The likely election of Ulrich Siegmund of far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) next weekend in the Saxony-Anhalt länder or state has much of democratic Germany deeply fearful. Currently polling at around 43 per cent, like the AfD in neighbouring former East German states of Thuringia and Saxony, his victory will be the first time a far-right premier rules one of the country’s länder since the Federal Republic’s 1949 founding. But not, many fear, the last.

The party’s rise, German chancellor Friederich Merz warned recently, marks “five minutes to midnight”, a reawakening of fascism, “the last warning to the parties of the democratic centre” of the need, he argues, to build consensus on key issues such as immigration, economic reform and European defence.

The AfD success and that of France’s National Rally or Rassemblement National (RN) among others, makes the publication of two studies into political continuity on the far right and the lasting legacy of its historic leaders in France and Italy particularly timely. Enda O’Doherty’s historical account of the French far right since the trial of Dreyfus (The dark side of France), and Stephen Gundle’s cultural and psychological examination of Italy’s whitewashing of Benito Mussolini’s legacy (Mussolini’s Ghost: The Afterlife of a Dictator), complement each other well, particularly in their different insights into the unconvincing parallel processes of what RN leader Marine Le Pen calls the “dédiabolisation” –........

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