As Marine Le Pen has proved in France, the rise of the populists is finally going into reverse

Intellectuals predicted the unstoppable conquest of the populist anti-European right. But a simple immigrant-bashing contempt for European partnership is not enough to hold a party together, writes Denis MacShane

Geert Wilders, leader of Dutch party PVV, Italy's Matteo Salvini and Marine Le Pen, leader of the French National Rally party, at the rally (Reuters)

It seems only yesterday that we were told the rise of right-wing national populism was unstoppable. In 2016, the victory for Brexit and Trump and the surges of Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini, Geert Wilders, the AfD in Germany and Vox in Spain were all fusing into a rightist take-over in Europe, threatening the continuing existence of the European Union.

Academics such as Matthew Goodwin, Cas Mudde, and Catherine Fieschi, and many of their continental colleagues, moved from the lecture hall to mainstreaming on TV and comment pages with books and articles proclaiming the new era of border-shutting, Islamophobe – or in Britain, Europhobe – politicians.

Binary divisions of voters into “somewhere” people who backed inward-looking nationalist solutions and “anywhere” people who were tolerant supporters of liberal values and who backed open societies and open economies were promulgated.