The rise of the Right across Europe is being spearheaded from the German medieval city of Magdeburg, where today a nationalist party is expected to seize power for the first time since Nazism was destroyed and Hitler committed suicide in a Berlin bunker.Our map shows that 81 years later, more than half of the EU's 27 member states – from Italy to Finland – are now ruled, or influenced, by Right-wing parties and factions that question the virtues of uncontrolled mass immigration.Nowhere is the defiance against Brussels' multicultural agenda starker than in Magdeburg, the former East German communist capital of Saxony-Anhalt, where the result of the epoch-making state parliament elections are due tonight.Final opinion polls reveal a runaway lead of 41 per cent for the contentious Alternative for Germany (AFD) party, 13 years after it emerged as a fringe anti-immigration outfit.The centre-Left magazine Der Spiegel has asked whether the AFD's leader in the state, the charismatic Ulrich Siegmund, is 'the most dangerous man in Germany'.Yet the party's popularity has been on the rise, say academics, since former Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Germany's doors – and effectively those of the EU – to 1.3 million migrants in 2015, many of them fleeing war in Syria.As leader of the centrist Christian Democratic Union (CDU) government at the time, she declared 'We can do it', confidently insisting that the country could handle the relentless swathes of newcomers.Today the CDU faces a voters' backlash across Germany.
Hard-Right spectre looms over the EU: SUE REID investigates
Our map shows that 81 years later, more than half of the EU's 27 member states, from Italy to Finland, are now ruled, or influenced, by Right-wing parties and factions.
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