The contemporary landscape
This section is organized by tier of the gradient, not by geography. Country-by-country coverage implies separate national stories; the tier structure shows what the cases are instances of. Everything here decays fast; note the last-verified date above, and see the measurement page for what the underlying indices actually measure.
Tier 1: the populist radical right, now the largest far-right formation in democratic politics
Mudde’s party family, nativist, authoritarian, populist, operating inside electoral democracy,claim type: fact is today a normal feature of most European party systems and several beyond. As of mid-2026, the three far-right groups in the European Parliament, Patriots for Europe, the European Conservatives and Reformists, and Europe of Sovereign Nations, hold 196 seats combined, outnumbering the center-right European People’s Party by twelve.claim type: fact Brothers of Italy governs in Rome; the RN, FPÖ, AfD, and their cognates anchor oppositions elsewhere.
The countervailing 2026 evidence deserves equal weight, and gets it. In the Netherlands, Wilders’s PVV fell from 37 to 26 seats at the October 2025 election, and a centrist minority coalition under Rob Jetten took office in February 2026 with the PVV excluded.claim type: fact In Romania, the far-right AUR co-sponsored the no-confidence vote that toppled the pro-European Bolojan government in May 2026, demonstrating leverage without governing: the president has ruled out a far-right government.claim type: fact
Tier 2: competitive authoritarianism, where the main action is
Levitsky and Way’s category, real elections on a tilted field,claim type: fact describes the largest share of contemporary democratic erosion. V-Dem’s 2026 report counts 44 ongoing autocratization episodes and lists ten new autocratizers with its 2025 data, including Italy (episode start 2021), the United Kingdom (2020), and the United States (2023), the latter among the ten largest ongoing stand-alone episodes.claim type: fact The United States case has its own module.
And the exits: Hungary, the type case of European competitive authoritarianism for a decade, voted its government out in April 2026, with Péter Magyar’s Tisza winning decisively and Orbán conceding after sixteen years.claim type: fact That outcome is not an anomaly: seventy-three percent of autocratization episodes of the last thirty years have ended in U-turns, and ninety percent of U-turns restore or exceed prior democratic levels.claim type: fact Poland’s 2023 turn, Brazil’s 2022 one, and South Korea’s institutional resilience belong to the same dataset. Tier 2 is a contested zone, not a terminal diagnosis, and both its degradations and its reversals are running in real time.claim type: inference
Tiers 3 and 4: the branches, today
Genuine para-fascism, tier 3, is rare in the contemporary world; the category’s modern work is mostly done inside the Russia debate. The genuine fascist movement, tier 4, persists at the margins: Golden Dawn’s 2020 conviction closed the era’s most successful open case,claim type: fact while the militant and accelerationist networks are covered at the online ecosystem page.
Tier 5: empty
No fascist regime, in the consensus sense of Tier A, currently exists. That sentence is worth reading twice, in both directions: it is the good news, and it is also why every contemporary classification fight is about tiers 1 through 4, where the answers are genuinely harder.