If one thing is common across the globe in every sphere of life, it is the increasing pace of change. Elections for the German Bundestag were held less than one year ago and the political spectrum is already undergoing a change. Die Linke, which means “The Left” is a German political party which was still on the margins in the February 2025 elections. Though up from 28 in the previous election, it won only 64 seats out of 630. Just eleven months later, The Washington Post carried an article, “Surging left-wing party challenges politics-as-usual in Germany.” The surge has alarmed the older generations but this Party is the first choice of a majority of young voters under 25 and this poses a challenge to the centrist establishment.

In the 20th century, the left was identified with violence and arson during demonstrations and protests. Between 1934 and 1995, there were six major prolonged left-led riots in Paris, including the Bloody May in 1968 when over 10 million workers went on strike and rioted throughout the month and it ended with a violent crackdown on Bastille Day. And yet, in recent times, the centrists have been fretting more about the violence associated with the far-right. In May last year, German anti-racism commissioner Natalie Pawlik warned, “Everyone in this country has a duty not to turn a blind eye to right-wing extremism and racism.” She said this even as the Left rioted for months during 2024-25 in Germany against the rising tide of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD). The left, however, have never been coy about resorting to disruption for achieving their goals and promptly admitted their responsibility for the longest blackout in Berlin since WWII. A far-left activist group, Vulkangruppe or Volcano Group, claimed that it caused the four-day power outage on 4 January, 2026, by setting fire to bundled power cables on a bridge at a time when temperatures dipped below freezing. As people huddled in their homes without electricity, the BBC reported the group’s statement that they had no sympathy for the suffering rich and that the sabotage was an act of self-defence against harm to the environment. This group had earlier claimed to have set fire to parts of the Tesla Factory in Berlin. Though the factory produced electric vehicles, the Guardian said on 5 March, 2024, that it was targeted because allegedly it was “neither ecological nor sustainable”

In the political space increasingly divided between the far-left and the far-right, it is the centrists that may feel the pinch. The alliance between the centre-right parties, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union, made a tactical U-turn and tilted towards the anti-immigrant stance of the far-right, publicly saying that they will crack down on illegal immigration. This helped them marginally increase their seats from 196 to 208. Part of the political space of Olaf Scholz’s centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) was grabbed by Die Linke, making SPD nosedive from 207 to 120 seats. The far-right AfD more than doubled its tally from 76 to 152. Clearly, the rise of the far-left is not hurting the far-right; it is squeezing the political space of the centrists.

Both the extremes are heavily invested in what is pejoratively called “populism” but, in their partisan universe, it is more likely to be called neo-realism. Politically correct centrist parties go by copybook ideals, trying to please both ends of the political spectrum, and end up losing the trust of both. The extremes, on the other hand, have their finger on the pulse of their constituents and articulate their fears, anger, frustration and humiliation at things not changing their way or not fast enough. A 2021 paper “Populism and the Affective Politics of Humiliation Narratives” published in the Global Studies Quarterly” had said that such emotions push people towards “an ostensibly conflicting sense of national greatness and victimhood to achieve an emotive response that enables a radical departure from established domestic and international policy norms”. That is the home turf for the left and their revolutions. The left and the right not only blame the economic and social woes on the centrists but also accuse them of playing second fiddle to the other extreme. Their followers, with deep disaffection for the establishment, scream approval.

In democracies, success at the ballot box plays a big role as a convincing credential. The surge of the far-right in the last Italian, Czech and Netherlands polls and in France’s 2024 legislative elections, and their large gains in Hungary, Austria, Finland, Sweden and Slovakia, created tremors in the ranks of the left and the Islamists. The far-right is nationalism-driven, while Communism and Islamism, both decry confinement of loyalty to national borders, the former expressing it through the Communist International or the Comintern and the latter, through aspirations of universal Islamisation. The far-left, who have sufficient experience and ideological motivation for social disruption, openly supported the use of disruption to stop the far-right in its tracks. An alarmed leftist wrote in 2024 an article called, “European Election 2024: the far right, the centre and the left’s response - the Internationalist Standpoint. He wrote that, “The idea of a united front of working class and left organisations against the far right on a grass roots basis has to be introduced very militantly and emphatically by the parties and organisations of the Left.” The gains of Die Linke and the prolonged black-out in Berlin were not the only symptoms of this reaction.

The normalisation of the far-right ideology has called into question the assumption that protest groups are integrated into the political mainstream. This has led to wider acceptance of the disruptive methods of the left among the electorate. The massive agitations in Germany, primarily against the strong show by the far-right, with 1.4 million participants in January 2024, continued into 2025. These drew stronger support from the left than from the centrists and this soon got translated into increased vote share for Die Linke. In France, the anticipated good showing by AfD resulted in the left-led 2024 large-scale protests against “anti-Fascists”, a label generally used for the far-right. Their efforts did deny the far-right their much-anticipated victory but the centrist Macron also lost 70 seats. The left emerged with substantial gains.

Immigration, racism and anti-Zionism are now the most glaring fault-lines between the two extremes, not only over a large part of Europe but also in the US, where the Democrats have firmly aligned themselves with pro-immigrant groups. Most of the illegal migrants in Europe are from Muslim countries and race and religion have given the Islamists enough reason to develop a synergy with the Left. In the US, even though the majority of illegal immigrants are not from Muslim countries, the anti-Muslim tilt of Trump has spurred a “Red-Green alliance” across the Atlantic too. The high visibility of such an alliance, in turn, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for the far-right groups’ “Great Replacement” bugbear. Even the US National Security Strategy 2025 says that Europe faces “civilizational erasure” due to mass migration.

These developments have the prospect of marginalising the heretofore mainstream parties and making the political field a highly polarised no-holds-barred contention between the two extreme groups. The consequent social turmoil, coupled with increasing geopolitical upheavals, bodes ill for peace and stability in the near future.

(R N prasher is a former IAS officer. The views expressed are his personal.)