It’s a bit naive to think that they weren’t already fascist. Banning Russian news outlets and putting people in jail for expressing pro-Russian opinions isn’t fascist? Giving arms, training and billions of Euros to Nazis isn’t fascist?

What is happening in the inevitable backlash to the disastrous failed policies of the so-called “centrist” liberal parties and the misguided center-left that constantly tails them. They have allowed the right wing xenophobes to monopolize the anti-war position by denouncing anyone who advocated for any form of caution or common sense in the policy toward Russia as a Putin puppet. Their obsessive sanction mania has plunged Europe into a catastrophic economic crisis from which it may never recover, cutting themselves off from the cheap source of energy upon which the international competitiveness of Europe was built. Europe is being deindustrialized.

They put all their chips on the US, NATO and the EU. They (and this includes the vast majority of “leftist” parties) tried to marginalize anyone critical of Europe’s subservience to Washington and of the EU’s undemocratic and neoliberal impositions upon sovereign European countries and in so doing drove them right into the arms of the right.

I am not at all surprised by this result. It is what happens when the left (excluding the communists) totally and utterly fails to provide an alternative. An anti-war alternative, an anti-NATO alternative, an anti-EU alternative, an anti-austerity alternative. When the entire mainstream European left throws its lot in with the neoliberals and the Atlanticist warmongers.