The populist surge has peaked but it will leave a bitter legacy

Europe's populist political tide is on the retreat. Not everywhere and not always for entirely comforting reasons. But the notion that Europe's political party system will be turned upside down by anti-establishment parties seems even more questionable than it did one year ago, when insurgents performed well, but not outstandingly well, in European Parliament elections.

Greece aside, most mainstream centre-right and centre-left parties are displaying resilience in the face of their iconoclastic rivals. To reverse the lines of the poet WB Yeats: things are not falling apart; the centre can hold.

One straw in the wind was the resignation last week of Hans-Olaf Henkel, a prominent businessman, from the leadership team of Alternative fur Deutschland, an upstart, anti-euro party in Germany. He has concluded, correctly, that AfD will be discredited by embracing rightwing nationalist causes that go against the grain of modern German values. Pegida, an anti-Islamic movement, fell into disarray after a photo surfaced of Lutz Bachmann, its leader, posing as Adolf Hitler. Meanwhile, the Free Democrats, a traditional liberal party that failed to win any Bundestag seats in Germany's 2013 election, is making a comeback at regional level.

Italy's Five-Star Movement, led by the blogger-comedian Beppe Grillo, burst on to the scene with 25 per cent of the vote in the 2013 election. Since then, Mr Grillo's idiosyncratic leadership has led to the departure or expulsion of 35 of its 163 members of parliament. The party is slipping in opinion polls because Matteo Renzi, the reformist centre-left premier, looks like a man tackling Italy's constitutional and economic challenges with an energy and sincerity untypical of the establishment. By contrast, Mr Grillo seems a protester obsessed with the purity of his party's principles rather than getting something done.

In Spain, the leftwing populists Podemos are also on the defensive. Economic recovery under the conservative Popular party undermines the argument that the political establishment is leading Spain to ruin. It also does Podemos no good to be associated with the recklessness in power of Syriza, its Greek sister-party. Lastly, Ciudadanos, a new party of moderate reformers, is capturing protest votes from Podemos.

Some anti-establishment parties have softened their images so much that they have one foot in the tent of respectability. Take the Finns, once known as the True Finns. In 2011 they were outsiders railing at bailouts for vulnerable eurozone countries. Now, after winning the second-largest number of seats in Finland's April 19 election, they will probably be invited to join traditional parties in a coalition government.

The test for rightwing populism will not be Britain's May 7 election, in which the anti-EU UK Independence party will win few seats, but France's 2017 presidential poll, when the National Front's Marine Le Pen aims to humiliate the establishment.

Elsewhere, the turning of the populist tide will benefit Europe only if mainstream parties put their new lease on life, and power, to good use. Thanks to long-term social and cultural change as well as recent economic hardships, corruption scandals and incompetence in government, the traditional parties have lost public trust and voter loyalty. They have their work cut out to show they can reform and make a durable success of European welfare capitalism.

Also, while Syriza is tarnishing the allure of leftwing populism, rightwing populists have already achieved some of their goals. They have injected a harsher tone into public debate on immigration, national identity, EU integration and mutual assistance in the 19-nation eurozone. Some mainstream centre-right parties are adopting these themes. Social peace and the health of European democracy will be the losers.

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