The far-right threat has receded, but we must not ignore the lessons of history

Almost three years after it became the first nation in Europe to vote a neo-fascist party into power, the voters of Austria have now, seemingly, reversed this trend. True, the world will have to see whether the country's system of proportional representation forces Chancellor Schuessel, a conservative, once again to offer Jorg Haider's extreme Freedom party a role in the cabinet. But there is no mistaking the collapse in the Freedom Party's popularity, from more than a quarter of the vote at the beginning of 2000 to 10 per cent now. Obviously the Austrians did not enjoy being the pariahs of Europe. With the rejection by the Swiss of a proposal to make their asylum laws even harsher, it is tempting to conclude that the electoral victories of the far right were a flash in the pan, a momentary and often exaggerated response to the pressures of immigration.

There should be no room for complacency, however. That Swiss proposal was approved by 49.9 per cent of the electorate. The fall of the Freedom Party may have owed as much to the mistakes of Mr Haider as to any national soul-searching. It was Mr Haider, after all, who took it upon himself to build special relationships with Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, neither a natural vote-winner in Carinthia. Perhaps it was just as well for him that Mr Haider opted to stay out of the coalition. The man he did nominate for high office, Karl-Heinz Grasser, the finance minister, defected to the conservative People's Party.

Had the Freedom Party had a more effective leader, it might well have held on to more of its strength, just as the Dutch far-right would still be in one piece had its charismatic leader, Pim Fortuyn, not fallen to an assassin's bullet. Even so, it demonstrates a certain weakness in these movements.

In any case, the collapse of the Freedom Party's vote should not tempt the European left into more complacency. The victories earlier this year of the Swedish and German Social Democrats were far from convincing, and we have the unhappy fate of Lionel Jospin and the French Socialists to remind us of just how easily a demagogue can destroy a great party.

If a trend can be discerned in the behaviour of electorates from Italy to Norway in the past few years – a necessarily tentative exercise – it is that the parties of the mainstream right have been the principal long-term beneficiaries of a gradual disaffection with the values of traditional European social democracy. The most spectacular beneficiary has been Jacques Chirac, and while the 80 per cent of the vote he enjoyed in the presidential election was a freak, his party is firmly in control of the French system. The re-election of Gerhard Schröder in Germany was, on the face of it, a triumph for old-fashioned ideas of solidarity; but his coalition only survived because of the strong performance of the Greens. Electorally successful left parties are those that talk left but "act right", notably New Labour.

The danger for conventional parties is to conclude that the way to beat the fascists is to be just a little bit like them. Such pandering to racism may work in the short term, but history shows that no one outflanks a fascist for long. The BNP's recent success in Blackburn should also remind us of that that. Parties such as the BNP and Austria's Freedom Party come and go, but the real danger is that their views and policies become mainstream. There are too many examples, not least in Britain, of that for democrats to feel entirely relieved at events in central Europe.