-right New Democracy) was in power when the crisis broke and when Greece entered its first international bailout. Its support then collapsed: from 43.9% of the vote in 2009 to low single digits in the years following the crisis. That dissolution was not simply the result of electoral fatigue. Among the public, PASOK became closely associated with bailout conditionality; austerity; and the sense that Greece’s governing class had accepted externally imposed discipline at the expense of social protection, public services, and ordinary households forced to bear the costs of adjustment.[i] Support for New Democracy also dropped sharply in the early 2010s, but it later recovered and consolidated much of the parliamentary right. By 2023, New Democracy was again above 40% of the vote, while PASOK had only partially recovered.
Figure 10 clarifies what initially filled the space opened by that rupture. SYRIZA, a radical-left coalition that became the central electoral vehicle of anti-austerity politics, surged after 2012 and transformed from a challenger party into a governing party. Its rise embodied the first phase of post-crisis rebellion: a rejection of austerity from the left. But SYRIZA’s governing experience also narrowed the promise of that rebellion. After winning office on an anti-austerity platform, it accepted Greece’s third bailout package in 2015 after a referendum confrontation with European creditors, a reversal that damaged its credibility as an anti-system alternative.[ii] In the dataset, the Greek post-crisis challenger category rises sharply after 2012, peaks in the mid-2010s, and then declines by 2023, though it remains electorally meaningful. Far-right-coded vote share remains lower than the challenger-left vote share for most of the period, but persists across several party forms, from Golden Dawn during the crisis years to newer formations such as Greek Solution, Niki, and Spartans by 2023. Greece’s latest rightward movement ultimately reflects New Democracy’s recovery, the fragmentation of the anti-austerity challenger space, and the persistence of smaller far-right-coded parties rather than a straightforward replacement of the old system by the far right.
Italy is the starkest case of rightward recomposition. In Figure 9, both traditional anchor families weaken over time. The Democratic Party, Italy’s main center-left anchor, declined from roughly one-third of the vote in 2008 to under 20% by 2022. The traditional center-right anchor in this chart refers to the Berlusconi party family: The People of Freedom and later Forza Italia, the personalist center-right vehicle built around Silvio Berlusconi’s leadership, media power, anti-communist appeal, and coalition-making capacity on the Italian right.[iii] Support for this Berlusconi-centered bloc fell even more sharply, from 37.4% in 2008 to 8.1% in 2022. Over the same period, far-right-coded vote share rose from 10.7% in 2008 to 37.9% in 2022. By Italy’s latest election, far-right-coded parties were no longer merely pressuring the party system from the outside; they had become the dominant pole of the Italian right, with Brothers of Italy leading the governing bloc and its far-right leader, Giorgia Meloni, taking the premiership.
Figure 10 indicates that Italy’s transformation passed through an anti-establishment phase before becoming a far-right-coded parliamentary surge. The Five Star Movement built its appeal around anti-corruption, anti-party, digital-democracy, and post-ideological populist claims. It rose sharply after the crisis and became the largest party in 2018.[iv] But Five Star’s governing experience weakened its outsider identity. It entered government first with the League and later with the Democratic Party, supported Mario Draghi’s technocratic government, suffered internal splits, and lost much of the protest energy that had fueled its rise. By 2022, Five Star’s vote share had fallen substantially while far-right-coded parties surged, especially through the rise of post-fascist, far-right Brothers of Italy and the continued strength of the League. Italy provides the clearest transition from post-crisis anti-establishment disruption to rightward nationalist recomposition. The political space first opened by Five Star was not stabilized by Five Star. It was ultimately overtaken by the far right.
Spain follows a later and more uneven trajectory. Its traditional center-left and center-right anchor parties, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) and the People’s Party (PP), both lost support after the crisis, but neither disintegrated as completely as PASOK in Greece or the Berlusconi-era center-right in Italy. PSOE and PP had structured Spain’s post-transition party system for decades, alternating in power while smaller parties remained secondary. That structure fractured after the economic crisis, austerity, corruption scandals, and the mass 15-M/Indignados protest cycle.[v] Figure 9 records PSOE falling from 43.9% in 2008 to the low 20s by 2015–2016 before recovering to over 30% by 2023. PP falls sharply after 2011, reaches a low point in 2019, and then recovers by 2023. Spain’s old party system, ultimately, was disrupted but not destroyed.
The challenger dynamic in Spain was also different. Podemos emerged from the anti-austerity and anti-corruption protest cycle that followed the crisis, presenting itself as a challenge to the old PSOE/PP order.[vi] In Figure 10, the post-crisis challenger category rises sharply in 2015 and 2016, then declines by 2023. That decline reflects not only electoral fatigue, but also institutionalization and fragmentation: the challenger-left space moved from Podemos to Unidas Podemos and then into the broader Sumar project, while internal tensions and coalition politics reduced some of its original anti-system force.[vii] Vox, the far-right party, emerges later. Spain had long been treated as an exception to the broader European far-right pattern, but that ended with Vox’s breakthrough. Its rise was closely linked to territorial conflict, particularly the Catalan independence crisis, as well as broader nationalist, anti-immigration, and anti-feminist politics.[viii] By 2023, far-right-coded vote share in Spain remained well above its pre-2019 level, even as the traditional PP recovered.
These three cases exemplify why Southern Europe’s regional rightward movement should be understood as recomposition rather than simple drift. Greece’s trajectory runs through the collapse of PASOK, the surge and later decline of the anti-austerity left, and the eventual reconsolidation of the center-right alongside fragmented, yet persistent, far-right-coded parties. Italy’s trajectory is more dramatic: anti-establishment disruption first hollowed out the old party system, but the political space it opened was ultimately captured by the far right. Spain’s trajectory is later and less totalizing, with challenger-left disruption and Vox’s emergence weakening the old two-party structure without fully displacing PSOE or PP.
Southern Europe illustrates one of the most important dynamics in this report: crisis does not move party systems in one predetermined ideological direction. The Eurozone crisis and austerity politics destabilized older systems of representation, but the first wave of challengers did not necessarily retain the political space they opened. Some were absorbed into government, some fragmented, and some lost credibility when protest collided with the constraints of governing. What followed depended on national party structures, protest movements, electoral opportunities, and the capacity of established parties to recover. The result is a region that moved right overall, but through rupture, substitution, and recomposition rather than a single continuous ideological wave.
2.4: Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland)
Eastern Europe is the region where the aggregate line is most likely to mislead if read too quickly. In Figure 6, Eastern Europe begins as the most right-leaning region in the dataset and remains there for most of the period, before dropping sharply in the latest years. But that regional movement does not describe one uniform Eastern European trajectory. It reflects three distinct country-level patterns: Hungary’s long period of Fidesz dominance and later center-right replacement; Poland’s sustained right-leaning parliamentary composition despite a change in government; and Bulgaria’s repeated electoral instability followed by a sharp latest-period shift.
This nuance matters because Eastern Europe’s ideological movement is not reducible to a conventional left-right story. The three Eastern European countries in this dataset are all post-communist EU member states, but their party systems developed under pressures different from those facing many older Western European democracies. Post-1989 transition, EU accession, anti-communist memory politics, corruption, state capture, rule-of-law conflict, nationalism, migration politics, and relations with Russia all shape party competition in ways that do not map neatly onto a Western European left-right spectrum.[i] In this region, the “right” often means more than economic conservatism or cultural traditionalism. It can also mean national sovereignty politics, anti-liberal institutional projects, anti-communist grievance, Euroscepticism, and efforts to concentrate power within the state.
Figure 11 makes that complexity visible. Hungary and Poland occupy a consistently high right-leaning band across the period studied. Neither country falls below 1.1 on the seat-share-weighted parliamentary ideology index, even after governing-party turnover. Bulgaria, by contrast, follows a much more volatile path: it moves from a moderately right-leaning position, drops during the early 2010s, rises again during years of instability and repeated elections, and then falls sharply in the latest election. This is why Eastern Europe’s regional average requires caution. Its late decline does not mean the region has simply moved left. It reflects a combination of government turnover, party-system volatility, and country-specific political realignment.
Hungary is the clearest example of right-leaning parliamentary dominance becoming institutional transformation. Fidesz’s 2010 landslide gave Viktor Orbán’s party a two-thirds parliamentary majority, enabling it to rewrite Hungary’s constitutional order and reshape key institutions.[i] This is the key distinction. Fidesz did not merely win office from the right; it used repeated electoral mandates to weaken the institutional checks that could constrain future governing power. In the dataset, Hungary is already strongly right-leaning at the start of the observed period and remains so through most subsequent elections. Its seat-share-weighted ideology index stays near the top of the regional range, even as the political meaning of that rightward position deepens from electoral dominance into democratic backsliding and illiberal rule.[ii]
The latest Hungarian election complicates the picture. TISZA’s 2026 victory ended Fidesz’s sixteen-year rule and marked a major governing rupture. But Figure 11 shows that the parliamentary ideology index barely moves. That is not a contradiction. TISZA is itself a center-right party, so Hungary’s government changes without the elected parliament becoming meaningfully less right-leaning. The implication is important: in Hungary, the most consequential democratic shift in the latest period is not a leftward ideological transformation. It is the displacement of an entrenched illiberal incumbent by another party on the right.
Poland follows a similar pattern in the data, though the institutional story is different. Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS), a national-conservative and socially conservative party, won a parliamentary majority in 2015 and used its time in government to reshape Poland’s judiciary, public media, and relationship with the European Union.[iii] Like Hungary, Poland became a major European case of democratic backsliding, but its party system remained more competitive and its opposition more electorally viable. In Figure 11, Poland’s parliamentary ideology index rises sharply after the first observed election and then remains consistently high.
Poland’s 2023 election is especially revealing. PiS lost the government and Donald Tusk’s pro-European coalition took office, ending eight years of nationalist rule. However, the resulting seat-share-weighted ideology index barely shifts. PiS remained the largest party, and the broader parliamentary right remained strong enough that the change in government did not translate into a dramatic leftward movement in the index. Poland’s case therefore reinforces one of Figure 11’s central points: government alternation and parliamentary ideology are not the same thing. A country can move toward liberal-democratic repair in governing terms while remaining structurally right-leaning in parliamentary composition.
Hungary and Poland also have influence beyond their national party systems. For years, their parallel rule-of-law conflicts with Brussels exposed the limits of EU enforcement against democratic backsliding from within the Union. Article 7 can ultimately suspend certain membership rights, but its sanctions stage requires unanimity among the other member states, creating space for backsliding governments to shield one another.[iv] This was not merely a theoretical problem. In 2020, Hungary and Poland jointly blocked the EU’s budget and COVID-19 recovery package in opposition to rule-of-law conditions on EU funds, turning their domestic rule-of-law conflicts into a Union-wide bargaining crisis.[v] The Hungary–Poland alignment is consequential: not only because both states challenged liberal-democratic norms at home, but because together they could complicate the EU’s ability to defend those norms collectively.
Bulgaria is different. It does not fit the Hungary-Poland pattern of durable national-conservative dominance. Its trajectory is defined less by consolidated illiberal rule than by volatility, anti-corruption politics, fragmented party competition, and repeated elections. Long-standing corruption and state-capture concerns are central to that instability, making Bulgaria’s movement less a clean ideological shift than a crisis of governability.[vi] The 2020 anti-corruption protests, intensified by the raid on President Rumen Radev’s office and broader public anger at corruption and state capture, helped open a prolonged period of political instability.[vii] Between 2021 and the latest election, Bulgaria held repeated parliamentary elections, struggled to sustain governing coalitions, and produced one of the most volatile country-level paths in the dataset.
That volatility is consequential because Bulgaria drives much of the late Eastern European drop visible in the regional average. By the latest election, Bulgaria’s seat-share-weighted ideology index fell below zero. But this should not be read as a simple social-democratic left turn. The latest parliamentary majority is better understood as an anti-corruption and state-reform vote with a Moscow-friendly geopolitical profile, rather than a conventional left-party consolidation.[viii] Bulgaria’s movement therefore complicates the regional story from the opposite direction: where Hungary and Poland remain right-leaning despite governing turnover, Bulgaria moves sharply downward in the index without becoming a straightforward example of leftward ideological stabilization.
Eastern Europe adds a unique lesson to this regional analysis. In Western Europe, the central issue was containment and institutional mediation. In Northern Europe, it was stability versus Dutch realignment. In Southern Europe, it was crisis-driven rupture and recomposition. In Eastern Europe, the core issue is the separation between ideological position, governing control, and democratic regime trajectory. Hungary and Poland remain deeply right-leaning in parliamentary terms even when governments change. Bulgaria’s late shift pulls the regional average downward, but through volatility and anti-corruption realignment rather than a conventional left revival.
Ultimately, the region’s overall story is not a simple march rightward or leftward. It is a warning about averages. Eastern Europe appears as the most right-leaning region for much of the period, and that is meaningful. But Figure 11 shows that the rightward regional position is built from different political mechanisms: entrenched illiberal incumbency in Hungary, national-conservative strength and attempted liberal-democratic repair in Poland, and volatile anti-corruption realignment in Bulgaria. The regional average captures the direction of parliamentary ideology, but the country-level paths reveal what that movement actually means.
[i] Kim Lane Scheppele, “Hungary’s Illiberal Turn: Disabling the Constitution,” Journal of Democracy 23, no. 3 (July 2012): 138–46, https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2012.0054.
[ii] Pech and Scheppele, “Illiberalism within”; Bertelsmann Stiftung, “BTI 2026 Country Report: Hungary,” BTI Transformation Index, 2026, https://bti-project.org/en/reports/country-report/HUN.
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[vi] Bertelsmann Stiftung, “BTI 2026 Country Report: Bulgaria,” BTI Transformation Index, 2026, https://bti-project.org/en/reports/country-report/BGR.
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[v] Bjerkem, “The Norwegian Progress Party.”
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[i] Annualized absolute ideological movement is calculated as the sum of absolute election-to-election changes in the seat-share-weighted ideology index, divided by the number of years between the first and latest observed election. This differs from the slope because it measures total movement regardless of direction, rather than net directional change over time.
