This all explains the revival of radical politics, on both the left and right, in recent years. Because the events of 2008 came as such a shock – even for the system’s outsiders – nobody proved immediately able to take advantage of such a historic opportunity. Gradually that would change, however, with the previously unthinkable becoming increasingly commonplace. In the 2009 European Parliamentary elections, the far right made impressive gains across the continent with the likes of UKIP, France ’s Front National and even the British National Party attracting widespread support. The BNP’s results in particular came as a shock, with a party historically connected to the country’s neo-Nazi movement gaining almost 1 million votes and two MEPs. For a few years similar energies on the left were limited to the streets – such as the 2010 British student movement and the Spanish Indignados – but eventually these too translated to success at the ballot box. Spain ofered the most obvious initial expression of that with the emergence of a new party, Podemos, which gained five MEPs in 2014 just a few months after it had been formed, before finishing third in the following year’s Spanish general election.
The Great Disorder
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