It’s interesting
Both America and Europe are facing similar situations. However, America continues to go left, while Europe goes right. I wonder if Europe had the same disparity in Covid deaths between the parties as America did.
There was no notable anti-COVID reaction to shutdowns in Europe. Each country's equivalent of the CDC gave recommendations and governments basically just followed them and almost everyone was just fine with it. Sure, there are always fringe groups, but there was nothing even remotely ressembling what occurred in the US (at least in Western Europe).
Reasons #1 through #100 why Europe is "shifting to the right" are immigration, immigration, immigration, immigration... Particularly immigrants with a very different culture. European countries are much more culturally uniform than the US.
Right and Left are poor measures of politics, for obvious reasons. There are tons of libertarian-style parties in Europe and these are generally very pro-immigration, although they are considered part of the right. On the other hand, conservative parties, like the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Germany, are often very centrist.
Basically, there's a right and a left in economic politics, social politics, and immigration. Since there are basically no two-party systems in Europe (with the effective exception of the UK), what happens is that there is a party for each and every combination of right/left in each of those metrics. Forming a government is done by assembling a majority of the seats in parliament (or at least a minority that no one is willing to vote against).
The effective result of that is that each countries forms two "blocks", usually called left and right. This can obviously become a bit of a mess when some parties have weird combinations of left/right beliefs, but they either join the least offensive (to them) block or abstain.
What has happened in recent years is that there has been a shift among voters in favor of more anti-immigration policies. The effect of this has been different from country to country, but basically falling into two categories:
A) Countries where the centrist parties have adopted the tougher anti-immigration policies.
B) Countries where the centries parties have not.
In the case of A, the power balance has remained pretty much the same as it always was. While there has certainly been a "shift to the right" in immigration policies, the parties themselves and the remaining policies have remained much the same.
In the case of B (which seems to be a majority), the power balance has shifted to what is simplistically called the right. These countries now have often very large parties that are "to the right" in immigration terms of the normal centrist-right parties and almost always form a "block" with those centrist-right parties. However, those parties are almost always QUITE FAR TO THE LEFT in terms of economic and social policies.
The end result in those cases, while *called* a shift to the right, is actually a shift to the right on immigration and a shift to the left on everything else.
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