Alternative for Germany is the latest right-wing party to make an electoral breakthrough in Europe.
AfD got nearly 6 million votes, or 13 per cent of the popular vote, the biggest ever electoral success for a party that far on the right of the political spectrum in recent German history.
By our calculations, it means at least 30 million people have voted for broadly similar right-wing populist parties in EU countries in the last five years:
We’ve concentrated on EU countries, and on parties with a strong right-wing nationalist or populist element which have made significant recent use of anti-immigration rhetoric. Here they are:
We’ve selected parties that have persuaded more than half a million people to vote for them in a parliamentary or presidential election in the last five years.
Inevitably, there will be disagreement about which parties should be included on this list.
In most countries selected, there has been a significant increase in support over the last two comparable elections. (The exceptions are Italy and Finland, where the Northern League and the Finns parties have lost votes):
It’s not possible to make an exact comparison between the vote for Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France in 2017 and in the previous presidential election, since this year was the first time a candidate from that party made it through to the second round since 2002.
So to calculate the change in vote, we compared the first-round votes for Le Pen in 2017 (7.7 million) and in 2012 (6.4 million).
We also calculated the share of the vote the different parties won in various countries: