Early this yearluck9, France’s center-right Republicans decided to move to a new home. After a decade of demoralizing defeats, the party vacated its headquarters for one closer to France’s National Assembly, hoping the move would bring a change in fortune.

It was not to be. June brought disastrous results in European Parliament elections and the prospect of more in a snap election called by President Emmanuel Macron. In response, the president of the Republicans, Éric Ciotti, threw in his lot with the ascendant National Rally, the far-right party of Marine Le Pen. But he did so without consulting the party’s other leaders, to whom the alliance remained anathema. When they tried to remove him from his post, he simply dismissed the staff and locked the doors.

Mr. Ciotti’s lockout is emblematic of the season of political chaos Europeans have lived through this past year. Such collapses and reversals have now become the norm. Within three months of taking office, the French government that was painstakingly put together after the election fell apart; the German government soon followed suit. As 2024 draws to a close, two of the European Union’s founding nations find themselves politically adrift.

Europe’s growing far right, meanwhile, has only entrenched its position. This summer’s European elections were marked by breakout performances for the hard right across the union, and there were major advances on the national level. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom forged a government coalition; Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s postfascist prime minister, saw her popularity deepen; and the far-right Alternative for Germany surged to become the country’s second-most-popular party.

Europe’s extreme right has moved past the point of normalization; now a regular force of government, it is becoming almost banal. For Europe, its consolidation caps a year of tumult. Judging from the continent’s parlous economic situation and general social disarray, matters are only going to get worse.

A decade ago, Europe presented a very different face to the world. In Greece the radical-left party Syriza was about to rise to power on the back of resistance to austerity imposed by the so-called troika of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the Eurogroup. In France a center-left president, François Hollande, was being hounded by rebels on the left of his party. And in Britain a socialist backbencher named Jeremy Corbyn was soon to claim the leadership of the Labour Party.

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Robinson’s history of comments that have been widely criticized as antisemitic and anti-gay made him a deeply polarizing figure in North Carolina long before his bid for governor was upended last week by a CNN report that he had called himself a “Black NAZI” and praised slavery while posting on a pornographic website between 2008 and 2012. Now, some of his allies are abandoning him. Most of his senior campaign staff members have resigned. The Republican Governors Association said that its pro-Robinson ads would expire tomorrow and that no new ones had been placed. And former President Donald Trump, who endorsed Robinson in the spring, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids,” did not mention him once during his rally in the state over the weekend.

Mr. Biden even held on to hope for the transformative peace deal for the Middle East that he thought was within grasp a year ago, believing it could survive even as the war between Hamas and Israel tore at its foundations.

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