European parliamentary elections held from Thursday to Sunday show a marked shift to the right across the Continent. Both moderate and far-right parties made substantial gains.

It didn’t matter if the right wing was in government or opposition. Across the whole continent, the right did well, and the left lost out. Leading historians worry that these election results could contain a grave warning for Europe.

David Kynaston, research fellow at Kingston University and author of Austerity Britain, says (emphasis mine throughout):

As Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, said of Stalinism in her book Hope Against Hope, “Don’t think it can’t happen to you.” There are definite parallels between Germany in the prewar years and now, most obviously the economic crisis that sparked mass unemployment. The Wall Street crash took place in 1929, but it wasn’t until January 1933 that Hitler became chancellor of Germany; I would suggest that we are a long way from seeing the worst of our own economic crisis, and if we date the start as being September 2008, then we still have a while to go in which the far right could gain a stronghold.More worryingly, the recession has been accompanied by a rise in populism and a loss of faith in democratic politics; the sort of people who, a generation ago, did not used to be cynical about politics now are. Worse still, people are not just indifferent to politics, they are ignorant about it: The level of hostility to intellectualism in this country is deeply depressing.

Richard Overy, professor of history at Exeter University and author of The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars, says he is mainly worried “about the drift to the right in the rest of Europe [other than Britain], where the mood is fearful, anti-immigrant, anti-Islam and deeply hostile to the left. Europe clearly feels embattled because of factors such as terrorism and the rise of China, and has been moving to the right for some time.”

Telegraph columnist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard also pointed to the collapse of the left in Europe:

In Germany and Austria, the Social Democrats suffered their worst defeats since World War ii. I don’t say that with pleasure. A vibrant labor-spd movement is vital for German political stability. It was the peeling away of Socialist support during the Bruning deflation of the Depression years—so like today’s Weber-Trichet deflation—that led to the catastrophic election of July 1932, when the Nazis and Communists took half the Reichstag seats.This will not happen again, thankfully, because there is no Bolshevik threat luring business into a Faustian pact with fascists. But the picture is not benign either. Unemployment in Germany may reach 5 million by the end of 2010, according to the five “wise men,” even if recovery comes on schedule.

Evans-Pritchard worries that European governments may start falling as a result of the European election debacle:

So, we may lose three or four governments in Europe in coming days or weeks—or even worse, they may survive. The drama is unfolding as I feared. Halfway through the depression, we are facing … exactly the sort of political disintegration that occurs in times of profound economic rupture.Remember, the dangerous phase in the Great Depression was Stage ii, after the collapse of Austria’s Credit-Anstalt in mid-1931 set off a disastrous chain-reaction that autumn (until then, most people thought they faced no more than a bad recession, like today).Don’t count on the political fabric of Europe holding together if our green shoots shrivel and die in the credit drought of the long, hot, rainless summer that lies ahead.

David Stevenson, professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science, warns that democracy is already under threat in some parts of Europe:

Then there is the whole question of Italy. Berlusconi has strengthened his support and is a threat to civil liberties. He controls the media, and the left are weak and powerless against him. He is not far right in the sense that Hitler was far right, but he is a threat to democracy. Italy has become a Western European equivalent of the sort of guided democracy you get in Russia.There are many worrying developments across Europe, and a number of different phenomena we need to be aware of. It is wrong to expect that an economic depression will help the left. It didn’t in the 1930s, nor in the 1870s and ’80s, when the radical, populist right was born. It seems that in periods of economic uncertainty, people look to authoritarianism rather than democracy.

However, many of the historians interviewed by the Guardian warn that the parallels between now and the 1930s are not exact.

“[W]e shouldn’t interpret this right-wing drift as a return to fascism,” Overy says. He continues:

Fascism with a capital “F” was a phenomenon of the ’20s and ’30s. It was a revolutionary movement asserting a violent imperialism and promising a new social order. There is nothing like that now. Far-right parties now are based on fear—fear of immigration, fear of aliens, fear of being Europeanized. They have no vision of a new social order, nor can they legally campaign for the replacement of a democratic government by an authoritarian regime. This is a protest vote by fearful people.

The Trumpet has said before that Europe’s next right-wing dictator will not necessarily come from a fringe right-wing party. Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote in the May/June 2009 issue, “The Bible prophesies that this man will come to power with deceit and flatteries.”

As these experts point out, the anti-democratic political climate that could bring this kind of dictator to power is already here. Watch European politics closely. As Stevenson said, “in periods of economic uncertainty, people look to authoritarianism rather than democracy.”

For more information, read Mr. Flurry’s article “The German Nightmare Has Returned!”