A hard-right tidal wave is coming, and outrunning it will be difficult - Gordon Brown

By the time of the European parliament elections in June, this year's rightward ebb in European politics will have turned into a tidal wave. Ultra-nationalist demagogues and populist-nationalists are now leading the polls in Italy, the Netherlands, France, Austria, Hungary and Slovakia, and running second in Germany and Sweden.

- Gordon Brown

There are two hard-right groupings in the European parliament - Identity and Democracy and European Conservatives and Reformists. Between them, they could secure as much as 25% of the June vote. But even more ominously, in almost every part of Europe including Britain, these factions are forcing the hand of the traditional centre-right parties - which, one by one, are capitulating to ever more extreme anti-immigration, anti-trade and anti-environment positions.

The rightward shift is, of course, a western and not just European phenomenon, with Trump 2.0 advocating a far more aggressive protectionist and nationalist agenda than Trump 1.0. But while the US economy roars forward - even if the average American voter does not feel the full benefits - Europe, and especially its industrial engine room, Germany, continues to suffer from near-zero growth and stagnation in terms of living standards. And having lived through a decade of consistently low growth, the continent is now divided between an optimistic but declining minority, who still hold to the expectation that a rising tide lifts all boats, and the growing and more pessimistic majority who now see life as a zero-sum game.

The latter is a mindset that, recognising the economic pie is not growing, leads people to an erroneous conclusion: "I will only do well if someone else does badly." Once embraced, this view is hard to shake.