It is an idée fixe among British Europhiles that continental Europe is a progressive place firmly wedded to left-wing parties and policies, and that in leaving the EU, Brexit Britain was demonstrating its irredeemably reactionary and backward nature.

The picture of Europe beloved by British Eurofans as a safe space for only left-wing politics is a complete myth

In fact, as a brief examination of recent European elections and current governments reveals, this is the exact opposite of the truth: across Europe the right and often the far-right are on the rise. Meanwhile, the once mighty Socialist and Social Democratic parties that dominated the continent are in eclipse, if not facing outright extinction. Only in Britain is a left-wing party poised to take power.

Until yesterday, Spain was the outlier bucking this trend, with the venerable Socialist Workers’ party, the PSOE, under Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, firmly in power for the past five years, governing in coalition with the far-left populist Podemos party.

But Sunday’s Spanish regional and mayoral elections have dealt a hammer blow to the left. The centre-right People’s party (PP) scored what even the Guardian called an ‘emphatic win’ and is on course to rule all but three of Spain’s 17 regions, though in some it will rely on the far-right Vox party to retain its majorities. The elections presage general elections this December which pollsters predict will oust the PSOE from national government in Madrid.

The Spanish polls followed hard on the heels of general elections in Greece earlier this month in which Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s conservative New Democracy defied opinion pollsters and trounced the left-wing opposition Syrizia and Pasok opposition parties. Though failing to win an absolute majority, Mitsotakis is likely to demand new elections this summer which are almost certain to confirm him in power.

Mitsotakis’s triumph confirms that most Greeks prefer the austere stability he offers to the grim economic anarchy that the far-left Syrizia presided over under the chaotic rule of its leader Alexis Tsipras from 2015 to 2019.

To the horror of the EU’s leaders, a party they had branded as far-right because of its neo-fascist origins, the Brothers of Italy, unseated their stooge technocrat Mario Draghi, and decisively won general elections last October under its charismatic leader Giorgia Meloni, a working class woman unafraid to stand up for traditional and patriotic values that are unwelcome among the Brussels elite.

Since her victory, Prime Minister Meloni has ruled in coalition with the populist League of Matteo Salvini and the Forza Italia party of aged former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, giving Italy an unfamiliar but welcome dose of stability. The once all powerful Italian left has no answers to Meloni’s popular appeal.

In Eastern Europe, the much reviled Viktor Orban presides over a Hungarian government run by his Fidesz party which has morphed from a liberal, free market ideology to an authoritarian, proudly illiberal movement in open defiance of the EU’s edicts.

Similarly, Poland’s ruling nationalist Law and Justice party, which controls Poland’s parliament and presidency, has emulated both Orban and Meloni in espousing pro-family, anti-immigration policies in defiance of the EU’s secularist and left-liberal ethos.

In Scandinavia, Sweden, for long the model of an ideal social democratic society, is now ruled by a right-wing minority government headed by the Moderate party, which depends for its survival on the support of the Sweden Democrats, a formerly far-right party with its roots in the neo-Nazi fringe.

Even in the supposedly liberal Netherlands, the ruling coalition of pro-EU premier Mark Rutte was shaken in March by the electoral success of a single issue populist movement, the BBB, formed by farmers furious at Rutte’s authoritarian plans to seize their land in obedience to EU decrees limiting nitrogen in the soil. The BBB now control enough seats in the Dutch Senate to frustrate Rutte’s and Brussels’s schemes.

In France and Germany, the EU’s cornerstones, the left are also in dire trouble. The Berlin ‘traffic light coalition’ of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz is increasingly unpopular thanks to a growing economic crisis. Defeated by the centre-right Christian Democrats in regional polls, it has also failed to halt the rise of the far-right AfD, which is now on 18 per cent in opinion polls.

In France, the hugely unpopular centrist President Emmanuel Macron is in his final term in power. Both of France’s traditional centre right and centre left parties, the Republicans and the Socialists, have been eclipsed to their far right and far left by Marine Le Pen’s French Rally and Jean-Luc Melenchon’s France Unbowed parties, respectively.

What this tour d’horizon makes very clear is that the picture of Europe beloved by British Eurofans as a safe space for only left-wing politics is a complete myth. Instead, it is the right that is resurgent wherever we look across the Channel.

Although by no means a united force – the European right is split on attitudes to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for example – they share common attitudes: primarily hostility to mass immigration and a conservative scepticism towards woke ideas in the culture wars.

Formerly openly neo-fascist parties in France, Italy and Sweden have moderated their policies and airbrushed their images in a largely successful effort to banish naked racism and appeal to a mass electorate, and it is obvious that millions of voters are not put off by their dark pasts.

If Labour takes power in Britain next year it will be butting against the headwinds that are sweeping the rest of Europe towards the right.