If the far-right National Rally party of Marine Le Pen gets 31.5% of votes in France, twice as much as the party of president Macron, you can't just call a third of the population of France "Nazis", and tell yourself that these people don't matter. Not even Macron does that, which is why he reacted in a very democratic way by calling a national election.

If you analyze it, the current main attraction of right-wing parties in Europe (and often elsewhere as well) is their hard stance against migration. In 2022, 875 000 people applied for international protection in the EU countries for the first time. That is the highest number since the 2015/16 peak from the war in Syria. And it is in addition to 3.8 million of people under "temporary protection" status, 98% of which are war refugees from Ukraine. The fundamental problem of migration into Europe is that Europe has very little control over the numbers under the current system. Waves of migration happen due to international events, like wars. But there is also a stream of asylum seekers that come due to economic conditions, just hoping for a better life, even if they aren't actually persecuted in their home countries. How many of the asylum seekers are legit is unclear, for example France only accepts 27.5% of asylum seekers in the first legal instance, while the Dutch in 2022 accepted 83.5% (and then elected a right-wing to far-right government in 2024), with the European average being just under half .

All of this results in some real issues for voters. They feel that there are too many immigrants, that they don't have control over how many of them are let into their country, and that a good number of them are basically cheating the system. Many voters also believe far-right statements that migrants are criminals; a more detailed analysis shows that it isn't the fact that somebody has a migration background that makes him more likely to be a criminal, but that the asylum process creates a large number of young men which are unemployed (because they aren't allowed to work). Young, unemployed men are more likely to be criminal than other parts of the population, regardless of origin.

The political problem is that the political center and left doesn't have any good solutions to these problems. Sometimes they just adopt a right-wing hardline, as Biden just did, limiting the numbers of migrants that are let in; such a solution is obviously unselective, and risks harming people legitimately in need of asylum, while letting others in that aren't. More often, the parties in Europe that aren't right wing simply say nothing much at all about the issue of migration. Voters, who have the choice between no answer to their issues, and a bad answer, will mostly choose the bad answer.

Europe actually needs immigrants, as they are a good solution to Europe's demographic problem of not having enough children. Migrant smuggling over the mediterranean with small boats is both costly and dangerous for the migrants; they wouldn't do it if there were accessible and legal ways to come to Europe and work. The centrist and leftist parties of Europe can't leave the important problem of migration unanswered, leaving dumb propaganda from far-right parties as the only answer out there. If Europe can solve legal immigration, they would stop the political shift to the right and seriously damage the far-right parties.