INTERNATIONAL ANALYSIS: Is the Old Conservative Right Disappearing? (PART I)

From Forza Italia to MAGA, from the Tories to Reform UK: the quiet transformation of social conservatism

For much of the last decade, European political analysis has interpreted the crisis that began in 2008 primarily as a crisis of the left. The collapse of PASOK in Greece, the declining influence of French social democracy and the emergence of new political forces in different countries seemed to confirm that the first victims of the economic and social earthquake had been the traditional progressive parties.

But that interpretation may have been incomplete. The same crisis that accelerated the fragmentation of the left may also have triggered a slower but equally profound process of erosion among the major conservative parties that dominated much of Western Europe for decades. That is the underlying warning raised by Iván Redondo in his column: perhaps we are not simply witnessing the temporary growth of parties positioned further to the right, but a redistribution of power within the conservative space itself.

The question is not simply whether new right-wing movements are emerging, but whether they have come to coexist with the traditional conservative parties or to replace them.

The phenomenon takes different forms depending on the country. In some cases, a new force occupies the space of another that had seemed hegemonic for years; in others, the traditional party continues to exist but loses its ability to define what it means to be right-wing; and in the United States, the transformation has taken place from within the Republican Party itself.

The paths are different, but the question connecting them is the same: who will represent the Western right ten years from now?

Italy: the right that replaced Berlusconi could itself be replaced

Italy offers one of the clearest examples. For almost two decades, Silvio Berlusconi built a political space around Forza Italia that seemed inseparable from the Italian right itself. That hegemony gradually weakened until the centre of gravity of the conservative bloc shifted towards Giorgia Meloni and Fratelli d’Italia. Forza Italia did not disappear, but it ceased to be the force around which the entire political space was organised.

What is interesting is that this transition may not have brought the process to an end. In 2026, former general Roberto Vannacci launched Futuro Nazionale and opened a new front to the right of Meloni. An SWG poll published in early September placed the party at 7.5%, slightly ahead of Forza Italia, while Fratelli d’Italia remained far ahead at 26.8%.

This is not a replacement of Meloni, but it is a significant signal: even the force that only a few years ago embodied political disruption can itself be challenged by another movement seeking to represent an even greater rupture.

An important paradox appears here. Governing forces parties to become institutionalised, to negotiate, to assume international responsibilities and gradually to become part of the system. The new right can also grow politically old. And when that happens, space opens up for another force to present itself as more authentic, more radical or less constrained by the obligations of government.

France: surviving is not the same as dominating

France presents a different variation. For decades, the Gaullist right was one of the major structures underpinning the Fifth Republic. Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy represented a political space capable of regularly contesting the presidency and organising a broad coalition of conservative and centre-right voters around itself.

That position of centrality once appeared structural. Today, it no longer does.

Les Républicains retains its organisation, representatives and institutional presence, but it no longer exercises the political monopoly once held by the French republican right. Meanwhile, the political space further to the right has expanded and forced the entire political map to reorganise.

The real change is not that the old party has disappeared, but that it is no longer the undisputed owner of that electorate.

That distinction is crucial to understanding the transformation of the traditional right. A party may retain its name, mayors and members of parliament and yet lose something even more important: the ability to define the language, priorities and ideological boundaries of its own political space.

United States: MAGA did not replace the Republican Party — it conquered it

The United States shows that this transformation does not even require the creation of a new party. The Republican Party formally remains the same historic organisation, but Donald Trump and the MAGA movement profoundly changed its internal balance.

Reuters was already describing at the 2024 Republican National Convention how Trump’s control over the party had reduced much of the internal opposition and turned the GOP into an organisation far more closely identified with his leadership and movement.

Here, no external party emerged to take the Republican electorate away from it. The transformation occurred from within.

The party name survived, the organisational structure remained and the party continued to compete under the same banner, but much of its political identity changed.

This is a fundamental distinction because it demonstrates that the replacement of an old right can happen in two ways: through another organisation occupying its political space, or through a new movement taking control of the traditional organisation and redefining it.

The American case therefore forces us to abandon the assumption that continuity of a party name necessarily means continuity of a political tradition. A party can retain exactly the same name while becoming, politically speaking, a different party.

Germany, the United Kingdom and Portugal: the pressure is no longer exceptional

Germany, the United Kingdom and Portugal do not reproduce exactly the same story, but they show that pressure on traditional conservatism is spreading across very different political systems.

In Germany, the CDU remains one of the country’s major political structures, but the growth of AfD has profoundly altered competition on the right. In September 2026, Reuters reported that AfD was leading national opinion polls while continuing to be excluded from the federal government by the so-called firewall, or cordon sanitaire, maintained by the other parties.

In the United Kingdom, Reform UK has managed to open up a political contest that only a few years ago would have seemed improbable.

The truly significant point is not which party is a few decimal points ahead in any particular poll, but that leadership of a political space dominated for generations by the Conservative Party no longer appears untouchable.

Reform had already led national polls during 2025 and 2026, while the Tories suffered considerable erosion of their electoral base.

Portugal offers an even clearer variation. In the May 2025 legislative elections, Chega won 60 seats and overtook the Socialist Party, becoming the main opposition force.

That result broke decades of dominance by the major traditional parties and confirmed that the emergence of a new right could cease to be a peripheral phenomenon and instead become one of the central axes of the political system.

The contexts are different, and it would be a mistake to treat all these cases as if they followed the same automatic rule.

But precisely because Italy, France, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and Portugal have such different electoral systems and political histories, it is significant that the same question is emerging across them:

the old conservative parties can no longer assume that they will indefinitely represent the entirety of their political space.

2008: perhaps it was not a crisis of the left, but a crisis of the old party system

Seen from this perspective, the 2008 financial crisis takes on a much broader political dimension.

It may not merely have caused an economic recession and a temporary wave of indignation, but a crisis of representation whose effects are still unfolding almost two decades later.

Those effects became visible earlier on the left because the fractures appeared there sooner and with greater intensity. On the right, the process may have been slower because the major conservative parties retained strong territorial organisations, stable electorates and a greater capacity to absorb discontent for longer.

But initial resistance does not mean immunity.

The cases analysed here reveal different mechanisms of transformation: replacement between parties, loss of hegemony without disappearance, competition from further to the right, or the internal conquest of a historic organisation.

The common outcome is that the old conservative parties can no longer behave as if their electorates belonged to them permanently.

Perhaps the true political legacy of 2008 is not the birth of populism, but the slow end of the party system that organised much of the West during the second half of the twentieth century.

Some of those parties will survive, others will transform themselves and others may eventually be replaced.

What seems far less certain is whether they can preserve intact the position they occupied for decades.

That is why the truly relevant question is not simply who governs today, but who is building the political identity that will dominate each ideological space tomorrow. Markdown pegado

Next article · PART II: SPAIN

If this process is spreading across different Western democracies, the inevitable question is whether Spain represents an exception.

In the second part, we will examine the electoral stagnation of the PP, the growth of Vox, voter transfers between the two parties and whether the battle for the Spanish right may be changing in nature.

Sources and references

Iván Redondo, “Lo que ve el bajo”, La Vanguardia, 28 September 2026.
Open source

Reuters, 1 September 2026, on Futuro Nazionale, Vannacci and the evolution of polling in Italy.
Open source

Reuters, 18 July 2024, on the transformation of the Republican Party under Donald Trump.
Open source

Reuters, 22 September 2026, on AfD’s position in Germany.
Open source

Reuters, 28 May 2025, on the rise of Chega as Portugal’s main opposition force 

[ORIGINAL]https://vocesrebeldesespana.blogspot.com/2026/09/analisis-internacional-esta.html[/ORIGINAL]