Countries of the EU falling to far right populism is the result of some unpopular policies being imposed by the EU themselves—Your comment reeks of "beatings will continue until morality improves".
It's had multiple resurgences since WW2, and the current one may have already peaked in some places. Duda didn't exactly improve his numbers, say, and in most Western European countries the far right isn't actually looking all that healthy in polls.
I've had the flu a lot, but that doesn't mean that I'm chronically infected with it. Every time I got sick, I caught it from a different person. Europe caught it from this intermediate condition where the core of the EU can consistently take advantage of the peripheral states, generating large trade surpluses, but have to be begged to help through begrudging one-off fixes (rather than federal institutions that work to and have the means to constantly rebalance things) whenever they crash one of them by loaning them too much money to buy things from the core.
If federalism is just exploitation, the obvious last resort is nationalism.
Hah, that is indeed the narrative but is it really true? Poland is one of the major recipients of EU aid, it also benefits immensely from the single market. Yet politicians always use it as a scapegoat blaming it for its problems!
The Polish political/media approach seems very, very similar to the British; anything good, Poland did, anything bad is the EU's fault. I think most member states do this to an extent, but a few really lean into it, causing a lot of public confusion.
So you have to take the bad with the good? Can't you say "money is good, but being forced to be leeched on by refugees of NATO wars is unsavoury and doesn't help anybody"
Nope, I witnessed the rise of populism in Hungary, its a very interesting story. Mostly because its a small country, so its easier to see behind the curtains and because its in the border of the west-east influence zone.
Hungary had far right activist since it was freed from the soviet union (MIEP [1] and early Jobbik [2] ), but these were very different from the ones today. They hated the Soviet union and Russia with a passion, since they occupied Hungary for 40 years. Another prominent feature of them was hating on jews. Also they never had any significant popularity, most ppl saw them just as wackos.
Then around 2010 something happened. The far right (mostly Jobbik at this time) reversed its stance on Russia and started hating the EU and US within like half a year (also they stopped their anti-jew rhetoric). Also small, dubious news sites and started popping up which praised Putin so much I thought it was a joke. Same thing happened in conspiracy sites - a few years earlier they content was about UFOs, lizard men, angels etc. and suddenly political articles praising Putin started appearing in them e.g. [3].
After these changes moving away from straight nazi stuff Jobbik started to become more and more popular, so much that Fidesz felt threatened. (around 2010 Fidesz was center-right). So they started saying the same things as Jobbik (and discrediting them, e.g. spreading fake news that the party's head was muslim), just louder, and with more $$$ backing them up wich leads to today.
So IMO it was a carefully planned operation from Russia (support extremist voices to start infighting in the EU) that turned out very well. They are of course not 100% responsible (the other part is the PC culture taken too far), just gave a kick in the right direction.
First world countries need to realize that war in the 21st century is not fought with tanks or warplanes and redistribute military spending accordingly.
sydd above said "small, dubious news sites and started popping up which praised Putin so much I thought it was a joke. Same thing happened in conspiracy sites - a few years earlier they content was about UFOs, lizard men, angels etc. and suddenly political articles praising Putin started appearing in them"
I don't think making a better argument had anything to do with the rise of this and it will have very little with pushing it back down.
