“Victory in defeat, there is none higher,” wrote Robert A Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land, about unsung heroes who never give up. Although the far right likes to portray itself as unsung heroes, it has mostly found defeat with a series of pyrrhic victories in recent weeks, unable to turn record electoral support in the EU, France and the UK into concrete political power.

This was perhaps best exemplified by Jordan Bardella, Marine Le Pen’s hand-picked “golden boy”, portrayed as almost infallible in much of the media. He led National Rally (Rassemblement National, or RN) to new highs in the 9 June European elections (eight percentage points up on the party’s 2019 performance) and France (14.5 percentage points up on the party’s showing in the first round of legislative elections in 2022). And yet, on Monday, Bardella was not announced as the new prime minister of France, but as the president of Viktor Orbán’s new Patriots for Europe (PfE), one of three rival far-right groups in the European parliament. The others are the longstanding European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), dominated by Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy (FdI), and a smaller, more extreme group called Europe of Sovereign Nations, launched on Wednesday by the German far-right Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD).

Although officially a new group, and now the third-biggest in the parliament, PfE is mostly just the old far-right Identity & Democracy (ID) of which Le Pen’s National Rally was the biggest player, with the addition of Orbán’s Fidesz party. Among a........

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