Welcome to the CR podcast. I'm Armeida Van Rai, and I've recently joined the CR as a senior research fellow to cover European security, foreign policy and politics.

Today we're going to discuss the far-right and democratic backsliding in Europe. With me, I've got Professor Catherine DeFries,

who's the President of the Institute of European Policymaking and Professor of Political

Science at Bokuni University in Milan, and my colleague Shaika Shacki, who's a Senior Research

Fellow with the CEO based in Brussels, specialising colleague, Jaika Shacki, who's a senior research fellow with the

CEO, based in Brussels, specialising in democracy and rule of law. The far right is gaining

support across Europe. And in a recently published paper, Jaika wrote, you outline how the far right

influences the agenda in 18 European countries, or more than half of the EU and the UK as well,

by virtue of either being in government or having a major influence on the policy agenda.

At the same time, the Global State of Democracy Initiative by International Idea found that

there is increasing pressures on democracy in Europe, over not just the past year, but over

some time already. And during the period from 2019 to 2024, there have been challenges to the rule

of law. Obviously, we think of Hungary, we think of Poland, but also in decline in freedom of the

press, in Italy, in Slovakia, for example, and other civil liberties. So all of this points to quite a concerning picture,

especially as we put those two trends together. So let's get into discussing this.

Gaddaina, if I could start with you, just give us an overview. Why is support for the far right

growing in Europe? Yeah, so I think that there's never unfortunately kind of one cause, right?

So it would be easier because then we know exactly what to fix.

But I think what we see is kind of three crises.

One has been a crisis of government.

And that's basically that the kind of social contract that existed in Europe,

we are paying fairly high taxes, and for that we get public services or kind of generous public services in return. That's been under strain. It's been under strain for several reasons. We can have an entire discussion about, you know, why that's the case. But also, of course, is if you have less competitiveness, if you have less growth, you have less tax base, and that's very difficult to keep those services at base. That's one, crisis of government. And people feel this in their lives, and therefore anti-establishment sentiment. It might have been in sometimes the left in the kind of Eurozone crisis. Now it's much more the far right. Then second element is, well, then why the far right? So if you have anti-establishment

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