Support for rightwing populists and the far right declined in Finland, Sweden and Denmark in Sunday's European elections, with a surge for Greens and left-leaning parties

Sometimes I feel like we are living in a bizarro world. In my lifetime, I never expected European nations to openly embrace Nazi-adjacent parties. Similarly, as an American, I never expected to see so many of my fellow Americans openly embrace Nazi ideology and symbology. It's stunning that in less than three generations so many westerners, European and American, have forgotten the hard-fought truths that our grandparents and great-grandparents united against. Naziism is revolting, as is anything even remotely approaching Naziism, and yet I now see that my instinctive, dogmatic opposition to naziism isn't a universal truth. It completely breaks my mind. How can anyone justify it, morally or intellectually? When the Nazi-sympathetic watch movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark, do they jeer Indiana Jones and root for the villains?

Anyway, all that to say, I'm not sure that the Nordic countries have ever been a genuine bellwether to mass political movements. Scandinavia seems to be in its own cultural bubble that, as someone looking from the outside in, comes across rather enviably.

I hope this is true but I'm afraid the situation isn't as good as it seems. That's because people don't care about EU elections as much as they do about presidential etc. And I'd bet that consensus is even higher in the far right crowd. Like for Finland the voting percentage was a little over 40% whereas the presidential election was almost 75%.