Editorial: The mainstream political right helped cause the rise of the far right

​A hard right candidate is ahead in the first round of Romania’s presidential election.

​It is the latest example of such a political breakthrough in Europe, which has seen emphatically right wing candidates make huge gains across the continent.

Sometimes they are called ‘far’ right, which implies neo nazi, when in fact they are mainly just outspoken against immigration and Islamic extremism. But sometimes they really are unsavoury political entities. In this case, Calin Georgescu is pro Russian, as are many hard right politicians in eastern Europe, giving succour to the warmonger Putin.

In other nations, the rise of crude right wing candidates has been accompanied by an increase in corruption.

One group of people has a significant part of the blame for this new form of politics: the mainstream right. In Britain, in America and in major European countries they often did next to nothing to stop massive waves of immigration. In fact in many cases they subtly encouraged it as a pool of cheap labour, rather than embarking on the trickier task of telling native populations that it could not turn its nose up at jobs. As this column noted yesterday, even Labour is now telling people to go to work.

In other cases, a certain type of conservative such as Boris Johnson boasted about supporting immigration, as if showing how cosmopolitan they were. Matters such as the need for cultural integration into the host country that is generously accepting the migrant were cast aside.

The former German leader Angela Merkel has just given an interesting interview to the BBC. She made an intelligent case for her approach to Russia and against the wealth imbalance in Africa that helps push people towards Europe. At the same time however, in merely citing the moral goodness of accepting vast numbers of economic migrants she displayed a naivete that has helped upend normal politics.