Political polarisation and democratic stability in Europe

This concluding chapter reassesses the volume’s hypotheses in the light of the second Trump presidency, the acceleration of the European defence agenda and domestic developments in Poland, Hungary, Romania and the Czech Republic. It summarises four national trajectories, radicalisation in isolation, anticipatory normalisation, moderation through governance and oscillation, and tests them against original survey evidence from the SUSPECTS project, covering 17,551 respondents across seven countries. Factor analysis yields progressive-conservative, populism and conspiracism indexes, complemented by an item on military aid to Ukraine, showing that distances within the right match those separating the mainstream families. The formation of the second von der Leyen Commission illustrates variable-geometry coalitions. A two-dimensional typology, liberal/illiberal and national-conservative/anti-European, replaces the populist radical right category.