My guest is Timothy Gartenhash.

Timothy Gartanash is Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford,

and his most recent book is Homelands, A Personal History of Europe, now published in 24 languages.

Welcome to the podcast, Timothy.

Good to be with you again.

Right. You say again, yes, our last podcast chat was in February

2021. So it's time we had a follow-up chat, absolutely. So we're going to talk essentially in this

podcast about the far right in Europe, but obviously also the impact of the recent US presidential

actions a couple of days ago as we record this.

But to get things straight at the very outset, Timothy, is there a kind of generic phrase we could

use or is it sloppy to assume that the words are interchangeable?

Far right, extreme right, populist parties.

What is the kind of phrasing or most comfortable with using?

So I would now say hard right.

Okay.

Because far implies they're far out on a spectrum.

Right.

And what we've seen in the last five years is that they're no longer far out on a spectrum.

Georgia Meloni, who comes from a post-neo-fascist party to be strictly accurate, is the Prime Minister of Italy, and other Marine Le Pen is, in a sense,

the current French government is on sufferance from Marine Le Pen. So these

parties are in extraordinary positions of influence in the mainstream. Right. I use a slightly

journalistic phrase, the rise of now, okay, the hard right, to use your phrase. That suggests

...